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Nov 18, 2013 · Fifty years after Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union, a BBC documentary looks at the blind spots in the British ruling class that made it so vulnerable to KGB penetration.
Apr 3, 2016 · Philby says that news came in of a fresh snowfall and the officer could not resist heading off to the Lebanese mountains to make the most of it. At that point, Philby got the signal from the KGB...
It has since been suggested that the whole confrontation with Elliott had been a charade to convince the KGB that Philby had to be brought back to Moscow, where he could serve as a British penetration agent of Moscow Central.
May 23, 1988 · What remains beyond question is that Philby nullified much British and American espionage during and after World War II, spilling all to his Soviet masters, first as head of the Soviet desk of...
- William A. Henry III
- He First Embraced Communism While Studying at Cambridge
- He Worked For Mi6 During The Second World War
- He Was Appointed First Secretary to The British Embassy in Washington in 1949
- He Warned Two Soviet Double Agents That They Were Under Suspicion
- He Evaded Full-Scale Incrimination to Avoid Embarrassment to The UK and USA
- He Was Publicly Exonerated in 1955
- A Kgb Defector Confirmed Philby Was A Soviet Mole
- Philby Confessed to Being A Soviet Spy in 1963
- He Eventually Reached The Rank of Colonel in The Kgb
Born in Ambala, India in 1912, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was the son of a British diplomat. Nicknamed “Kim” after a spy character in a Rudyard Kipling story, Philby attended Westminster School, then Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite his background, Philby embraced communism during his time at Cambridge in the early 1930s, along with fellow students Guy...
After successfully posing as a patriot, in 1940 Philby was recruited into MI6 by his friend Guy Burgess, a British secret agent who was himself a Soviet double agent. Despite Philby’s interest in communist circles during his time at Cambridge, there was little vetting during his recruitment. Philby quickly climbed the ranks and by the end of the wa...
Although this was his official job title, in reality, Philby served as chief British intelligence representative in Washington – the top liaison officer between the British and American intelligence agencies. While holding this highly sensitive post, he revealed to the USSR that there was a plan to send armed anticommunist bands into Albania in 195...
These double agents, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, were Philby’s friends and were fellow Cambridge spies. Philby’s warning meant the two men consequently were able to escape to the Soviet Union in 1951.
After Maclean and Burgess had been exposed as Soviet spies, the glare of suspicion fell on Philby. Whilst he was interrogated, he was officially cleared and managed to evade full-scale incrimination for over a decade – partly due to a lack of hard evidence, but largely because many officials in the Foreign Office and in Parliament refused to believ...
Following revelations in The New York Times, Labour MP Marcus Lipton used parliamentary privilege to ask Prime Minister Anthony Eden whether he was determined to cover up Philby’s dubious activities. This was reported in the British press, leading Philby to threaten legal action against Lipton if he repeated his accusations outside Parliament. Phil...
In January 1962, suspicions over him were confirmed when Philby was implicated in evidence given by KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. British agents confronted Philby with enough evidence to convict him of espionage. He was offered immunity from prosecution if he cooperated and divulged what he knew about the Soviet spy network. Philby agreed and allo...
It took until 1 July 1963 for Philby’s escape to Moscow to be officially confirmed, and on 30 July 1963, Soviet officials announced that they had granted him political asylum in the USSR, along with Soviet citizenship. When the news broke, MI6 came under criticism for failing to anticipate and block Philby’s defection. Philby was revealed to have b...
After his arrival in Moscow, Philby discovered that he was not a KGB colonel (as he’d been led to believe). Although he was paid comparatively well, his family weren’t immediately able to join him in exile and Philby was under virtual house arrest, guarded, with all visitors screened by the KGB. It was only 10 years later that Philby was given a mi...
- Amy Irvine
Apr 3, 2016 · He says there were two reasons why he got away with his espionage for so long. The first was the British class system, which could not accept one of their own was a traitor.
Mar 24, 2022 · The year, not stated, was sometime between 1983, when I was born, and 1988, the year my grandfather, the double-agent Kim Philby, died in the Soviet Union in an apartment given to him by the...
