The cult of the secret agent. Their activity has always posed a deadly threat to the open society…
In the netherworld of espionage, a particular odium, and with it a particular fascination, attaches to that distorted mirror image of the patriotic spy known as the double agent…
The most celebrated double agent managed to live a very long life, at least by the standards of the profession. This is of course, Harold “Kim” Philby, the suave, wordly, upper-middle class graduate of Westminster and Cambridge who joined the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1940 and in 1963 defected to the Soviet Union, for which he had, in fact, been working all those years.
—Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview.
Philby died in the city in 1988, 25 years after defecting to the Soviet Union, where he was employed as an occasional consultant to the KGB helping to prepare spies for missions to the west.—click image for source…
Like his fellow double agents, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Philby had embraced Communism in his youth and remained ever after an enemy of the British Establishment in which he had been raised and which he ostensibly served. Even in the cozier political climate of Moscow, however,Philby showed little inclination to mend his duplicitous ways: he made of with his friend Maclean’s wife.
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…According to Charlotte’s recollections, published by The Independent in March 2010, ‘when the pair returned to England in May 1934, Philby, by then a Soviet agent, found work as a foreign correspondent’. She also believed that he was the ‘third man’; that he was recruited by the mysterious ‘Mar’; used the codename, ‘Stanley’; and that ‘the leading Russian writer, Genrikh Borovik,was given access to Philby’s unseen KGB file in 1994, six years after the spy’s death’. In Moscow, an unnamed KGB comrade of Philby told Charlotte that ‘a gang of five or six of Philby’s former colleagues still meet up every month and raise a toast in his honour’.
The defection of Philby to the Soviet Union on January 23 1963 is one of the great dramatic moments of the Cold War. With his departure that night, the humiliation inflicted on Britain’s secret world by the Cambridge Spy Ring was almost complete. Nine years previously, Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, had stood in the House of Commons to declare that there was no evidence to suggest Philby was the so-called Third Man, who had helped the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to flee to Russia in 1951. But he was.
There was a Fourth Man, too – Anthony Blunt – and a Fifth, John Cairncross, who helped betray the secret of the atomic bomb. But Philby stands out as the archetypal traitor, the subject of admiration in MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, even as he sent agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain.
There were many victims of Philby’s campaign against his own country, not least the women he married and the children forced to live in the vacuum created by his disappearance. ….click image for source…
But much of this is untrue. Philby lied to his son and the KGB lied to his granddaughter. Kim Philby was the first man rather than the third, but he was not recruited to penetrate British intelligence, as he claimed and as the KGB continued to claim, even after the end of the Cold War, eager to demonstrate their supposed success against the West. The truth is very different.
When Philby and Litzi came to London in May 1934, Philby decided to join the Communist Party and came into contact with one of its underground cells. He was promptly reported to Edith Suschitzki, by now Edith Tudor-Hart, a talent-spotter for the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor….Read More:http://www.historytoday.com/boris-volodarsky/kim-philby-living-lie
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