78 Facts About Kim Philby

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union.

In 1949, Kim Philby was appointed first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington and served as chief British liaison with American intelligence agencies.

Kim Philby was suspected of tipping off two other spies under suspicion of Soviet espionage, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, both of whom subsequently fled to Moscow in May 1951.

Under suspicion himself, Kim Philby resigned from MI6 in July 1951 but was publicly exonerated by then-Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955.

Kim Philby resumed his career as both a journalist and a spy for MI6 in Beirut, but was forced to defect to Moscow after finally being unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1963.

Kim Philby was born in Ambala, Punjab, British India, to author and explorer St John Philby and his wife, Dora Johnston.

Kim Philby won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and economics.

Kim Philby graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree in Economics.

At Cambridge, Philby exhibited a "leaning towards communism", in the words of his father, who went on to write: "The only serious question is whether Kim definitely intended to be disloyal to the government while in its service".

One of the first things Kim Philby did in Cambridge was join the Cambridge University Socialist Society, attending their meetings but taking little part in their proceedings.

Kim Philby admired the strength of her political convictions and later recalled that at their first meeting:.

Kim Philby had come to the Soviets' notice earlier that year in Vienna, where he had been involved in demonstrations against the government of Engelbert Dollfuss.

Kim Philby hated London, adored Paris, and spoke of it with deeply loving affection.

Kim Philby recommended to Deutsch several of his Cambridge contemporaries, including Donald Maclean, who at the time was working in the Foreign Office, as well as Guy Burgess, despite his personal reservations about Burgess' erratic personality.

Kim Philby took a job at a monthly magazine, the World Review of Reviews, for which he wrote a large number of articles and letters and occasionally served as "acting editor".

In 1936, Kim Philby began working at a failing trade magazine, the Anglo-Russian Trade Gazette, as editor.

Kim Philby became a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organization aiming at rebuilding and supporting a friendly relationship between Germany and the United Kingdom.

The Anglo-German Fellowship, at this time, was supported both by the British and German governments, and Kim Philby made many trips to Berlin.

In February 1937, Kim Philby travelled to Spain, then embroiled in a bloody civil war triggered by the coup d'etat of Falangist forces under General Francisco Franco against the government of President Manuel Azana.

Kim Philby worked at first as a freelance journalist; from May 1937, he served as a first-hand correspondent for The Times, reporting from the headquarters of the pro-Franco forces in Seville.

Kim Philby began working for both the Soviet and British intelligence, which usually consisted of posting letters in a crude code to a fictitious girlfriend, Mlle Dupont in Paris, for the Soviets.

Kim Philby used a simpler system for MI6, delivering post at Hendaye, France, for the British embassy in Paris.

Kim Philby's controller in Paris, a Latvian national named Ozolin-Haskins, was shot in Moscow in 1937 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Kim Philby told the British, after a direct question to Franco, that German troops would never be permitted to cross Spain to attack Gibraltar.

Kim Philby found that the award proved helpful in obtaining access to fascist circles:.

Kim Philby testified before the Dies Committee regarding Soviet espionage within the US.

In July 1939, Kim Philby returned to The Times office in London.

Kim Philby briefly reported from Cherbourg and Brest, sailing for Plymouth less than 24 hours before France surrendered to Germany in June 1940.

In 1940, on the recommendation of Burgess, Kim Philby joined MI6's Section D, a secret organisation charged with investigating how enemies might be attacked through non-military means.

Kim Philby replied that none had been sent and that none was undergoing training at that time.

Kim Philby provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa and of the Japanese intention to strike into southeast Asia instead of attacking the Soviet Union as Adolf Hitler had urged.

Kim Philby claimed to have overheard discussion of this by chance and sent a report to his controller.

Kim Philby noted that they produced an extraordinary wealth of information on German war plans but next to nothing on the repeated question of British penetration of Soviet intelligence in either London or Moscow.

Kim Philby had repeated his claim that there were no such agents.

Kim Philby was given the task of dealing with Volkov by British intelligence.

Kim Philby, "employed in a Department of the Foreign Office", was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1946.

In February 1947, Kim Philby was appointed head of British intelligence for Turkey and posted to Istanbul with his second wife, Aileen, and their family.

Kim Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of emigres into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia, but efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits.

Kim Philby was implicated in a similar campaign in Communist Albania.

Clearly there had been leaks and Kim Philby was later suspected as one of the leakers.

Kim Philby's wife had suffered from psychological problems since childhood which caused her to inflict injuries upon herself.

In 1948, troubled by Kim Philby's heavy drinking and frequent depressions and his life in Istanbul, she experienced a breakdown, staging an accident and injecting herself with urine and insulin to cause skin disfigurations.

Kim Philby was sent to a clinic in Switzerland to recover.

Shortly afterward, Kim Philby was moved to the job as chief SIS representative in Washington, with his family.

Kim Philby's office oversaw a large amount of urgent and top secret communications between Washington and London.

Kim Philby was responsible for liaising with the CIA and promoting "more aggressive Anglo-American intelligence operations".

Angleton remained suspicious of Kim Philby but lunched with him every week in Washington.

Kim Philby had been briefed on the situation shortly before reaching Washington in 1949; it was clear to Kim Philby that the agent was Maclean, who worked in the embassy at the time and whose wife, Melinda, lived in New York.

Kim Philby had to help discover the identity of "Homer", but wished to protect Maclean.

Kim Philby's arrest led to others: Harry Gold, a courier with whom Fuchs had worked, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Kim Philby's wife resented him and disliked his presence; Americans were offended by his "natural superciliousness" and "utter contempt for the whole pyramid of values, attitudes, and courtesies of the American way of life".

Kim Philby had undertaken to devise an escape plan that would warn Maclean, in England, of the intense suspicion he was under and arrange for him to flee.

Under a cloud of suspicion raised by his highly visible and intimate association with Burgess, Kim Philby returned to London.

In July 1951, Kim Philby resigned from MI6, preempting his all-but-inevitable dismissal.

Kim Philby wrote under his own name and under the pen name "Charles Garner" when writing about subjects he considered too "fluffy", for example the subject of Arab slave girls.

Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer recently stationed in Beirut who was a friend of Kim Philby's and had previously believed in his innocence, was tasked with attempting to secure his full confession.

Kim Philby told Elliott that he was "half expecting" to see him.

The Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter bound for Odessa, had left Beirut that morning so abruptly that cargo was left scattered over the docks; Kim Philby claimed that he left Beirut on board this ship.

Journalist Ben Macintyre, author of several works on espionage, speculated that MI6 might have left open the opportunity for Kim Philby to flee to Moscow to avoid an embarrassing public trial.

Kim Philby was paid 500 roubles a month and his family was not immediately able to join him in exile.

Kim Philby was under virtual house arrest and under guard, with all visitors screened by the KGB.

Secret files released to the National Archives in late 2020 indicated that the British government had intentionally conducted a campaign to keep Kim Philby's spying confidential "to minimise political embarrassment" and prevent the publication of his memoirs, according to a report by The Guardian.

Kim Philby confirmed that he had worked for the KGB and that "his purpose in life was to destroy imperialism".

In Moscow, Kim Philby occupied himself by writing his memoirs, which were published in Britain in 1968 under the title My Silent War; they were not published in the Soviet Union until 1980.

Kim Philby continued to read The Times, which was not generally available in the USSR, listened to the BBC World Service and was an avid follower of cricket.

Kim Philby found work in the early 1970s in the KGB's Active Measures Department churning out fabricated documents.

In February 1934, Kim Philby married Litzi Friedmann, an Austrian Jewish communist whom he had met in Vienna.

In 1940, Kim Philby began living with Aileen Furse in London.

Kim Philby lived separately from Philby, settling with their children in Crowborough while he lived first in London and later in Beirut.

In 1956, Kim Philby began an affair with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer.

In 1971, Kim Philby married Rufina Pukhova, a 39-year-old Russo-Polish woman, with whom he lived until his death on 11 May 1988, aged 76, in Moscow.

Kim Philby died of heart failure in Moscow on 11 May 1988.

Kim Philby had the policy of never confessing; a document in his own handwriting was dismissed as a forgery.

Kim Philby said that at the time of his recruitment as a spy there were no prospects of his being useful; he was instructed to make his way into the Secret Service, which took years, starting with journalism and building up contacts in the British establishment.

Kim Philby said that there was no discipline there; he made friends with the archivist, which enabled him for years to take secret documents home, many unrelated to his own work, and bring them back the next day; his handler photographed them overnight.

Kim Philby has been the subject of several books, films and television series, including A Spy Among Friends and Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal.

Kim Philby is a main character in Frederick Forsyth's 1984 novel The Fourth Protocol, and a lesser role in the 1987 film based on the novel.

Kim Philby is the initial instigator and later patron of the plan to smuggle parts of an atomic bomb into the UK.