The organization was one of several fronts operated by German communist Willi Mnzenberg, a member of the Reichstag who had fled to France in 1933. He was implicated in a similar campaign in Albania. [74] When the news broke, MI6 came under criticism for failing to anticipate and block Philby's defection, though Elliott was to claim he could not have prevented Philby's flight. But the rezident (Russian term for spymaster) in France, probably Pierre at this time, suggested to Moscow that he suspected Philby's motives. He never promised to give up, but once, completely unexpectedly, he suddenly said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, I'm not going to drink any more.' He had the policy of never confessinga document in his own handwriting was dismissed as a forgery. In her absence, Philby had begun an affair with Donald Maclean's wife, Melinda. Harry George Philby Birth. [11][pageneeded]. His arrest led to others, Harry Gold, a courier with whom Fuchs had worked, David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Death. Two years later, a Sunday Times correspondent was in Moscow and about to pack his bags after an unsuccessful attempt to interview the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, when, out of the blue, he was invited to a room in his hotel. Philby, one of the few British intelligence officers operating in America at the time, was an obvious possibility. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. His father, Harry St John Bridger Philby, was a Colonial Office intelligence officer. [11][pageneeded], A more serious incident occurred in August 1945, when Konstantin Volkov, an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain for himself and his wife. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. His mother resented Burgess and his close relationship with her husband, and began staging accidents to claim attention; she reported being mugged in her car; on another occasion she set fire to the living room, suffering serious burns. Following his debriefing in the US, Golitsyn was sent to SIS for further questioning. the title escapes me at the moment. Born in India in 1912, Philby became a communist sympathiser after leaving Cambridge and began working as a KGB informer in the mid 1930s in London. Philby's work led to the deaths of dozens of British agents, making him a reviled traitor once he was exposed in Britain. Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of migrs into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia, but efforts among the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. Harry St. John Bridger Philby, 1885-1960, British explorer, official, and author. His mother, Dora nee Johnston, was his father's first wife. But it wasnt true. Krivitsky claimed that two Soviet intelligence agents had penetrated the Foreign Office and that a third Soviet intelligence agent had worked as a journalist for a British newspaper during the civil war in Spain. Pierre-Charles Path est un journaliste franais n le 9 juillet 1910 Boulogne-sur-Mer et mort le 14 novembre 1997 1 Villejuif. Philby snr was the senior officer of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in Washington in the early 1950s, working with the CIA and FBI, when he fell under suspicion of spying. Philby was given the task of dealing with Volkov by British intelligence. [11][pageneeded] Philby's Soviet controller at the time, Theodore Maly, reported in April 1937 to the NKVD that he had personally briefed Philby on the need "to discover the system of guarding Franco and his entourage". Upon her return to Istanbul in late 1948, she was badly burned in an incident with a charcoal stove and returned to Switzerland. [5] He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and economics. Melinda put the bravest of faces on her situation when she wrote to her still grief-stricken mother that she understood the suffering she had caused. During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one-time pad to transmit intelligence traffic. A plaque in his honour was. by. [62], In Lebanon, Philby at first lived in Mahalla Jamil, his father's large household located in the village of Ajaltoun, just outside Beirut. Eventually, Tommy visited Kim five times in Moscow in the 1970s. In 1940 he was interviewed by MI5 officers in London, led by Jane Archer. They went to live with an aunt and uncle, and saw little of his father. But he also did it to impress her. You should have seen his face.". Colonel Redl from the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WW1 probably was a more devastating spy. Guarded night and day by KGB troops, and rigorously de-briefed to make sure they were not double agents, to all intents and purposes they were under house arrest. Maclean seemed totally at one with Soviet ways and believed to his death that the USSR and its new society has a much better prospect than the old of overcoming the major ills and injustices of our civilisation. He told the paper that Kim eventually came to think that it was all wrong, implying that Philby grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. In those days, correspondence had to be sent to a PO Box; and in his reply, Kim would sign off under a special code name, Panina (a combination of Pa and Nina, the alias used for Kims wife). Donald Maclean, although arrogant and someone who liked a drink too, was regarded as more convivial. Another effort was made using a Turkish gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. He also delivered clothes and money to refugees. Jun 27, 2019. In time, details emerged of their lives after they defected. They even had a dacha a country cottage 20 miles from Moscow where the children could swim, fish, bicycle and forage for mushrooms. In a way hes always just been my father. His ashes were brought back to England, as he had requested, and buried in his parents grave after dark and by torchlight so that the press would not get wind of it. We all loved him enormously. He was publicly exonerated in 1955, after which he resumed his career as both a journalist and a spy for SIS in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, his post was that of First Secretary to the British Embassy; in reality, he served as chief British intelligence representative in Washington. 1951Tips off fellow Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. The NKVD received the same report from Richard Sorge but with an extra paragraph claiming that Hitler might seek a separate peace with the Soviet Union. [10], Philby acted as a courier between Vienna and Prague, paying for the train tickets out of his remaining 75 and using his British passport to evade suspicion. Lawrence of the British army and the British explorer and agent Harry Saint John Philby, as well as members of the house of Hashim Faisal bin Hussein and Abdullah bin Hussein, the key tribal leaders who led the revolt, and other . "If he continued drinking, he got inebriated quickly and changed in front of your eyes," she said. "It was winter and we were going out for a walk and I found one of my boots had disappeared. [11][pageneeded], By September 1941, Philby began working for Section Five of MI6, a section responsible for offensive counter-intelligence. He got himself a job teaching English in a school. He claimed he made the admission to her to excuse his lateness for their meetings when he was busy handling documents and rendezvousing with his Soviet handler. Pukhova said he was a "special" and principled man. [43][pageneeded] Clearly there had been leaks and Philby was later suspected as one of the leakers. Harry St John Bridger Philby Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) (3 April 1885, Badulla, British Ceylon - 30 September 1960, Beirut, Lebanon), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah ( ), was a British Arabist, adviser, explorer, writer, and colonial office intelligence officer. When young Philby's mother died in 1957, none of her children was invited to the funeral, and he never knew where she was buried. [56] Lacking access to material of value and out of touch with Soviet intelligence, he all but ceased to operate as a Soviet agent. Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. However, his son told The Telegraph that his fathers contribution to the physical demise of Western intelligence operatives is overstated: there is no information that anyone died as a result of Kim Philbys treachery, he said. [11][pageneeded] Following the Austrofascist victory in the Austrian Civil War, Philby and Friedmann married in February 1934, enabling her to escape to the United Kingdom with him two months later. They knew the risks they were running. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.[91]. Philby had been briefed on the situation shortly before reaching Washington in 1949; it was clear to Philby that the agent was Donald Maclean, who worked in the British Embassy at the time and whose wife, Melinda, lived in New York. The stammering, debonair Philby was suspected of being the so-called Third Man and, although he was investigated, he swore that he did not know Maclean. Please try again later. Lipton later withdrew his comments. Philby was a 19-year-old art student when his father was exposed in 1963 as a traitor. He had five, one of whom, incidentally, was named after George Washington, the American president. In late summer 1943, the SIS provided the GRU an official report on the activities of German agents in Bulgaria and Romania, soon to be liberated by the Soviet Union. [17], In London, Philby began a career as a journalist. To order a copy for 15, visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. Clear rating. Shortly afterward, Philby was moved to the job as chief SIS representative in Washington, D.C., with his family. Harry George Philby was so named after Harry Truman and George Washington, keeping with. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. She told a BBC documentary: He was just dad. 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