Kim Philby (1912–1988) was a British MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union from 1934 until his defection in January 1963. He is widely regarded as the most damaging long-term penetration agent of any Western intelligence service in the twentieth century. For more on the famous-spies article; the Soviet service that ran him is treated in the KGB article.
Philby was born on January 1, 1912, in Ambala, India, the son of Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a civil servant who had converted to Islam and who served as an adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia after the First World War. Philby was educated at Westminster School in London and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and economics and was a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society. In 1933, in a London safe house, he was recruited by Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet NKVD officer working under cover as a graduate student. The recruitment interview, conducted by Deutsch and his controller, lasted several hours; Philby’s motivation was ideological, not material. He was given the codename “Sohnchen” — “sonny.”
Wartime and postwar
Philby was a journalist in London and then in Vienna before being recruited to the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1940. His first SIS post was in Section V (counterintelligence); he transferred to the Iberian section, where he ran operations against the German Abwehr in Spain and Portugal. In 1944, he became head of Section V’s antisubversive branch. In 1947, he was sent to Istanbul as the MI6 station chief; in 1949, he was reassigned to Washington as the British liaison to the CIA, the FBI, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. In Washington, he was widely considered the most effective British intelligence officer in the United States. He was, in fact, the channel through which Moscow was receiving the CIA’s and the SIS’s most sensitive Anglo-American planning.
In 1951, the defection of Burgess and Maclean exposed the Cambridge network. Philby was recalled to London and questioned; he was cleared by the Foreign Office in 1955. In 1956 he was sent to Beirut as a journalist, ostensibly representing The Observer and The Economist, in reality as an SIS officer continuing in service. He was finally exposed in 1963, after the defection of Anatoly Golitsin, an SIS officer who had broken with the CIA in 1961 and had provided details of British penetrations. Philby, warned by his Soviet handler that the net was closing, was extracted from Beirut to Moscow in January 1963 on a Soviet freighter.
Philby’s contribution to Moscow
The full extent of what Philby passed remains classified, but the broad picture is clear. From 1941 to 1951, he was the most senior British intelligence officer working under Moscow’s control, and he had access to the Anglo-American war effort’s most sensitive planning. He warned Moscow of the Anglo-American plans for the Balkans, including the controversial 1944 deal with Tito and the 1944 percent agreement with Stalin; he identified the Anglo-American intelligence operations in the German-occupied Soviet Union; and he briefed the PGU on the early development of Anglo-American nuclear-weapons policy, including the Quebec Agreement and the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report on the international control of atomic energy.
After 1949, in Washington, his contribution to Moscow shifted. He identified and briefed the PGU on the most sensitive Anglo-American intelligence and policy channels, including the operations of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, the early planning for the Marshall Plan, and the operations of the newly formed CIA. He is also widely believed to have been the source of the tip that warned Maclean and Burgess of their impending arrest in 1951. As Christopher Andrew argues in The Defence of the Realm (2010), Philby’s position as Washington’s British liaison was, in operational terms, the most valuable posting the British espionage system ever gave a Soviet agent.
Life in Moscow and the historiography
Philby spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. He was received by Khrushchev, awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, given a dacha, and consulted by the KGB on Cold War policy. His memoir, My Silent War, was published in 1968 in a heavily-edited Soviet edition and in 1968 in a fuller English edition. He was interviewed for the 1983 BBC television documentary Philby: The Long Road to Moscow and for the 1984 Channel 4 documentary Philby, Burgess and Maclean. He died of a heart attack on May 11, 1988, in Moscow, and was buried with Soviet military honors in the Kuntsevo Cemetery.
The historiography of Philby is unusually rich. The British journalist Chapman Pincher published Their Trade is Treachery in 1981, drawing on the inside sources in MI5; Bruce Page, David Leitch, and Phillip Knightley published Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation in 1968; Genrikh Borovik, a Soviet journalist, published The Philby Files in 1994. The most thorough scholarly treatments are in Christopher Andrew and David Dilks’s The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (1984) and in Andrew’s authorized MI5 history, The Defence of the Realm (2010), which used the Mitrokhin archive and the British service’s own files. The most balanced single-volume account is Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends (2014), which uses MI5’s Philby file and the papers of his closest MI5 colleague, Nicholas Elliott.