Kim Philby, The Spy who Betrayed his Country

In the early 1930s, Kim Philby, an idealistic young Cambridge graduate, set off to Vienna to help refugees from Nazi Germany who were crossing into Austria. He had already been involved in a student socialist group at university and now wanted to do something active with his political beliefs.

And Vienna, the capital of Austria, was very active. Philby was there when the Austrian army used artillery to put down strikes and rebellions in the working class areas of the city. Just as Philby had come to believe, the workers and the poor needed all the help they could get in their fight against the rich and powerful. This and the constant arrival of tortured refugees from Nazi Germany, just over the border, confirmed Philby’s socialist and pro-Soviet beliefs.

The time was ripe when a young Austrian woman of Hungarian Jewish descent, Litzi Friedmann, decided to recruit Philby for Soviet intelligence. Disgusted by what he had seen and already in love with Litzi, he agreed. He married her so that she could leave Vienna at any time on a British passport. Philby was now launched on a twenty-five year career as a spy giving his own country’s secrets to its most dangerous enemy. It’s a choice that many find hard to understand and it’s still not clear exactly why he did this but, perhaps, we can find some clues to his personal psychology in his background and upbringing.

Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was born in India, the son of an important British political officer in India, Sir St. John Philby. A highly eccentric man, Sir St. John would convert to Islam in middle age, become an advisor to the Saudi Arabian king and then a Saudi subject. He switched kings, loyalties, religion, wives and homeland by choice; but, he also did it publicly.

Sir St. John’s son, Kim, would copy his father by changing loyalties to another nation, but in the most secret way. He started life as the son of a famous and important British Imperial officer and ended his days, in Moscow, with the rank of general in the KGB. For thirty years, his life was a dangerous lie that not even his family knew about.

After he had joined the Soviet spy service, Philby needed to ‘lose’ his socialist past and so he went to Spain as a journalist and reported on the civil war there between the democratic socialist government and the army, which wanted an end to democracy in Spain because it led to the socialism they hated. Philby joined these anti-communist and anti-socialist forces and reported on them in the most biased and favourable way. He was often close to or even in the fighting and he became such a friend of the anti-democratic forces that they gave him a medal. Philby’s new political personality as a strong anti-communist began to take shape.

Back in London, he started friendship groups with anti-democratic and anti-communist countries like Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. By the time the Second World War started in 1939, Philby was seen as an enemy of the Soviet Union and a patriotic Englishman. He had whitewashed himself and even those who had been at university with him were prepared to see his socialist beliefs in the old days as just the mistakes of a ‘silly student’. He went straight into British intelligence and by 1944, near the end of the war, he was made the head of the anti-Soviet section. At this time, unknown to anyone at home, he was also a major in the KGB.

This, of course, was a disaster for Britain’s efforts to catch Soviet spies or plant spies in Russia and other communist countries right through the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is also considered the greatest single triumph by a foreign power in the history of international espionage.

From 1944 to about 1953, Philby betrayed spy after spy; and these people were then tortured and shot. He sent dozens of agents to their deaths all across Eastern Europe and made it so that, at the time when Britain and the U.S.A. most needed eyes and ears in the Soviet Union and its new empire in Eastern Europe, they found their spy networks worse than at any time in recent history.

In the end, it was Philby’s long run of failures to make new spy networks and the deaths of so many of his agents that finally led the British to suspect that he was a Soviet spy. He was quietly removed and went back to journalism while the intelligence services investigated him further but in an unhurried way.

Finally, in 1963, they decided they had enough to arrest Philby but, unsurprisingly, the Soviets got wind of this and Philby escaped easily from Beirut, where he was living, and reappeared in Moscow three months later. For the first time in thirty years he could be himself, hiding nothing.

After this embarrassing disaster for British ‘intelligence’(!), the U.S.A. would not share much important information with London. There had been four other Soviet moles of lesser importance who had been at Cambridge University with Philby too. How had all this gone unnoticed?

There are several reasons. Recruitment into the intelligence services during the Second World War had been hasty and no real checks were made on new officers because of the emergency. However, many were accepted without question because they were from the upper-class and had been to expensive schools and top universities. The heads of British intelligence and almost all the case officers were from this kind of background. They were brought up to believe that ‘gentlemen’ could never betray their country.

So, as they carefully investigated working-class union leaders and lower middle-class democratic socialist politicians to see if they were traitors, they let their ‘own kind’ into key intelligence posts, certain that someone like themselves needed no checking. Even a quick look at Philby’s time at Cambridge University and then in Vienna would have made him very suspect and he would never have been given any jobs in intelligence, less still as chief of the anti-Soviet section.

Their stupidity and incompetence continued when they let Philby go off to the Lebanon. This just made his escape much easier. Two other Soviet ‘gentleman’ spies also escaped from England without any real difficulty or drama because the upper-classes refused to believe they would behave badly. They were being closely watched and followed in London but not on Saturdays and Sundays because an English gentleman does not do business at the weekend.

Philby lived until 1988 in Moscow but did not work for Soviet intelligence until ten years after his arrival there. Although he claimed that he regretted nothing, Philby’s life in Russia was purposeless. He drank heavily and was often depressed. It was only after he died that he received the recognition for his services that had never come in his lifetime.

A final note. In recent years, some have suggested that Philby was a ‘double-double agent’ – a triple agent: he was officially with the British and secretly with the Soviets but, underneath it all, he was still a loyal British agent and, when he got to Moscow, he became a very useful spy for London. Others have pointed out that there is no evidence for this and that it makes a nice face-saver for the snobs who were so embarrassed by the Philby business. When asked what Philby, now long dead, had done for Britain when he was in Moscow, the ‘triple agent’ theorists say that this must remain secret for security reasons.