In this group of spies, the most effective was a man known as “Kim” Philby. His legal name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby. “Kim” was, in years past, a name often given to boys as well as girls.
Born in 1912, Philby studied at Cambridge University, but by 1933, was employed by an organization which seemed to be a charitable agency, but was in fact a “front” - a facade for Soviet espionage activity. Such front groups were organized by the Communist International, a branch of the Soviet Communist Party tasked with fomenting revolutions in countries around the world.
Often called the ‘Comintern,’ the Communist International established a group in Vienna which claimed to be helping refugees. Kim Philby was employed by this organization which, despite its allegedly humanitarian purposes, was an arm of the Soviet intelligence-gathering apparatus.
By 1934, Philby was back in England and employed by the NKVD, one of the Soviet intelligence agencies. He worked as a journalist in the 1930s, during which time he became an agent for MI6, the British intelligence agency. He remained part of MI6 until July 1951.
For about fifteen years, Kim Philby was on the payroll of the MI6, kept a “cover” job as a reporter, and actually work for the NKVD and later for the KGB. He was a double agent. He was able to gain more information, and more sensitive information, for the international communist conspiracy than an ordinary British citizen.
Eventually, suspicions were voiced about him, leading to his resignation from MI6 in 1951, but he remained employed as a newspaper reporter for more than a decade afterward. Although no longer in the employ of MI6, he had contacts and an experienced insight into international matters, and remained a valued asset for the KGB.
After leaving MI6 in 1951, suspicions continued to surround him. In 1955, after some public discussion of Philby’s loyalties, the matter was discussed in Parliament, and the government seemed to satisfy itself that Philby was not a Soviet agent. One historian, M. Stanton Evans, known as “Stan” Evans, writes about Harold Macmillan’s defense of Philby in the face of questions raised by Marcus Lipton, MP:
The secretary of state (for foreign affairs, to give him his full title) oozing all the reassurance was the Tory, Harold Macmillan; the legislator who brought the charges, Col. Marcus Lipton, Labor MP for Brixton; and the suspect so triumphantly cleared, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, Red spy par excellence, who would later surface in Moscow as an “intelligence officer” of the Soviet KGB, and extremely proud to say so.
Finally, in 1963, Philby defected to Russia, to spend the rest of his life in Moscow. He believed that MI6 was preparing to arrest him.
Philby was able to function as an active communist agent in England for thirty years, feeding massive amounts of information to the Soviets. His success led to deaths around the world as the international communist conspiracy sought to start revolutions and undermine British democracy.
How could he maintain his cover for thirty years? Stan Evans writes:
That super mole Kim Philby was cleared by Harold Macmillan and the old-boy network in the United Kingdom speaks volumes about security standards prevailing there in the 1940s and early ’50s. As does, indeed, the whole fantastic story of Communist infiltration in which Philby was merely one, albeit a leading, player. The saga of Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, James Klugmann, and others of the formidable crowd of Moscow agents who fanned out from the University of Cambridge and wound up in the British government is among the most astounding tales in all the annals of subversion, testimony to the deceptive skills of those who engineered it.
Philby’s success in maintaining his cover rested in part upon the naivety of some government officials, who felt that an educated Cambridge man from a good family simply couldn’t be a Soviet agent, in part upon those who didn’t feel that the Soviet threat was serious enough to merit careful monitoring of those with access to classified information, and in part upon those who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause and who therefore did not carefully monitor government employees in hopes that some of them were in fact Soviet “plants.”
The British government learned a lesson from the case of Kim Philby. England could survive only through proper vigilance and caution. Philby’s actions were a proverbial “wake-up call.” Britain learned, although slowly.
It’s testimony as well, however, to the complacency and negligence of the people who let it happen. As the records plainly show, there were plenty of signs along the way that members of the Cambridge clique had Red connections, glaringly obvious in some cases, but these were ignored, discounted, or, in the latter phases of the scandal, shoved under the nearest Whitehall carpet. After all, most of the Philby group had gone to the right schools, belonged to the right clubs, and didn’t look or talk the way Bolsheviks were supposed to. It was unthinkable they could be Soviet agents or betray their country. So the evidence of their perfidy was brushed aside until the proof was overwhelming.
In late 2013 and early 2014, the British government declassified documents relating to Kim Philby. Those texts made it clear that MI6 had, in the 1950s, an instinct to defend its agents rather than examine them. This had been a factor in the blind eye turned to Philby’s work for the Soviets.
Philby gained public attention for the first time on a large scale in the 1950s, and this coverage was one factor which inspired the author John le Carre to write his successful spy novels. Philby’s defection in 1963, and the defections of other MI6 agents, played into the spy novels written by Ian Fleming.
