Volume 14 Number 004 Kim Philby

Home , Donald Maclean (spy), Guy Burgess, Kim Philby

Volume 14 Number 004

Kim Philby, Spying for the Other Side I

Lead: Polished and elegant, with upper-class education and heritage, Kim Philby in the 1940s rose in the ranks of British intelligence. He was, however, spying for the other side.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Harold Adrian Russell Philby grew up in India. Early on his father, a fixture in the British Civil Service there gave him the name Kim, after a Rudyard Kipling character. While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in the mid-1930s, Philby came under the influence of Professor Maurice Dodd. His mentor reinforced in the boy a powerful trend among intellectuals in that decade. Many of them looked at the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union and believed they had discovered the future, a system that would transform mankind for the better. Ignoring the corrupt, inefficient, brutal and oppressive character of Stalinism, they became quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, champions of communism. Kim Philby became a life-long true believer.

In the course of his Cambridge years he was inducted into The Cambridge Conversazione Society, an ancient and secret fraternity devoted primarily to discussion of important topics of the day. While a part of the so-called Apostles, he deepened his friendship with three other devotees of Stalinism, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Donald MacLean, at least one of them also an Apostle. Each of the four rose in the ranks of the British government, MacLean as Foreign Office Secretary, the other three in the intelligence service, either MI5 or MI6. All of them passed secrets to the Soviet Union, apparently out of an intellectual and emotional commitment to communism rather than greed or avarice. Next time: walking the espionage tightrope.

Research assistance by Nick Vucic, at the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

Resources

Barnes, Julian E. “The Third Man: the Havoc He Wreaked Stretched Far and Wide,” U.S. News and World Report. January 27, 2003.

Hamrick, S. J. Deceiving the Deceivers : Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.

Knightley, Phillip. The Master Spy : the Story of Kim Philby. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Philby, Rufina. The Private Life of Kim Philby: the Moscow Years. United Kingdom: Time Warner Books, 2003.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_philby.html