Kim Philby: unmasking the original Cold War double agent

Kim Philby, Britain’s most infamous spy, could have been unmasked as a double agent years before he fled to the Soviet Union, newly declassified records have revealed.

According to files from the National Archive, which have been kept secret for 60 years, Philby confided to the British-Russian social campaigner Flora Solomon in 1938 that he was “100% on the Soviet side”. Philby, who eventually defected to Moscow in 1963, added: “I am helping them… I am carrying out a terrifically important and difficult assignment.”

Despite this revelation Solomon did not report her suspicions until 1962, when she told Victor Rothschild, a former MI5 officer, at a cocktail party in Tel Aviv.

“Her motivations for keeping Philby’s secret for 25 years, then eventually shopping him to the security services, remain mysterious,” said The Telegraph.

Who was Kim Philby?

Born in India in 1912, Harold “Kim” Philby was a pillar of the British establishment, attending Westminster School and then Cambridge University.

Having been “drawn towards communism at Cambridge”, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934 with the aim, he would later claim, of overthrowing Western imperialism. Having worked as a journalist for The Times, he eventually joined MI6 and quickly rose through the ranks of the British intelligence service.

While working in Washington DC as MI6’s liaison with the CIA and FBI in 1951, two fellow Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow, turning the spotlight on to Philby.

He was interrogated and eventually cleared but in 1955 was publicly accused of being the so-called “Third Man” in the spy ring. In an extraordinary press conference held in his mother’s flat in London, he managed to successfully convince journalists he was innocent.

Despite officially leaving MI6, he resumed life as a double agent while working as a newspaper journalist in Beirut, until he was finally unmasked in 1963.

The reason he got away with his double life for so long was twofold, said the BBC. “The first was the British class system, which could not accept one of their own was a traitor.” And the second “was the fact that so many in MI6 had so much to lose if he was proven to be a spy”.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/958158/kim-philby-unmasking-the-original-cold-war-double-agent