Kim Philby

Postage stamp of the USSR with the portrait of Philby

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (born January 1, 1912 in Ambala , Punjab , British India , today Haryana , India , † May 11, 1988 in Moscow ) was a British double agent .

Origin and studies

Philby was born in Ambala, India, to the British diplomat , Arabist and researcher St. John Philby . His father Harry St. John Bridger Philby (called Jack) was born in Badula on Ceylon in 1885 . His father, Henry Montague Philby, went to India as a young man, became wealthy there and lived as a tea planter in Ceylon. He was married to the much younger May Bee Duncan, daughter of an officer of Scottish origin in the British-Indian Army . In this, Henry Montague Philby also fought against the Indian rebellion, in the Afghan wars and during the conquest of Burma. Jack Philby converted to Islam and became an advisor to the Saudi King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud .

Thanks to his birth in India, St. John Philby's younger son was nicknamed "Kim", the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's Indian novel Kim , who spied for the British colonial power in the 19th century . In 1928 , at the age of 16, Kim Philby left Westminster School to study history at Trinity College . There he came into contact with Guy Burgess in 1930 , who - like others of his generation and origins - inspired him for communism . A year later, Philby joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS). Although he had already passed a third of his history exams, he switched subjects and studied economics from then on .

Vienna and Paris

Philby left Cambridge an ardent communist with an economics degree. When he asked one of his tutors , Maurice Dobb , how he could serve the communist movement, Dobb recommended him to a communist apron organization, which in 1933 passed him on to the Comintern underground in Vienna . In Vienna, Philby experienced, among other things, the February uprising in 1934 and, together with George Eric Rowe Gedye, was involved in the rescue of threatened fighters of the Republican Protection Association . In this context, he also met his first wife Litzy Friedmann (née Alice Kohlmann), an Austrian communist whom he saved as a British citizen by marrying on February 24, 1934 from arrest by the Austro-fascist regime. The daughter of Litzy Friedmann, the German writer Barbara Honigmann , writes about this marriage and the life of her mother in her book A Chapter from My Life . In addition, Philby was involved in the (World) Aid Committee for the Victims of German Fascism , headed by Willi Munzenberg , a Comintern preliminary organization based in Paris . Munzenberg was a German communist who had emigrated from Germany in 1933, had various contacts for the International Workers Aid and its aid organizations and was a leading agent of the Soviet Union in the West until 1936. Arnold Deutsch , an Austrian communist and agent, recruited Philby for the Soviet secret service GPU because of his dedicated work for the Comintern. Anatoly Gromov became Philby's senior officer in London .

Spain

After Philby in Austria and in the Spanish Civil War , u. a. for the Soviet reconnaissance, who had worked as a journalist , "Vee Vee" Valentine Vivian recruited him with the support of Burgess in 1940 for the British secret service MI6 . Initially, Philby was given training in subversive propaganda. From 1941 to 1944 he rose to head the British counterintelligence on the Iberian Peninsula . He was later assigned to Special Operations Executive (SOE), where he came into contact with agents from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Philby moved to the anti-Soviet department in London in 1944. Immediately after the end of the Second World War , he was sent to Istanbul . His work earned him the Order of the British Empire .

Washington

In 1949 Philby was promoted to liaison officer for British intelligence in the United States . In this function he was to keep in constant contact with the newly founded CIA . In January 1949, as part of the VENONA project , the US government informed the British government that nuclear weapons research secrets had been passed on to the Soviet Union via the British embassy in Washington from 1944 to 1945, which was intercepted. The British traitor's code name was "Homer", who could later be identified as Donald Maclean . Philby was given access to this VENONA material.

While Maclean had access to British-American nuclear weapons research, Philby knew z. B. the American plan to send armed anti-communist agents to Albania . The two friends from studying together at Cambridge passed on everything that was of use to the Soviet Union. In violation of all intelligence rules, Philby shared a house in Washington at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, NW, with another college friend from Cambridge days, diplomat, intelligence officer, and British anti-Soviet counterintelligence specialist Guy Burgess

When Maclean was exposed in April 1951, surveillance independent of Venona began because neither the United States nor Great Britain had an interest in exposing Venona. Maclean and Burgess went into hiding a month later and fled to the Soviet Union. Philby was suspected of having warned Burgess and Maclean. Philby was forced to resign in 1952 and officially "retired". From then on he worked as a journalist for the " Observer ". The competent authorities investigated for a year in order to be able to prove the betrayal. Against all odds, Philby was acquitted of all suspicions a few years later by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons in a statement.

Beirut

Disguised as the Middle East correspondent for the newspaper " The Economist ", Philby surprisingly worked again as an agent of MI6 in Beirut from 1956 , where he moved from an informal employee to the second man in " Operation Musceteer ", the joint British-French landing company Interaction with the Israelis on the Suez Canal to recapture the Suez Canal and eliminate the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser .

At a cocktail party in Tel Aviv in 1962, the British Flora Solomon commented on Philby's sympathy for the Arabs in his articles. She explained that Philby's bosses were in Moscow and that she had always known that he had worked for the Soviet Union, which was immediately reported to MI5 in London. Victor Rothschild was dispatched to question Solomon, stating that she would never testify against Philby in court, although she later admitted that he had confessed to being a spy and tried to recruit her.

Although MI5 and MI6 could not immediately agree on how to evaluate this information, a friend of Philby's MI6 days, Nicolas Elliot , was dispatched to confront him with the information in Beirut. Since information from MI5 apparently reached the Soviet Union repeatedly at that time, it was assumed that it was a high-ranking mole. While it is unclear whether Philby knew about Solomon's history or the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn who exposed triple agent Anthony Blunt , there is evidence that Philby began drinking heavily in late 1962 and his reactions became erratic. He may also have been warned by the Soviet leadership agent Yuri Modin , who traveled to Beirut from the Soviet embassy in London in December 1962.

When Elliot met Philby in Beirut, Philby said right from the start that he was half expecting him. When Elliot explained that there was new evidence against him, Philby immediately confessed without asking what evidence there was. Although a further interview had already been arranged for the last week of January 1963, Philby went into hiding on January 21, 1963, fled to the USSR and applied for political asylum . Soviet reports later revealed that a Soviet freighter was anchored in Beirut at the time.

Moscow

Philby's tombstone with his portrait in the Kunzewoer Cemetery in Moscow

Philby later appeared in Moscow, where he accepted Soviet citizenship and received a position in the KGB , which he held until shortly before his death. Beyond his propaganda role, there was no evidence of any activity from him in the West, but his alcoholism increased. Shortly after arriving in Moscow, he married Donald Maclean's ex-wife, Melinda, who, however, returned to the West. He then married a Russian woman, Rufina Philby, who was 20 years his junior and with whom he lived until his death. After his death he received the honors for which he had waited in vain all the years before: In addition to countless other orders and medals, he was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin . Philby received a hero's funeral in the Kunzewoer Friedhof .

Philby was a close friend of the author Graham Greene , who had officially left MI6 before Philby was exposed. Rumor has it that Greene never actually left MI6 to run his old friend Philby as a British triple agent in the KGB. These rumors are extremely improbable to fantastic because Philby had previously unmasked the entire British-American agent network in the USSR himself.

Kim Philby's code name was PARSIFAL .

reception

The spy novels by John le Carré allude again and again to the search for "moles" in the British secret service, in particular to the Cambridge Five . Without knowing the Philby case, these allusions are difficult to interpret correctly.

The novel Dame, König, As, Spion (Original: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ) sheds light on the case of Kim Philby. The novel was filmed in 1979 with Alec Guinness in the lead role. The German version was broadcast by ZDF in 1980. A remake of the novel with Gary Oldman and Colin Firth in the lead roles was released in 2011.

The ARTE documentary King of Spies , produced in 2008 by John le Carré, sheds light on the background to the “Cambridge Five”.

Kim Philby also plays an important supporting character in the 2002 spy novel The Company, written by Robert Littell , who is also involved in the film adaptation .

In Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fourth Protocol , Philby appears as the mastermind behind the scenes.

See also

• Anthony Blunt
• John Cairncross
• Melita Norwood
• Profumo affair
• George Blake

literature

• Mission at headquarters . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1968 ( online - Jan. 29, 1968 ).
• Kim Philby: Mein Doppelspiel - Autobiography of a Master Spy , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968 (English original title: My Silent War )
• EH Cookridge: Career: Double Agent. Kim Philby, master spy for London and Moscow. Stalling, Oldenburg 1968; Zurich 1969
• Phillip Knightley: Kim Philby, secret agent. List, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-471-77977-9
• Barbara Honigmann : A chapter from my life. dtv, Munich 2006. ISBN 3-423-13478-X (incl. Biogr.) First 2004: ISBN 3-446-20531-4
• Peter Stephan Jungk: The darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart , S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 2015, ISBN 3-10-002398-6

Web links

• Literature by and about Kim Philby in the catalog of the German National Library
• Uwe Klußmann: Top agent Philby: Useless in Moscow for one day

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Escape of a top spy: On July 1, 1963, the British government admits that Kim Philby escaped. In: German Spy Museum. July 1, 2020, accessed on July 20, 2020 (German).