The last secrets of Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent who betrayed the UK

He was always the most clever and cunning of them all. They were called the Cambridge Five. Young Britons educated among the elite who, during the decades before and after World War II, worked as Soviet agents infiltrated into the heart of the system. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as Kim Philby, was the most elusive one of them all, and the one who held out the longest before being discovered. Newly declassified documents made public by MI5, the domestic security service of the United Kingdom, now reveal the last secrets of the double agent who elicits the most admiration and hatred among his fellow Britons.

There are 21 files that recount the recruitment of young Philby by the Communist International; his cold-blooded moves to get rid of the KGB defector Konstantin Volkov and his wife before they were able to betray him, and the hours of conversation in Beirut with his friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliott, in which he ended up confessing his decades as a spy for Moscow.

The documents, however, do not reveal the final secret: why Elliott gave his old friend enough time to flee to the Soviet Union before being arrested. Philby died in Moscow, revered as a hero by the USSR but alone and a drunk, 25 years later.

Kim from India

Philby was born in 1912 in Ambala, the Indian city then part of British India. His father, John Philby, was an army officer, a diplomat, an explorer and a writer who eventually converted to Islam and served as an advisor to King Abdulaziz bin Al Saud of Saudi Arabia. The nickname Kim, chosen by his father, comes from the title of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, about the adventures of a young man who spies for the British Empire.

He studied history and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was seduced by Marxism. Recruited by the Vienna branch of the Comintern (the Communist International), Philby carried out work for the Soviet intelligence service in Austria and Spain. Disguised as a journalist for the newspaper The Times, he managed to charm the forces of the future Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, with a series of stories favorable to the cause of the coup plotters. He received the Red Cross for military merit from Franco himself.

Philby’s hours of conversation with Elliott, undoubtedly the most revealing material of all the information made public by MI5, show a man corrupted by decades of lies and concealment, who is sparing and evasive when it comes to admitting his own betrayals, and who continues to play with ambiguity and half-truths, despite confessing to being a double agent.

In 1945, when Philby was already in service of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, and working hard for the KGB, he learned that a Soviet agent, Volkov, had turned up at the British consulate in Istanbul, where he had offered a huge amount of information and secrets in exchange for £50,000 and the chance to start a new life in the U.K. with his wife. Volkov was to reveal the names of nine Soviet moles who had infiltrated the main institutions of the United Kingdom. One of them, he said, was in charge of the counter-espionage service of MI6. It was obvious that it was Philby.

After alerting his superiors in Moscow, he flew straight to Istanbul to take charge of the matter. By the time he arrived, Volkov and his wife had been kidnapped, drugged, bandaged and carried on a stretcher by a doctor and two KGB officers to a plane that took them to Bulgaria. They were never heard from again. “Presumably what you passed to them [the KGB] was mainly directed towards information of direct interest to them, like the Volkov business?” Elliott asked Philby at their meeting. “Indeed,” the double agent confirmed laconically.

The other spies

Despite years of university friendship and subsequent camaraderie, Philby always tried to protect his own back against the risks and blunders of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, the other agents who made up The Cambridge Five.

Donald Maclean, son of the Liberal Party politician of the same name, became First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington from 1944 to 1948. There he carried out the most important work for the Soviet Union. He passed on to Moscow much of the communication between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later between the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and Harry S. Truman. Through Maclean, the Soviets learned of the progress made by the United States in the development of the atomic bomb.

When Maclean returned to the U.K., it was Philby who ended up posted to the U.S. capital. There he discovered that the British authorities were about to unmask his comrade. Using a secret code, he warned Guy Burgess, another of the five spies, who worked at the Foreign Office and was then living in Philby’s London apartment, to alert Maclean. The code agreed between the former friends was to refer to a supposedly abandoned car in the backyard of Philby’s residence. “If I am dragged into elaborate measures in connection with the car, I propose to charge you heavily for it...” Philby wrote to Burgess. The letter is part of the documents now declassified by MI5.

The confession

Despite growing suspicions about Philby on the part of his British superiors, they were unable to uncover any substantial evidence against him. Although he was forced to leave MI6, it was his friend Elliott who helped him settle in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, in 1956, as a correspondent for The Economist and The Observer. Six years later, his friend Flora Solomon’s confession that Philby had tried to recruit her as a Soviet agent in 1934 finally unmasked the double spy.

Elliott traveled to the Lebanese capital and spent several days recording the conversation with his friend. “I certainly would not have spoken to anyone else and when you yourself told me that you believed the evidence against me, that really did it. Here’s the scoop as it were. I have had this particular moment in mind for 28 years almost, that conclusive proof would come out.,” Philby told Elliott.

The two friends parted with the understanding that Philby would continue to provide information to Peter Lunn, the MI6 man in Beirut. There was a tacit understanding that there would be no criminal prosecution if the double agent confessed to all his betrayals. A few days later, Philby fled to Moscow aboard a Russian steamer docked in the port of Beirut. “I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade [defect],” he wrote years later from the Soviet capital to his old friend Elliott.

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