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Highly-educated idealists, the two were destined for prominent positions in Britain’s Foreign Office. The Soviets paid for Philby’s travel to Spain, where he began writing sympathetic accounts of fascist leader Francisco Franco’s army in its war against the country’s elected Republican government.īefore leaving Cambridge, Philby had recruited two friends, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, also to spy for the Russians. He was instructed thereafter to pose as a right-wing newspaper correspondent. Now committed to the communist cause, Philby was introduced by his wife to a Russian in London who recruited him as a Soviet agent.

Trinity College, Cambridge University (Image Credit: Suicasmo, Wikimedia Commons) After that, Maurice Dobb, a Marxist professor of economics at Cambridge, sent him to Vienna to contact communists organizing demonstrations against the authoritarian Austrian government.įully radicalized by the rapid and violent crushing of Austria’s leftist movement, in early 1934 Philby married the daughter of his contacts, and brought her to England to escape almost certain arrest and execution by Austrian security forces. While still a Cambridge student, Philby witnessed anti-Semitic violence firsthand in Berlin early in 1933. These regimes early on committed gross assaults on political rivals and scapegoated minorities in their own nations.

Fascist movements in Italy, Germany, and Spain arose, in part, in reaction to the perceived communist threat. Kim Philby arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge University at a critical time in this global realignment. Its differences with the West were only sharpened in the years that followed as the European powers, and then the U.S., sought to contain what they considered a very real threat of world communist revolution. Russia’s territorial interest did not change when it swapped czarist tyranny for communist rule in 1917. The British/Russia contest was at the time termed “ The Great Game ,” a drama in which Kim Philby seemed destined to act. In it, an Anglo-Irish orphan boy learns to take on multiple South Asian identities, and travels across northern India on secret missions against Russian designs on the territory. John gave his only child the nickname “Kim,” for which he was ever after known, for the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian adventure novel. John (pronounced sin-gin ) Philby, had been an Imperial administrator in British Punjab (where young Philby was born in 1912) before becoming advisor to the Saudi king, after which he converted to Islam, and took a second wife. Philby was very much the product of the old world of espionage.

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With many details still classified, and documents destroyed, the full impact of his betrayal may never be known. In fact, when the clandestine work of Harold “Kim” Philby, once Britain’s top intelligence officer in Washington, was finally exposed in 1963, the class system that had produced leaders for England’s spy services for centuries was shattered, never to recover. This Russian double agent, working at the top of British Intelligence, caused the deaths of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people associated with British and American spy agencies in the early Cold War years, and crippled the gathering and analysis of covert information by England’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for decades. This betrayal of American interests was compared at the time to the earlier cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, mid-level officers at the CIA and FBI, respectively, who sold secrets to the Russians out of plain greed or to settle personal grudges.Īs devastating as these two older cases were, they paled in comparison to what remains the greatest betrayal of a country by a highly placed intelligence officer in the 20 th century. In 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden leaked to several journalists highly classified documents regarding widespread, indiscriminate surveillance, which Snowden believed to be illegal, while also compromising sensitive operations. In 1949, he was named Britain’s chief intelligence liaison to Washington, where he had complete access to CIA information for two years, but how long could his string of luck last?

There, Philby betrayed countless secrets. His upper-class credentials, established by birth and education, gained him entry into Britain’s secret service at the start of WW2. When the British secret agent Kim Philby defected to Russia in 1963, he had been spying for the Soviets since leaving Cambridge University nearly 30 years earlier.