Kim Philby

Kim Philby

Kim Philby, byname of Harold Adrian Russell ,(born January 1,1912, Ambala , India -died May 11,1988 , Moscow,Russia, U.S.S.R.), British intelligence officer until 1951 and the most succesful Soviet double agent of the Cold War period.

While a student at the University of Cambridge, Philby became an communist and in 1933 a Soviet agent. He worked as a journalist until 1940, when Guy Burgess, a British secret agent who was a himself a Soviet double agent , recruited Philby into the MI-6 section of the British intelligence service. By th end of World War II had become head of counterspionage operations for MI-6, in which post he was responsible for combat Soviet subversion in  western Europe. In 1949 he was sent to Washington to serve as chief officer MI-6 officer there and as the top liaison officer between the British and U.S. intelligence services.While holding this highly sensitive post, he revealed to U.S.S.R an Allied plan to send an armed anticommunists bands into Albania in 1950, thereby assuring their defeat; warned two Soviet double agents in the British diplomatic service,Burgess and Donald MacLean, that they were under suspicion ( the two men consequently escaped to the Soviet Union in 1951) and transmitted detailed information about MI-6 and the Central Intelligence Agency to the Soviets. After Burgess's and MacLean's defections, suspicion fell on Philby and he was relieved of his intelligence duties in 1951 and dismisses from MI-6 in 1955. Thereafter he worked as a journalist in Beirut until the fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1963. There he settled in Moscow and eventually reached the rank of colonel in the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. Philby published a book, My Silent War(1968), detailing his exploits.

Philby seems to have been a lifelong and commited communist whose primary devotion lay toward the Soviet Union rather than his native country.He was apparently responsible for the many deaths of many Western agents whose activitities he betrayed to the Soviets during the 1940s and early ’50s.