Philby, Kim (1912-1988), was a British civil servant and diplomat who, while working for the British intelligence service , was a Soviet spy. With Guy Burgess , Donald Maclean , and Anthony Blunt , Philby proved to be one of the most damaging double agents in modern history.
Harold Adrian Russell Philby was born in Ambala, India , on Jan. 1, 1912. He was educated at Westminster School, London , and studied history and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge University , in the early 1930’s. At Cambridge, he met Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt, and like them became a Communist .
In 1933, he was recruited as an agent of the Soviet Union. Philby worked as a correspondent for The Times of London, covering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In 1940, Burgess, already a spy for the Soviet Union, recruited Philby into MI6, the British secret service. From 1944 to 1946, Philby served as head of anti-Communist counterespionage at MI6. By 1949, he was first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. , serving as liaison officer between the United Kingdom and United States police and intelligence services. This post gave him considerable access to sensitive information concerning the operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) . In 1951, the authorities learned of his Communist sympathies as a student, though not of his later espionage activities. In the meantime, he was able to warn Burgess and Maclean that they were about to be discovered and gave them the chance to flee to the Soviet Union with the aid of Blunt. Their escape drew suspicion upon him, but he did not confess under questioning. He resigned from the service in 1952. In 1956, he returned to journalism and became a foreign correspondent of The Observer and The Economist. He was posted to Beirut , Lebanon , where he continued to spy for the Soviet Union. In January 1963, again under suspicion, he fled to Moscow , where he became a Soviet citizen and an officer in the KGB .
In 1968, Philby published My Silent War, an account of his spying activities. He admitted sabotaging plans for an Allied invasion of Albania in 1950 by revealing them to the Soviets. He also admitted passing on information about the CIA to the Soviet intelligence service and prompting the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Philby died in Moscow on May 11, 1988.
