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Vanessa Thorpe at the British newspaper
the Guardian reports on a new exhibition at the National Archives in
London that reveals the extent of the MI5 operation to expose the British double
agent and traitor Kim Philby.
Secret surveillance of Britain’s notorious
double agent, Kim Philby, made public for the first time in archived documents,
reveals how keenly the Security Service wanted to confirm or disprove early
suspicions of his high-level treachery.
In daily bulletins submitted to MI5 in
November 1951, undercover operatives describe how Philby, codenamed Peach,
moved about London.
They
said he gave “no outward sign of being either nervous or on the alert, but your
well trained man should not do so; every movement is natural – again as it
should be”.
The notes, from official “watchers” who
were tailing Philby and bugging his phone, raise a key question about how the
arch-traitor eventually escaped justice: did the British establishment
deliberately protect him, or simply hope to avoid a public scandal? Mark
Dunton, of the National Archives, believes the documents, which go on display
in the exhibition, “MI5: Official Secrets,” next week at Kew, west London,
shed light on one of the most shady periods of British espionage.
The Washington Times
published my review of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.
When one thinks of the Cold War — the
era when the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union,
were adversaries from the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet
Union in 1991 — perhaps one thinks of Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall,
spy vs. spy dramas, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the arms race or Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev stating, “We will bury you.”
But in addition to the
conflict between spies, soldiers and statesmen, there was another conflict that
took place during the Cold War:
The fight over literature.
“Between February and May
1955, a group secretly funded by the Central
Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist
territory. Gathering at launch sites in West Germany, operatives inflated
10-foot balloons, armed them their payload, waited for favorable winds and
launched them into Poland. “They then watched as the
balloons were carried deep behind the Iron Curtain, where they would eventually
disgorge their contents. These, though, were not explosives or incendiary
weapons: they were books,” Duncan White writes in the opening of his book,
“Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.”
“At the height of the Cold War, the CIA
made copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” rain down from the Communist sky.”
“Cold Warriors is the story
of the writers who dealt with the consequences of having literature become a Cold War
battleground.
… Authors
around the world were involved in the Cold War
conflict, Mr. White explains. “They led double lives as spies, volunteered in
foreign wars, engaged in guerrilla insurgencies, churned out propaganda,
exposed official hypocrisy, and risked their lives to write books that defied
the Cold War
consensus.”
Mr. White calls his book a
group biography that traces the interconnected lives and works of writers on
both sides of the Iron Curtain. And the cast of characters is impressive:
Graham Greene, John le Carre, Stephen Spender, Ernest Hemingway and others.
Some of the writers were leftists whom the Soviets called “useful idiots,”
while others, like George Orwell, condemned the Soviet Union’s evil empire.
Mr. White also covers the
courageous Russian writers, like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
who defied the all-powerful Soviet regime to write great literature that did
not conform with Soviet ideas. The book also covers British spy and traitor Kim
Philby, who didn’t write fiction, Mr. White says, he lived it.
I was surprised that the book
did not cover thriller writer Ian Fleming more. As a young reporter for Reuters
in 1933, he covered the Metro-Vickers espionage trial of British engineers in
the Soviet Union. Later, after serving as a naval intelligence officer in
World War II, he became the London Sunday Times’ foreign manager and several of
his foreign correspondents also reported to British intelligence. And in
addition to taking on international criminals, Ian Fleming’s James Bond
character battled Soviet spies and assassins. For many readers, James Bond was
the ultimate fictional Cold Warrior.
Steve Doughty at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a piece on a British judge ruling that the possible "seventh man" in the 1950s Cambridge spy ring named in a letter cannot be revealed.
(In the above photo, the "third man," the late Kim Philby, meets with reporters).
A man connected to Britain’s most notorious spy scandal cannot be named, a judge has ruled.
His identity must remain secret even though historians say he could be the ‘seventh man’ in the 1950s Cambridge spy network that included traitor Kim Philby.
Judge Peter Lane ruled that the suspect’s name cannot be revealed as he is still alive and it was ‘quite possible that personal relationships could be jeopardised’, and there was no pressing need to identify Cold War defectors.
The man is named in a letter held in the National Archives in Kew, South West London.
Its existence was traced by historian Andrew Lownie but he was denied the right to see the letter following a Freedom of Information request. That decision was upheld in the publication yesterday of Judge Lane’s first-tier tribunal ruling.
Historians criticised the ruling, saying possible social embarrassment was no reason for shielding a traitor from exposure.
You can read the rest of the piece and view the photos of the known spies via the below link:
Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on British spy and traitor Guy Burgess and his meetings with a British newspaperman.
Ever since two members of the Foreign Office, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, both Cambridge graduates, screeched their Austin saloon to a halt in Southampton docks and scrambled aboard the midnight ferry to Saint-Malo in the closing minutes of 25 May 1951, their dramatic flight has sponsored a minor genre.
Now, with the release by MI5 of secret documents dealing with the Burgess and Maclean scandal, there is a new perspective on the betrayal that enthralled a generation. Two biographies of Burgess and a forthcoming account of Maclean (Orphan: The Lives of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps) are just the latest manifestations of 1950s spy-mania. From thrillers and biographies to Alan Bennett’s television drama An Englishman Abroad, the “missing diplomats” (it was several weeks before their treachery as Soviet spies was confirmed) have inspired thousands of column inches.
The awesome scale of Russian penetration became a national obsession. In government, there was disbelief; among the reading public, fascination. Throughout the 1950s, the top newspaper story from Moscow was less to do with Stalin or Khrushchev than Burgess and Maclean, who became a strange kind of national brand as familiar to British readers as Fortnum & Mason or Gilbert and Sullivan.
For the defectors, their new life in the Soviet Union was both Yeomen of the Guardand Pirates of Penzance. Burgess was as worldly, reckless and compelling as his co-conspirator was stiff, ideological and forbidding. Where Maclean made a new career as “Mark Frazer”, instructing Soviet diplomats and avoiding British journalists, Burgess remained himself, a charming and erratic high-living homosexual, who continued to cruise and booze with Rabelaisian joie de vivre.
The sensational irruption of Guy Burgess, either on the telephone or in person, became a bizarre rite of passage for the English visitor to Soviet Moscow. On his first meeting with Michael Redgrave, who was playing in Hamlet with a touring Shakespeare company, Burgess was so drunk he threw up in the star’s dressing room, a story that would eventually attract Bennett’s attention.
Not everyone was enchanted by Burgess: Edward Crankshaw, for instance, was typical of the 1950s Observer. Like David Astor, his editor, he had done secret work in the second world war, serving in Moscow and then at Bletchley Park. Astor, who often hired journalists with wartime intelligence connections, brought Crankshaw on to his staff in 1947 to specialise in Soviet Russia.
As an Observer recruit, Crankshaw had even been summoned by Burgess, in his Foreign Office guise, for a dressing-down for being “too soft towards Russia”. It was Crankshaw’s first meeting with Burgess and he was not impressed. But he was no ordinary journalist. Steeped in Russia, Crankshaw seems always to have mixed reportage with espionage, attracting the attention of both the CIA and the KGB.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Peter Apps at Reuters offers a piece on why computers may never replace human spies.
If legendary British spy-turned-KGB mole Kim Philby was alive to offer arrested U.S. Navy officer Edward Lin advice — regardless of his guilt or innocence — we know what it would be.
Despite repeatedly coming under suspicion, Philby fed British and American secrets to Moscow for three decades before ultimately defecting in 1963. His survival, he told officers of the East German Stasi spy service in 1981, was partly down to organizational ineptitude and his privileged position as a member of Britain’s ruling class.
But it was also, he said, simply down to the fact that when challenged, he always maintained his innocence. Even when confronted with incriminating evidence in his own handwriting, he simply denied having anything to do with it.
“All I had to do really was keep my nerve,” said Philby according to a recording found by the BBC and published this month. “So my advice to you is to tell all your agents that they are never to confess.”
For Taiwanese-American Lieutenant Commander Lin, it may already be too late for that. The United States government remains remarkably tight lipped — for now, it remains unclear whether he is suspected of spying for mainland China or only Taiwan. All that is known for sure is that he faces charges of espionage, attempted espionage and a charge of patronizing a prostitute.
Lin was a member of an elite U.S. Navy reconnaissance aviation unit flying from Hawaii and said to operate some of the most sophisticated equipment and sensitive missions in the Pacific.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Andrew Lownie, the author of Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, unmasks the sixth man in the notorious Cambridge spy ring that included Kim Philby and Guy Burgess in the Daily Mail.
For more than 50 years, the identities of members of the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring have been the stuff of debate and fevered speculation. Four – Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt – have been unmasked as Soviet agents.
A fifth is believed to have been the Bletchley Park and MI6 officer John Cairncross. Now author Andrew Lownie has unmasked a sixth Soviet spy at the heart of the Establishment – a brilliant MI6 physicist who sent nuclear secrets to the KGB which allowed the Russians to develop their own atom bomb…
To his colleagues in MI6, scientist Wilfrid Mann was known as ‘Atomic Man’, the conduit between Britain’s nascent nuclear programme and the team of specialists working under Robert Oppenheimer on America’s Manhattan Project in the desert of New Mexico.
But he also had a secret life as a Russian spy, working in the office next door to his fellow KGB agents Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby in the British Embassy in Washington from 1943 to 1951.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
The British newspaper the Daily Mail offers three extracts from Andrew Lownie's biography of the British spy and traitor Guy Burgess.
You can read the extracts and watch a video of an interview with Burgess via the below links:
Ollie Gillman at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a piece on a new book that claims the notorious British traitor and spy Kim Philby tipped off Italian Bruno Pontecorvo, who later fled to the Soviet Union.
For decades the mystery of why Italian nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo defected from the Allies to the USSR has baffled Cold War historians.
The scientist, while on holiday in Italy with his wife and children in 1950, suddenly disappeared, resurfacing years later on the side of the Iron Curtain.
But now a new book has revealed that Pontecorvo was being trailed by the FBI for suspected communist activity, and has claimed that he fled to Russia after being tipped off by none other than infamous double agent Kim Philby.
Pontecorvo, a prominent nuclear physicist in Britain, the U.S. and Canada, shicked the world when he defected to the USSR. After re-emerging five years later in Moscow, he eventually said he left for ideological reasons - but the real reason why he fled remained shouded in mystery for more than 60 years.
Frank Close, a scientist who believes that Pontecorvo could have gone on to win a Nobel prize had he stayed with the West, told the Observer that the FBI were investigating the Italian at the time of his disappearance.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Received an Amazon gift card or some other gift card for Christmas? Looking for a good book to purchase?
Well, you can search here for my book reviews and posts on a good number of books.
Or, the Philadelphia Inquirer - where I've been a contributor since 1999 - offers their staff's choice of a good book to read this Christmas season.
Avid readers are always happy to tell you about the good things they've been reading, and we at The Inquirer are no different. Here's a roundup of the best new books that Inquirer staff members have read this year. Enjoy!
Bagmen, by William Lashner (Thomas & Mercer, $14.95 paperback). If they gave a Pulitzer Prize for snappy dialogue, William Lashner would be a betting favorite every time. Bagmen is a murder mystery set in the altogether too convincingly rendered demimonde of Philly's bagmen, the political fixers. - Michael D. Schaffer.
You can read the rest of the staff picks via the below link:
Ben Macintyre, author of A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a look at the films based on Kim Philby at Word & Film.
Kim Philby, the most notorious and successful spy of modern times, has inspired myriad films for cinema and television. Some are broadly factual, others factual, and most others somewhere in between - which is appropriate, since the gray area between truth and untruth, reality and deception, is where Philby spent his entire life.
Philby's long and ongoing role in film is easy to explain, for his is the essential spy story: the man who appears, on the outside, to be the perfect English gentleman, but on the inside is someone else, playing for the other side, smiling and betraying. The moral uncertainty here is irresistible to dramatists, going all the way back to Shakespeare, who noted man's ability to "smile and smile and be a villain." Philby's very charm was his armor.
The Philby story, and its numerous spin-offs, enables filmmakers to ask the essential questions: Who do you trust? What is friendship? Is it possible to love your betrayer?
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Andrew Lycett wrote a good review of Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal in the Telegraph.
Outside a small flat in Beirut in January 1963, the usual Middle Eastern sounds – blaring horns, raised voices and amplified music – rent the air, while inside “one of the most important conversations in the history of the Cold War” (to use author Ben Macintyre) was taking place.
Finally, almost three decades after Kim Philby, product of Westminster School and Cambridge, had been recruited into the Soviet secret service, and had wormed his way into its British equivalent, MI6, to become the most dangerous traitor in British espionage history, he was being confronted by Nicholas Elliott, his friend and former MI6 colleague.
Elliott had been sent to the Lebanese capital to extract a confession, a dozen years after Philby had been identified in parliament as the “third man” in a top-level spy ring, following the defection to Moscow of two of his co-conspirators, Donald Macleanand Gy Burgess.
But, despite overwhelming evidence which had forced him to resign, Philby had always protested his innocence and, such was the camaraderie in MI6, associates such as Elliott had believed him. Indeed Elliott had helped him financially and later pulled strings to find him employment as a journalist in Beirut, where, amazingly, he still performed occasional freelance jobs for MI6.
However, following the discovery of further incriminating evidence, even Elliott now realised Philby was guilty.
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
Philip Henson at The Spectator offers a review of Ben Macintyre's new book on the British traitor, spy and rotter Kim Philby.
The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of thousands of men and women. Among them were the Albanian guerrillas, hoping to liberate their country, who found Soviet-sponsored troops waiting at their landing places to shoot them. A list of non-communist opposers to the Nazis in Germany was passed on to the Russians who, advancing into Germany in the last years of the war, summarily executed 5,000 named people.
Philby worked for the British security services for years, almost all the time passing significant information to our country’s enemies. He was closely associated with those other traitors, Burgess and Maclean, and clearly helped them to escape. Despite very substantial evidence against Philby, he was allowed to retire from the service and left unprosecuted. MI6 seems to have protected and defended him; MI5 wanted to bring a case, but was rebuffed.
How did Philby get away with it, and how, at the last, confronted with indisputable evidence of his treachery in his exile in Beirut, was he allowed to flee to Moscow? The answer, according to Macintyre, is the British class system, and in particular the loyalty felt on account of social standing by two men, Nicholas Elliott and James Jesus Angleton of the CIA. Angleton seems to have handed over the details of every one of those Albanian landings during immensely long boozy lunches in Washington. What was Elliott’s responsibility? Why did he allow Philby to slip through his fingers at the end? They are questions which still can’t be answered.
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
William Boyd, who has written the latest James Bond continuation novel, Solo, wrote three interesting pieces for the British newspaper the Guardian.
Two of the pieces were on spy thriller writers Ian Fleming and John le Carre and the third piece was on the notorious British spy and traitor Kim Philby.
You can read Boyd's take on Ian Fleming via the below link:
Robert McCrum looks back on the notorious British traitor and spy Kim Philby and the old boys club.
One of the darkest and most enthralling British espionage stories of the 20th century turns 50 this month, still resonant with sinister meaning. It was on 1 July 1963 that the British government finally admitted what it had known for some time: that Harold Adrian Russell Philby – "Kim" to friends and family – was not merely living in the Soviet Union as a defector and a Russian spy, but was actually the fabled "third man". Later this archetype of treachery would become known, in the words of his biographer, as "the spy who betrayed a generation".
Philby was perhaps the most lethal double agent in the annals of British espionage. As a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring and a secret servant of the Soviet intelligence services, Philby was responsible for the betrayal of countless national secrets as well as the brutal elimination of many British agents.
At the same time he was a member of the British establishment, with a distinguished literary father and friendships with prominent English literati, such as Graham Greene, as well as with high-flying US spooks such as James Angleton, later to become head of the CIA. If ever there was a member of the club – two, as it turned out – it was Kim Philby, OBE.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Note: James Angleton rose to become the head of Counterintelligence in the CIA, but he did not serve as the director. Also, although Ian Fleming was a young journalist for Reuters prior to World War II, he was working as a stockbroker when he was recruited to serve in British naval intelligence. He was not, like Graham Greene, a "prominent English literati."
Vladimir Putin, Russia's president former KGB agent, likes to trot out the memories of the Cold War spies like Kim Philby and honor them as heroes.
One such Cold War spy, 90-year George Blake, is still alive and resides in Putin's Russia.
Exiled former master spy and traitor George Blake, whose betrayal of British agents to the KGB is said to have cost any lives, claims the 'happiest years' of his life are being spent in Putin-controlled Russia.
In a rare interview marking his 90th birthday, the former MI6 officer recalled sharing cocktails, including martinis - favored by James Bond - with fellow spies outside Moscow in their KGB retirement.
Nearly five decades after he escaped from a British jail and was smuggled to east Berlin in a camper van in one of the classic cloak-and-dagger stories of the 20th century, Blake lives quietly in the Moscow suburbs with his wife Ida on a pension from the KGB.
'These are the happiest years of my life, and the most peaceful, ' Blake, who goes by the Russian name Georgy Ivanovich, said in the interview, published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta.
... There was no sign of regret or remorse for his duplicity and he appeared content with the life he forged after being exposed with fellow traitors Donald Maclean and Kim Philby as among the most 'significant' spies of the Cold War years.
You can also read the Associated Press piece on Blake in the Philadelphia Inquirer via the below link:
Two of my favorite thrillers, Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear and Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, take place in Istanbul, so I was interested in NPR's look at the Turkish city and its history of spies in fact and fiction.
Headlines today in Turkey feature stories of alleged Iranian spies, gathering information about Kurdish militants who are responsible for many deaths in Turkey this summer.
But these tales of deception and intrigue pale in comparison with the city's storied past as a mecca for spies. Turkey's golden age of espionage was World War II, a period that continues to serves as a muse for writers of historical thrillers.
You can listen the NPR broadcast and read the story via the below link:
Jeff Stein offers a brief history of the real story behind John le Carre's spy novel, which was made into a classic miniseries and is now a feature film starring Gary Oldman.
Stein's piece in the Washington Post covers the Cambridge spy ring, a group of British men who spied for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Included in the ring was a senior British Secret Intelligence Service officer named Kim Philby (seen in the above photo).
But for two-plus hours, moviegoers — especially those born after the last hammer and sickle flew from the Kremlin in 1991 — might wonder what all the fuss was about.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Will Stewart at the British newspaper the Daily Mail reports that the British spy and traitor Kim Philby is getting the hero treatment in a new book being published in Russia.
Kim Philby has been praised as "one of the greatest Soviet spies" by Russia's secret service.
The man whose treachery led to the deaths of many British agents is being eulogised in a book and in a TV documentary in a push to make him a hero to a new generation of Russians.
Philby was part of a ring of Cambridge-educated British agents which also included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt who passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and at least into the early 1950s.
You can read the rest of the story via the below link:
The British newspaper The Guardian reports that British spy and traitor Kim Philby was disillusioned by communism and his personal failures at the end of his life.
Philby, according to his Russian wife, drank heavy and expressed his disappointment with communism as the defector ended his days in the Soviet Union. Philby died in 1988 before the fall of the Soviet Union, so he died not knowing that he spied for the losing side.
You can read the newspaper story via the below link:
Paul Davis is a writer who covers crime. He has written extensively about organized crime, cybercrime, street crime, white collar crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, the military, espionage and terrorism. He is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and Counterterrorism magazine, and he writes the magazine's online 'Threatcon' column. His 'Crime Beat' column, which covers crime news, crime issues and crime prevention in South Philadelphia, appears weekly in the South Philly Review, and his 'On Crime' column, which covers crime in the Greater Philadelphia region, appears weekly at Philly Daily and Broad and Liberty. His crime fiction appears in American Crime Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Weekly and other publications. As a writer, he has attended police academy training, gone out on patrol with police officers, accompanied detectives as they worked cases, accompanied narcotics officers on drug raids, observed criminal court proceedings, visited jails and prisons, and covered street riots, mob wars and murder investigations. He has interviewed police commissioners and chiefs, FBI, DEA, HSI and other federal special agents, prosecutors, judges, public officials, WWII UDT frogmen, Navy SEALs, Army Delta operators, Israeli commandos, military intelligence officers, Scotland Yard detectives, CIA officers, former KGB officers, film and TV actors, film writers, directors and producers, journalists, novelists and true crime authors, gamblers, outlaw bikers, and Cosa Nostra organized crime bosses. Paul Davis has been a student of crime since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970. He served aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War and he later served two years aboard the Navy harbor tugboat U.S.S. Saugus at the U.S. floating nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland. He went on to become the civilian administrative officer of a Defense Department command in Philadelphia, where he oversaw security, safety and other programs for the command's military and civilian employees, and served as an investigating officer, while working part-time as a newspaper crime reporter and columnist. He retired in 2007 after more than 37 Navy/DOD years of service and became a full-time writer. From 1991 to 2005 he was a producer and on-air host of "Inside Government," a public affairs interview radio program that aired on Sunday mornings on WPEN AM and WMGK FM in the Philadelphia area. You can read Paul Davis' crime columns, crime fiction, book reviews and news and feature articles on this website. You can read his full bio by clicking on the above photo (by Brittany Davis-Pearson). And you can contact Paul Davis at pauldavisoncrime@aol.com.
