Ghost Of British Master Spy And Traitor Kim Philby Returns To Cambridge

Neil Tweedie at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on the Cambridge Spies conference.

Give me the child and I’ll give you the man, said the Jesuits. The KGB, on the other hand, believed that indoctrination could wait until a little later in life. But there was no disagreement between the two regarding the best place to recruit spies. From the time of Elizabeth I, when Roman Catholic zealots plotted the Protestant queen’s downfall, to the 1930s, when it incubated the so-called Magnificent Five of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross, the University of Cambridge has been a breeding ground for treason and espionage.
 

This weekend, that tradition will be celebrated – if that is the right word – at the first-ever conference on the Cambridge Spies to be held in Cambridge. An audience of academics, laymen and intelligence officers will gather at Trinity College, which produced four of the five, to listen to Kim Philby lecture on the art of betrayal.
 

The most notorious traitor produced by Britain in the 20th century will speak from beyond the grave on a tape smuggled out of Russia to the West. In a recorded address to an audience of KGB officers, Philby, a long-term Soviet mole at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, instructs them in how to handle agents in the field. Speaking through an interpreter, the man who sent hundreds of agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain, even manages a joke or two.
 

“The most important thing the tape does is to provide a possible answer to the biggest unanswered question about Philby’s exile in Russia,” says Professor Christopher Andrew, Britain’s leading historian on intelligence and a keynote speaker at the conference. “Here is this man, a super hero, who even has his face on Soviet postage stamps, and yet he is denied the supreme honour of Hero of the Soviet Union, an award bestowed on KGB agents of much lesser significance. Why?”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/10786005/Ghost-of-master-spy-Kim-Philby-returns-to-Cambridge.html

Note: Ben Macintyre has a good book on the notorious spy coming out soon in the U.S. called A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal.

Kim Philby: The Man I Knew, By The Master Spy's Oldest Friend

Neil Tweedie and Michael Smith at the British newspaper the Telegraph offer a piece on the Kim Philby story, as told in a book by Tim Milne.

Harold Adrian Russell ''Kim’’ Philby was an adequate rather than spectacular cricketer as a pupil at Westminster School. When fielding, he was content to stand apart from the rest, observing events at a distance. His preferred position? Deep cover. So it would be for much of his adult life. 
 

The label often attaching to Philby, the most prominent member of the Cambridge Ring, is that of “master spy”, a description conveying ruthlessness, guile and charm. Britain’s most infamous Cold War traitor, whose betrayal resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of agents operating on the dark side of the Iron Curtain, possessed those qualities, certainly. But his charm was not simply of the synthetic kind and he commanded the affection and loyalty of friends, even as the awful truth of his clandestine career – a Soviet asset operating at the heart of British intelligence – became clear. 
 

Tim Milne was Philby’s closest associate in the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. A fellow pupil at Westminster, he was recruited into the secret world during the Second World War on the recommendation of his friend. In retirement, he wrote a memoir of his friendship with Philby, which was promptly banned from publication by MI6. Now, four years after Milne’s death at the age of 97, his story can be told. 
 

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy is an often-intimate portrait of the Third Man, candid in its assessments. Written without rancour – despite Philby’s attempt to blacken Milne’s name during interrogation – it charts the 37 years from first meeting at Westminster in 1925 to Philby’s escape from Lebanon to Russia. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/10669294/Kim-Philby-The-man-I-knew-by-the-master-spys-oldest-friend.html 

The Third Man: British Traitor And Spy Kim Philby Fled To Soviet Union 50 Years Ago Today

Neil Tweedie at the British newspaper the Telegraph wrote an interesting piece on the 50th anniversary of the defection of British Traitor and spy Kim Philby to the Soviet Union.

Fifty years ago tonight, as a fierce storm lashed Beirut, a lean, middle-aged man quietly closed the door of his flat, situated on a hill overlooking the city, and made his way down five flights of stairs into the darkness of the Rue Kantari. Checking to ensure he was not being followed, he walked quickly through streets awash with water to the port, and a waiting ship, the Dolmatova. The freighter hauled anchor the minute the man came aboard, heading out into the turbulent Mediterranean. The hammer and sickle flew from her stern; Odessa was her destination. After a quarter of a century in the shadows, Kim Philby was finally on his way to the spiritual home he had visited only in his thoughts.

The defection of Philby to the Soviet Union on January 23 1963 is one of the great dramatic moments of the Cold War. With his departure that night, the humiliation inflicted on Britain’s secret world by the Cambridge Spy Ring was almost complete. Nine years previously, Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, had stood in the House of Commons to declare that there was no evidence to suggest Philby was the so-called Third Man, who had helped the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to flee to Russia in 1951. But he was.

There was a Fourth Man, too – Anthony Blunt – and a Fifth, John Cairncross, who helped betray the secret of the atomic bomb. But Philby stands out as the archetypal traitor, the subject of admiration in MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, even as he sent agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9818727/Kim-Philby-Father-husband-traitor-spy.html