A Look Back At The British Traitor And Spy Kim Philby

Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Hopkins at the British newspaper the Guardian offera piece on British traitor and spy Kim Philby.

We may think there is nothing whatsoever new to say about the Cambridge spy ring, that exotic group of five (mainly) elitist, public school-educated, individuals who spied for the Soviet Union, or Communism, as they would have preferred.

We may be wrong .

But a BBC 4 documentary, Storyville: The Spy Who Went Into the Cold – Kim Philby, Soviet Super Spy, to be broadcast on Monday,18 November, sheds some new light, and contains a new mystery, about the defection of the "Third Man", Kim Philby.

Philby was protected by former colleagues in MI6 up to the moment he jumped aboard a Soviet freighter in Beirut in January 1963.

Philby was suspected by MI5 and the Americans as being the Third Man who tipped off Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two other members of the Cambridge spy ring, that they were about to questioned.

The two fled to France and ended up in Moscow in 1961. Philby was publicly cleared of being the Third Man, partly because of lack of hard evidence, partly because of his friends in MI6.

However, suspicions, notably within MI5 and America's CIA and FBI, grew to the extent that even his friends in MI6 could no longer withstand them

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

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/defence-and-security-blog/2013/nov/14/mi6-mi5

How Kim Philby Infilrated MI6, With A Lot Of Help From His Friends

Richard Norton-Taylor and the Nick Hopkins at the British newspaper the Guardian offer a look at a new book on British traitor and spy Kim Philby.

So much has been written about Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring that people may be forgiven for thinking that's enough. They would be wrong.

There is so much, ranging from the exotic to the banal, which makes the story of the Cambridge spy ring of such perennial interest.

A new account shows how Kim Philby, the "third man" of the Ring of Five, came, partly by sheer luck, to head the counter intelligence branch of MI6 and ended up being responsible for co-ordinating British secret operations in the Soviet Union.

As Edward Harrison, author of The Young Kim Philby, published on 1 October by the University of Exeter Press, points out, this Soviet agent was at the heart of Britain's secret cold war.

How he got there is described in detail, some of it fresh, most of it very telling. It tells you as much as about the British establishment, as about Philby personally.

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/defence-and-security-blog/2012/sep/27/espionage-mi6