The Philby files

by Genrikh Aviėzerovich Borovik

Kim Philby's secret life is far stranger than any spy fiction. Its outline is well known. Recruited by the Soviet KGB at Cambridge in the 1930s, he made his way into the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), where, after a brilliant wartime career, he became head of its anti-Soviet section, then liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and FBI - revealing everything he learned along the way to his Moscow bosses. He was in the running to become "C," chief of the British secret service, where the damage he could have done would have been incalculable. But following the defection of his fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in 1951, Philby found himself under a hazy but persistent cloud of suspicion, and he himself eventually fled in 1963, just steps ahead of capture. Before he died in Moscow in 1988, unrepentant and fulfilled, he had become a symbol in the West of Soviet-inspired treachery - an Englishman from a privileged background who had betrayed the entire free world.