The man who sat in that room had spent years being two people at once. A British intelligence officer by day, a Soviet agent by night. But it was the people around him who paid the true price. And no one suffered more than the woman he married.
In June 1934, his first wife told him she had arranged a meeting with a man of decisive importance. She said nothing more. He went to Regent’s Park in London, where he met a man who called himself Otto. Otto was cultured, intelligent, and passionate about his hatred of London and his love of Paris.
He was looking for idealistic Brits to work for the Soviets. The young man agreed on the spot. He even suggested some of his colleagues for recruitment. Those men would become known as the Cambridge Five spy ring.
He was born in India during the British Raj, son of a famed explorer. He had graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and become a devoted activist. He helped refugees in Vienna and fell in love with a woman named Litzy Freriedman, unlike anyone he had met before. Their spark fizzled once everyday life settled in, and they separated not long after he became a Soviet agent.
They divorced years later. But by then, he had bigger things on his mind. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave him his first chance to be of use. He traveled to Seville and covered the conflict for The Times.
From Spain, he secretly sent intel to his Soviet handlers in Paris by writing loosely coded letters to a fake girlfriend. Eventually, his handler gave him a nearly impossible mission: take out General Franco. His handler met with him in London and reported back with a damning verdict. He was devoted and ready to sacrifice himself for the Soviet cause, but he was not an elite assassin.
He lacked the physical courage. The plan was shelved, and Franco lived on. Near the end of 1937, a Republican shell landed directly in front of his car and exploded. Four journalists were inside.
Only he survived. It was horrifying, but in a bizarre twist, it became exactly what he needed. Having survived an attack from the hated Republicans, he suddenly found himself rubbing elbows with Franco’s fascist elite. The secret communist had never had better intel to offer.
But something terrible was always waiting around the corner**. The Russians weren’t the only ones with double agents**. In 1938, a Soviet intelligence officer named Walter Kravitzki defected to France. He published an account of life in Stalin’s secret service, and he knew that Moscow had infiltrated Western institutions.
He also happened to know that a certain British journalist covering Spain was a Soviet agent. Philby seemed doomed. But before Kravitzki could implicate him, he turned up dead in a hotel in Washington, DC. Philby was safe, but for how long?
Soon after, his own handler, Alexander Olof, aka the Swede, defected too. He could have named him. But he understood the chilling consequences if he did. The outbreak of World War II gave Philby the chance to become the spy he’d spent years trying to be**.
He landed a job working for MI6, Britain’s top intelligence agency. Six years after meeting Otto, Moscow’s faith finally paid off. They had their mole**. Around the time he joined MI6, he moved in with a woman named Aileen Furse.
She didn’t know her husband was living a lie. Her own life would eventually be torn apart by it. Once he started working for British special operations, the Soviets suddenly saw value in him again. Their resident spy in London reconnected with him after years of silence, and he became a double agent in earnest.
He spent his days training British operatives while feeding information to Moscow. He did his job well**. As the war neared its conclusion, British intelligence became increasingly aware that the Russians could quickly go from ally to adversary**. In 1944, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service reactivated Section 9, a department with one goal: fighting communism.
And guess who they chose to lead it**. It’s nearly unbelievable. He joined the Soviet cause in 1934 as a nobody. Ten years later, he was leading the SIS’s anti-communism department.
Some in the agency found him suspicious**. Years earlier, a defector had claimed a British journalist in Spain was a double agent. His wife was a known communist. There were plenty of warning signs.
The SIS ignored them all. In August 1945, he received an assignment that must have sent a chill down his spine**. A Soviet agent named Constantine Volkov was defecting to Britain, claiming to have the names of three other agents working in Britain, one of whom worked for the SIS. His superiors told him to travel to Istanbul and deal with Volkov personally.
If only they’d known what they were doing**. He was in charge of getting those names out of Volkov while knowing full well that one of those names was his own. He had to neutralize him while looking completely uninvolved. It looked like the most dangerous mission of his life.
Then a bizarre twist came his way**. By the time he arrived in Istanbul, Volkov was already gone. Whisked off to Moscow, never to be seen again. By all accounts, British intelligence seemed to think he was doing an outstanding job.
In 1946, he earned the prestigious Order of the British Empire**. I can only imagine what went through his head when the medal was pinned to his chest. If he felt smug or triumphant, he didn’t have much time to celebrate. The SIS relocated him and his family to the United States**.
The new job offered a fresh start and a chance to provide new intel to the Russians. What he didn’t know was that his transfer to the US marked the beginning of the end**. Philby and the other Soviet agents lived on a razor’s edge**. Sooner or later, someone was bound to slip up**.
A careless mistake by a Russian clerk revealed crucial information to the Brits: a Soviet agent in the British embassy who went by the code name Homer met a handler in New York City twice a week. When Philby heard about the leak, he knew it was only a matter of time before his secrets came out. He knew exactly who the Soviet agent was: Donald Maclean**. That was a problem.
As a British agent, he should have passed that info along and had Maclean apprehended. As a Soviet agent, he had to protect him at all costs**. To make matters worse, Western intelligence apprehended several Soviet spies around this time. The walls were closing in**.
It seemed like things couldn’t get more dire. So, of course, they did**. As everything was falling apart, a man named Guy Burgess arrived in Washington. He’d been friends with Philby since college.
They had joined the Soviets together and both worked for British intelligence. The problem was Burgess was a drunkard and completely unstable. He could easily ruin everything. And in a way, that’s just what he did**.
Burgess made a name for himself in Washington for all the wrong reasons. His abrasive personality put off almost everyone. His constant drinking got him in trouble with the law numerous times. He stayed at the Philby household while he was there.
Not only did this infuriate his fragile wife Aileen, but it sent Kim down a dark path. Maybe the stress of the situation was finally starting to set in, but Philby and Burgess drank away their days as they tried to figure out what to do. Burgess was a complete wild card. He could compromise their position at any second**.
Then there was still Maclean to think of as the Brits closed in on him fast**. Finally, Philby came up with a desperate plan**. He’d send Burgess back to England where he would warn Maclean. Fortunately, he didn’t need to come up with a good excuse**.
Burgess got three speeding tickets in one day, and the British embassy sent him back to England out of embarrassment**. That part of the plan went well, but the rest was a total disaster**. The SIS was closing in on Maclean, and Burgess hadn’t yet gotten him out of England**. A desperate Philby sent Burgess a barely coded telegram telling him to move his convertible before it was too late.
And there was nothing more he could do**. Crisis averted, right? ** No. Not by a long shot**.
The plan was for Maclean to flee and for Burgess to stay in England. But Philby’s telegram must have spooked him. Now, two British diplomats, one strongly suspected of being a Soviet agent, had vanished and turned up in Moscow**. The other diplomat happened to be very close to Kim Philby, a high-ranking member of British intelligence**.
Let me tell you, that does not look good**. Philby had a lot of questions to answer. His superiors called him back to London. Surely now British intelligence caught on and realized he was the traitor, right?
** Of course not**. Philby vehemently denied all accusations that he was in cahoots with Burgess and Maclean, though he still resigned his position**. He lived to spy another day, but his troubles were far from over**. His once extravagant life went down the drain after Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow**.
Out of work, he and his family struggled to make ends meet, which made him turn to the bottle more and more**. Aileen’s mental illness only worsened, and she developed a serious drinking problem as well**. Their marriage fell apart, and they separated**. If you thought this was rock bottom, you’d be dead wrong**.
His wife left him. He struggled to find work. And to twist a knife, the Soviets, for whom he’d sacrificed everything, cast him aside**. He was of no use to them as a sporadically employed freelance journalist**.
But it wasn’t the end**. Not yet**. Believe it or not, after all that, the British government eventually announced that Philby was completely innocent of all suspicion**. They publicly exonerated him**.
Even crazier, he actually started working for them again**. They sent him to Beirut, where he would find a whole new world of intrigue waiting for him**. In Beirut, Philby embarked on yet another wild affair**, this time with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of an American journalist. Eventually, Eleanor left her husband and moved in with Philby.
They married and set themselves up in Beirut. But just like his last marriage, it would end in tragedy**. After so many close calls, Philby’s double life finally caught up with him in 1961**. A Soviet defector revealed what so many had suspected for so long: Philby had been working with the Russians the whole time**.
British intelligence sent word to Nicholas Elliot, an MI6 officer in Beirut and a close friend of Philby’s**. Elliot had believed in Philby’s innocence the entire time, and it was up to him to get Philby to confess**. By the time his secrets came to light, Philby was already a shell of a man**. He fell into a deep depression and drank almost every day**.
His wife recalled coming home one night to find him hopelessly drunk and incoherent with grief on the terrace. A fox had apparently fallen from the balcony,and Philby was inconsolable**. When Elliot arrived to confront him, he found the man in a similarly pathetic state**. Philby had stumbled and fallen into a radiator, cracking his skull**.
He was covered in bloody bandages, unable to stand**. Philby mumbled that he was half expecting to see his friend. As if he had known the end was nigh**. Elliot did not mince words**.
He spat: “I once looked up to you, Kim. My god, how I despise you now. I hope you have enough decency left to understand why. “** It was finally time to pay the piper**.
Philby admitted to everything, but when Elliot asked him to sign a written confession, he begged Elliot to delay the official interrogation**. They scheduled a meeting in late January. When the time came, Philby didn’t show up. Days earlier, he had vanished without a trace.
Months later, he finally surfaced again in Moscow**. Remarkably, Eleanor didn’t abandon her husband after his disgrace**. She visited him in Moscow and actually made plans to move there with him permanently, but they couldn’t salvage their marriage by that point**. They divorced soon after her second visit to Russia**.
In the end, it was for the best**. Kim Philby spent almost his entire life in service of the Soviet Union, but he faced a harsh reality when he finally found himself living there**. He thought he was a colonel in the KGB thanks to his years as a spy**. However, when he arrived, that wasn’t quite true**.
Instead, the Soviets treated him with suspicion and hostility in case he was secretly acting as a British spy**. The lack of accolades wasn’t what pained him the most**. As his final wife, Rufina Puga, wrote: “Philby saw how much the people of the USSR suffered,and it devastated him**. For years, he thought he was fighting the good fight**.
Yet he couldn’t claim life in the Soviet Union was better than back in Britain. “** Kim Philby lived out the rest of his days in the Soviet Union as a depressed alcoholic wreck**. He filled his days working with the KGB, ensuring that the propaganda they disseminated into England sounded properly and believably English**. By the end of his life in 1988, he had finally earned the Soviets trust,and they treated him like a national hero**.
His double life eventually destroyed him**. But his wife Aileen ended up suffering the darkest fate of all**. She had suffered from psychological episodes since she was young. Having a paranoid, hard-drinking husband certainly didn’t help**.
She had been coping with a mental illness for a time, but after a while, it finally became too much for her to bear**. In 1948, Aileen suffered her most disturbing episode yet**. She purposely injured herself, staged it to look like an accident,and injected herself with her own urine to cause grotesque skin disfigurations**. Philby sent her to a clinic to recover, but things didn’t get any better when she returned**.
She scolded herself on a charcoal stove soon after**. Aileen needed support,and Kim was not the man to provide it for her**. Though she eventually left him, it was too late to save her**. Her health never truly recovered,and she succumbed to illness just a few years later**.
She was only 46 years old**.
