DAY OF RECKONING FOR THIRD MAN PHILBY
Born in India, educated among Bedouins in the desert and later at some of Britain’s greatest schools, Harold Adrian Russell Philby had an incredible life.
His father, who converted to Islam, saw fit to send him to live in the Arabian Desert for a while, to make him a man.
Later, nicknamed Kim after the Rudyard Kipling character, he studied at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and grew up in the very heart of posh, privileged England. But he would gain fame, or infamy, for secretly working for the other side, and it was on July 1, 1963, that Kim Philby was finally exposed as the Third Man.
Along with Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, his double- dealing probably should have been spotted much earlier.
In January of that year, Philby hadn’t turned up to meet his wife for a Beirut dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary of the British Embassy.
He claimed he left for Odessa on a cargo ship, but others reckon he made off through Syria, overland to Armenia and Russia. When his spying became public in July, the Soviets waited till the end of the month before announcing he had been granted political asylum in the USSR – and given Soviet citizenship.
Needless to say, there was shock and outrage in the West, and MI6 took it in the neck.
Some have guessed that they actually allowed him to escape, so they could avoid a deeply embarrassing trial in public.
Philby had once used his covert skills for better causes, having sneaked money and support to refugees from the Nazis. He had been inspired by the first of his four wives, Litzi Friedmann, a young Austrian Communist with Hungarian roots.
The World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, which they were involved with, was a front run by German Communist Willi Munzenberg, who had fled to France in 1933.
At the cemetery in the district of Kuntsevo, you’ll find the last resting place of Ramon Mercader, who murdered Leon Trotsky with an ice axe, Mark Naimark, a great Soviet mathematician, and Philby.
Never given free rein to do the work he really wanted to because Stalin was wary of him, in the end they did treat him as a hero.
Philby’s face even appeared on Soviet stamps and if Russians go to the cemetery to pay their respects, you won’t find many Britons doing likewise. No one knows quite how many died because of his treachery.