The smile that hides a traitor’s misery
At first glance, it looks like an official news photograph from yesteryear. The figure in the middle is perhaps a politician, visiting a dreary industrial complex, his secretary holding some flowers presented to her by the plant’s management.
But look closely again, especially at that central figure. Unlike the other men, he is not wearing a suit, but a jacket in Prince of Wales check. His smile is uncertain, and his features, softer than those of the men around him, suggest that he is a foreigner.
He most certainly was a long way from home, as the Bratsk hydroelectric station in Siberia is 3,782 miles from London. When the picture was taken, in the summer of 1972, he had not been home for more than a decade, and, at the age of 60, knew that he was unlikely ever to return.
The reason was simple: he was a traitor, the worst the United Kingdom has produced for at least a century – and perhaps the worst ever. In his adopted home of the Soviet Union, he called himself Andrei Fedorovich Fyodorov, whereas the world knew him better by a name that continues both to repel and to fascinate – Kim Philby.
These never-before-published pictures show him on honeymoon in Siberia with his Russian wife Rufina – and two KGB minders.
“Glimpses of Philby’s life after defection are unusual, and are read like tea leaves by espionage historians,” says Jeremy Duns, the spy writer and historian. “These photos are a final glimpse of his ‘normal life’ behind the Iron Curtain before he went into a far darker place.”
They come from a collection of three photograph albums that Rufina sold after Philby’s death in 1988 and were bought at auction from Sotheby’s in July 1994. They are now in the possession of Philip Eastwood, an espionage enthusiast and expert on the works of the author Desmond Bagley, who runs a website called bagleysrunningblind.info.
“It is well documented that Philby did not cope with his life in Moscow too well,” says Mr Eastwood. “These images show he was obviously treated with some kind of reverence, but perhaps he did not find that as fulfilling as his multifaceted career.”
Philby did indeed have a multifaceted and glittering career.
Before he fled to Moscow from Beirut in January 1963, he had assisted victims of Nazi persecution in Vienna; reported for The Daily Telegraph and The Times; been decorated by General Franco himself after surviving a republican artillery strike during the Spanish Civil War; and worked for the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, before finally joining MI6, where he earned an OBE and became the senior liaison officer with the CIA.
But for most of this time, Philby’s loyalties lay with the Soviet Union, to which he supplied an enormous amount of the most highly sensitive material. Although it is impossible to provide a figure, many agents lost their lives through the treachery of a man who insisted on remaining true to a Marxist ideal that was irrevocably corrupted, and now smelled more of the gulag than revolutionary fervour.
In 1951, Philby resigned from MI6 under a cloud of suspicion that was largely due to his association with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had fled to Moscow that May. Philby insisted he was no traitor, and with an absence of evidence, Harold Macmillan, the foreign secretary, found himself on the floor of the House of Commons in October 1955 having to declare that Philby was not “the so-called ‘Third Man’, if indeed there was one”.
Just over seven years later, realising that the net had finally closed in, Philby informed his Soviet masters that he needed to come in from the cold. In July 1963, the Russians admitted that Philby was now a citizen of the Soviet Union.
When he defected, Philby was 51, and he found it hard to adjust to life in Moscow. Not only was his Russian halting, but he had little to do. Contrary to popular belief and his own expectations, he was received not with open arms, but with suspicion. He could, after all, in the paranoid minds of his Slavic spymasters, have been a triple agent.
Philby spent his days composing memos and gathering recollections that he thought would be valuable for those in the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. His efforts were ignored. Although he was paid a decent salary of 500 roubles per month, and provided with a good apartment, what Philby wanted was respect and attention. He got little of the former, and much of the latter, but only from those who followed him he would often immerse himself in whatever alcohol he could find. “I was never far from tears in that first period of my life with Kim,” Rufina recalled in her book The Private Life of Kim Philby.