This interesting thread has disappeared from the Forums so I thought of bringing it back here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/histori...y_harold.shtml

My weirdest find so far has to be Kim Philby, senior officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) for ten years, but was actually an agent of the Soviet KGB.



Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby (1912 - 1988)

Best Known As: British "Master Spy" and Soviet double-agent

Philby was the son of the famous Arabist St John Philby, and was born in India, where his father was serving as a magistrate.

He was recruited to the KGB while still a student at Cambridge, and along with other KGB recruits - Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt - from the same university, eventually became infamous as a member of 'the Cambridge spy ring'.

In the 1940s they began working for British intelligence, and Philby rose in the ranks to be a respected member of the intelligence community.

Philby betrays the most intimate Anglo-American secrets of state to Moscow, including the top secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Thanks in no small measure to Philby, a network of Soviet spies gradually infiiltrates the Manhattan project supplying the Soviet Union with the most intimate details of the atom bomb.

The most urgent appeals and secret memoranda sent to the British government from German conspirators such as Carl Goerdeler never reach their intended destination because Philby has intercepted and destroyed their conspiracy papers. Philby's mission on behalf of the Soviet Union is to block or sabotage from his position as intelligence overlord any possible contact between the German conspirators and the British government.


In 1951, under suspicion of being double agents, Burgess and Maclean disappeared, surfacing in Russia in 1956 as defectors. Philby was questioned and accused of being "the Third Man," the one who warned Burgess and Maclean to flee as investigations closed in, but he was never officially charged. In 1963 Philby defected to the Soviet Union, and in his 1968 book My Silent War he claimed to have been a "double-agent" for the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, for nearly two decades. He lived the rest of his life in Russia, where he died in 1988, a recipient of the Order of Lenin and an official Soviet hero.


http://www.who2.com/kimphilby.html

http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Philby.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSphilby.htm

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