The Spy Who Betrayed MI6 from the Inside

0:01 Welcome back, everybody. Today's story is going to be the double agent, Kim Filby. Before we get to Kim Filby, what I wanted to promote a little bit is my new book, Dog Psychology, which you can get at Amazon on Kindle and paperback. And if you ever wondered why your dog does certain things or how to work with your dog and train your dog and understand the dog mind, then Dog Psychology by Dr. Carlos is the book for you.

0:24 All right, let's go to the enigmatic betrayal, the double life of Kim Filby. The reason I brought this podcast up is because there was a great show on Prime called Spies Among Friends, and there was a great story about Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby. Some of it is not accurate, which is what they tell you ahead of time anyway, but it was still a great spy show.

0:47 I think it's six episodes, about an hour apiece. So Harold Philby, known to the world as Kim, was born on January 1, 1912, in Ambala, India, under the shadow of the British Raj, his father, the renowned explorer Harry St. John Philby instilled in young Kim a fascination with Asia, but it was the turbulent interwar years that forged his path as one of history's most notorious double agents. Philby was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Philby emerges a brilliant but restless intellect. He was drawn to leftist causes amid the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1933, a formative trip to Vienna exposed Philby to the brutal suppression of socialists During the Australian Civil War, he married

1:32 a woman by the name of Litzy Friedman, an Austrian communist firebrand 20 years his younger, in a hasty union that facilitated his escape. But that wasn't it. This clandestine marriage, rarely discussed in biographies, marked the inception of his covert existence. You see, back in London, Philby was recruited by Soviet agent Arnold Deutsch in a dimly lit rendezvous orchestrated by his wife, Friedman herself. By the 1930s, Philby had infiltrated the British establishment, suggesting fellow Cambridge graduates for Soviet recruitment, thus birthing the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring. His audacious foray into the Spanish Civil War as a freelance journalist for the time concealed a darker mandate, which was to

2:15 assassinate General Franco. Lacking the resolve for direct action, Philby instead survived the Republican shell explosion in 1937 that obliterated his car and fellow reporters. but it earned him an unlikely medal from Franco and an entree to fascists in his circles. The near-death episode, coupled with a fleeting affair with pro-Hitler aristocrat Francis Doble, revealed his chameleon-like contradictions in character.

2:43 Philby's ascent in MI6 during World War II was meteoric and ironic. In 1944, he was appointed head of Section 9, the anti-communist division, a position from which he sabotaged operations... In Albania, he dispatched British agents to certain doom, betraying them to Soviet handlers without remorse. A lesser-known narrow escape in 1945 when he neutralized the threat of defector Konstantin Volkov, who held most secrets that could have unmasked the ring by ensuring Volkov's swift rendition to Moscow. Suspicions mounted in 1951 after colleagues Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean defected, prompted by Philby's cryptic telegram. urging Burgess to move his convertible.

3:28 Cleared by a British inquiry and astonishing lapse in vigilance, Philby resumed duties in Beirut, where there he married an American by the name of Eleanor Brewer, amid another affair. Yet in 1963, cornered by mounting evidence, he fled to Moscow, leaving behind a trail of shattered lives, including five children from his bigamous union with Eileen First. In the Soviet Union...

3:51 Philby indulged in heavy drinking and further entanglements, notably an affair with Melinda McLean. That's right, the wife of his former comrade. Even his handlers grew weary. Elena Morshkinskaya, a Soviet intelligence chief, long suspected of him being a triple agent loyal to Britain due to his uncanny successes. Philby died eventually as a disillusioned figure in Drab, Moscow, flat in 1988. His legacy is a testament to ideological fervor's corrosive toll. And that's the story of Kim Philby, at least part of it. It's a big story. There's a lot of books out there that cover much more than we covered today. I just wanted to give you a brief story for your week to enjoy. And that's it for now.