4.1 out of 5 stars. After Donald Maclean fled to Moscow to escape arrest in Britain as the spy who, for 15 years, had passed state secrets to the Soviet Union, friends of his wife, Melinda, found it easy to believe that she knew nothing of her husbands treachery. Were you always aware that your family had this extraordinary history? The controversial civil rights leader was gunned down in front of his wife and children while making a speech in New York. She also helped find homes for Kindertransport children and during the Second World War helped set up the British Restaurants for people who had been bombed in the Blitz. 1933Leaves Cambridge a convinced Communist. I remember Kims words: I have followed exactly the same line the whole of my adult life. A large amount of the letters in the book are lifted verbatim from those. Aileen and the children also moved to America and the Philby's took a spacious, ramshackle two-storeyed place at 4100 Nebraska Avenue. Is it time Harry & Meghan accept Clarkson's apology and move on? Kim Philby drank while Guy Burgess, who was gay, missed his friends in London, including Anthony Blunt whose spying activities, though known to the government, were kept under wraps until they. But I had to find the right way to approach it. There, a tall man in a blue suit and red bow-tie held out his hand and said: I am Donald Maclean. With him in the room was Guy Burgess. "If he continued drinking, he got inebriated quickly and changed in front of your eyes," she said. But even then, having made calculated decisions based on deeply-felt political ideals, I still dont think he would have done things any differently. Published by Charlotte Philby on 12th June 2018. Required to take new names and identities, Maclean chose to be Mark Petrovich Frazer (after the Cambridge anthropologist Sir James Frazer of Golden Bough fame, a 12-volume study of mythology and religion). And it is to these that my mind turns as I make my way from my hotel, across Red Square, the following day towards Kims flat, following the route marked out in pencil on a rather vague map drawn up from the combined memories of various family members, none of whom has been here in more than 20 years. In his own words: I am really two people. Her mood changed, though, with Stalins death in March 1953 and the prospect that the Soviet Union might now become a more open place. In this article for The Independent Magazine, I returned to Moscow to discover the truth about my grandfather, the infamous Third Man. He never promised to give up, but once, completely unexpectedly, he suddenly said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to lose you, I'm not going to drink any more.' She cashed a substantial cheque, bought her toddler daughter some new clothes and settled an outstanding garage bill. One can hardly overlook the irony of a man who so resolutely betrayed his country, surrounding himself in his Soviet apartment with British condiments, newspapers and light-hearted English classics. Everything has seen better days. Philby was a chap. Death. The spy novelist, whose latest book tells the story of her grandfather Kim Philby and the Soviet agent Edith Tudor-Hart, talks about the perils of writing about family, and why female spies get overlooked. My second novel is The Times' Book of the Month for July 2020, Chapman Pincher: The Spy-Catcher of Fleet Street, Edith Tudor-Hart: The grandmother of the Cambridge Spies, John le Carr: The writer who made me want to write, ELLE: An unexpected friendship with the other woman. His wife Eleanor joined him in Moscow, and the Philbys and the Macleans spent a lot of time together, going to the ballet or just having dinner and playing bridge. Two years later he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Macleans study resembled that of a Cambridge professor, with copies of Trollope, biographies of Gladstone and airmail editions of The Times. Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. During our stay, more mourners piled in, their cries and moans ricocheting off the walls. Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview. In 1951, Kim tipped off his fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean that Britain had caught wind of Macleans spying activities and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Many of the street names have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 1912Harold Adrian Russell Kim Philby is born on 1 January in Amballa, India, the son of Dora and St John. He became more optimistic once the family was deemed fully rehabilitated and they moved to Moscow in 1955. When you look at the way Edith is referred to in the [security services] files as that foreign woman, I wonder whether theres a sense of embarrassment too. Later arrives in Russia. Inside, however, the lift is as temperamental as it ever was, so I make the journey to his flat by foot, instantly recognising the strange studded-leather front door as I emerge from the stairwell. 1929Enters Trinity College, Cambridge. Image: Barney Beech, Kim's graveside, at Kuntsovo Cemetry. Kim Philbys granddaughter describes memories of her grandfather. How? 1944Appointed head of Section IX, newly formed to operate against Communism and the Soviet Union. Philby died in the city in 1988, 25 years after defecting to the Soviet Union, where he was employed as an occasional consultant to the KGB helping to prepare spies for missions to the west. Aileen died in 1957, when Tommy was just 11 years old; his contact with his father was cut off as soon as the double spy defected to the USSR in January 1963. But no matter; allowing myself plenty of time to get lost, Im soon heading towards the apartment where my grandfather lived out the final 25 years of his life under the watchful eye of Moscow and where his widow Rufa is currently preparing an enormous spread for our afternoon tea. children: John David Philby Josephine F. Philby Dudley Thomas Philby Miranda Philby Harry George Philby Birth. He wasnt one to care what others thought: Never be boring, and dont be afraid of offending people was one of the last things he told me before he died. It's Mr (coffee) Bean! Donald Maclean pictured in his teens whilst at Gresham School - he fell for Melinda the moment he met her among the bohemian set he socialised with in Paris, Donald Maclean Soviet was Third Secretary in Paris for the British Embassy and stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in the back row, (second from the right), Donald Maclean (arrowed in the second rank) taking part in an anti-war march in Cambridge in 1933. Melinda translated Russian stories into English for the weekly English paper, Moscow News. And here he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. I remember at the time feeling that something very dark was happening and that I didnt feel safe. But as the months turned into years and no word came from him, she sank into depression at the realisation that she was now bringing up their children alone. 1951Tips off fellow Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. JOHN Philby, the eldest son of Soviet spy Kim Philby, who was a double agent and the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, has died in England. Here, surrounded by an extensive library, he would sit for hours. Takes charge of British intelligence in Spain and Portugal. While working as a senior member of British intelligence, he spied on behalf of the Soviet KGB and NKVD from the early 1930s until 1963, when he defected to Moscow. But at the famous Secret Trial in 1952, he convinced his MI5 interrogator Buster Milmo that he was not a Soviet agent. But such treatment did not last and they were quickly dispatched to the closed city of Kuybyshev, 600 miles east of Moscow far away, they were told, from British assassination squads. He passed over 900 British documents to the KGB. John Philby, who has died aged 65, was the eldest son of the Russian spy Kim Philby, unmasked in 1963 as a double agent and the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s. Macmillan was, of course, Prime Minister by 1962, when the Soviet double agent George Blake was caught, and Kim could no longer hide the truth. Then they boarded what was described as a small military-type aircraft which flew them to Moscow to be reunited with Donald. One of Kims old KGB comrades, whom Id been in contact with during the course of my research for this article, told me that a gang of five or six of Kims former colleagues still meet up every month and raise a toast in his honour. A retired CIA agent was once asked what he would say to Kim Philby, an MI5 agent who spied for Joseph Stalin, if he encountered the defector in Moscow. It was seeing those photos as a six-year-old child which helped first alert me to the fact that there was something a bit different about grandpa Kimsky. 1940Recruited by British Secret Services and attached to the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) under Guy Burgess. Because hed told her from the very start. 1963Disappears in Beirut on 23 January. Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.. Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott. Kims library, which he had shipped over soon after he emerged in the Soviet Union, is testimony to his complexities and to his contradictions: across four walls of bookshelves, Russian classics and key Communist texts stand side by side with Raymond Chandler and PG Wodehouse novels; there are 19 volumes of Cambridge Modern History and a Sherlock Holmes scrapbook. But they were quasi-spy novels so I ended up talking about them in relation to his story anyway. When her brother-in-law, Alan Maclean, asked her whether she would join Donald if she knew for sure that he was behind the Iron Curtain, she gave a firm No. After all, they won the war.'". As Kims former KGB colleague also reiterated on the phone: Kim was a Communist idealist. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. He got himself a job teaching English in a school. Philby lives in Bristol with her husband and three children. He got drunk and roamed Kuybyshev looking for action, on one occasion having his teeth knocked out in a brawl. But I dont think my grandfather ever questioned a single decision he made. Hed been worried about leaving her and their children to carry on without him, but shed given him the all-clear to go. Its my third day in Russia. He died in 1983 at the age of 69, recording beforehand that I do not at all regret having done what seemed and still seems to me my duty. Slowly but surely, he was turning himself into one of the most cunning and treacherous double agents of all time. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow, avoiding capture, Kim was the chief suspect for having given them the heads-up. As Kim told my mother when she asked him if he felt any remorse, he believed he was a soldier, fighting a bloody war in the bloodiest century in history. Best thrillers for July 2021, The Times. No doubt your grandfather would have disapproved of the sharp contrasts in present-day Russia, he said. Charlotte Philby. He would say we and our when speaking of the Soviet Union and defended his adopted countrys brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 an event that disgusted many Left-wing supporters back in the UK. The spy who loved us: what Kim Philby's personal letters revealed about his mind The double-agent's granddaughter, Charlotte Philby, on the correspondence of a man who betrayed his country. Exposure showed me along with William Boyds Restless how you can write a novel that is ostensibly a spy story but is really about the people, and the families, at the heart of a great betrayal. And in 1951, as his spying activities unravelled and his Soviet masters told him to defect, she agreed the best course of action was for him to be ex-filtrated rather than try to brazen out the accusations of treachery that were soon to be levelled at him. She flew to New York to see her daughter Annie, and it was there that several letters arrived from Philby. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Kim Philby in Russia in 1968, five years after defecting. He was 76. Perhaps its too early to judge; after all, Communism, according to its followers, is the final epoch, inevitable only once all other systems have eaten themselves which, of course, they will. Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 - 11 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer who worked as a spy for the Soviet Union, before defecting in 1963. Her fourth novel, Edith and Kim, tells the linked stories of her grandfather and Edith Tudor-Hart, a Jewish photojournalist born in Vienna, who studied at the Bauhaus, married an Englishman, worked as a Soviet agent in London and introduced Kim to his Russian handler. Fergie is horrified that [Donald] might have done something wrong at the office and the FO will be very angry when he returns. Recently I found a paparazzo shot of my dad with a suitcase getting into a car and me, aged five, looking into the camera, and I had this moment of recognition. At the sight of our car, the men leap from their posts, saluting and buzzing the electric gates; one jumps into the front seat and calls out instructions as we roll off again. In Spain, reports the Civil War from General Francos side, and is awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco. Those are the facts but there are plenty of question marks too. She emphasised the strength and goodness of their fathers moral and political beliefs as a committed communist who wanted peaceful co-existence between East and West. Was he lamentable for still believing that a Communist state could ultimately exist, free from the corruption which plagues all systems, to the benefit of a fair, just society? All was reasonably well between them until Kim Philby the master-spy who recruited him back in their Cambridge days himself defected in 1963. For one thing, like all the men in the Philby family, he was bloody-minded. Did your father, John, talk about his father?We never had a family meeting where he said: Right, Im going to explain to you who your grandfather was. That was not at all the kind of person he was. He always knew what he was risking his family, his friends, his reputation and he made his choices accordingly. Writing Edith and Kim alongside home schooling and everything else has been a big thing and I feel now is a good time to pause and reflect. Eventually, Melinda went back to her home country, the U.S., bringing to an end nearly 40 years of endurance, loyalty and betrayal. When they had not returned on the Sunday night, her mother was frantic. Opposites attracted. "I said something to the escort and he just stayed silent, sitting, leafing through his magazine. birth date: 1912-01-01. birth place: Ambala. Occasionally, the driver would draw a curtain around the inside of the windows, and attach a flashing blue light to the roof before setting off. . . I think Ive spent so long having other people project their versions of my grandfather and my family on to me that writing about it is a way of trying to reclaim the story. An Indian Civil Service officer turned Arabist and explorer, he spent 20 years travelling across the desert on camelback charting Saudis unexplored Empty Quarter, crossing paths with Lawrence of Arabia, and eventually marrying a slave-girl given to him by his friend King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, to whom he spent many years as personal advisor. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. George Blake, who is still alive, got on well with him than with Philby. Melinda returned to Donald, but two years later moved to her own apartment. Standing on the balcony, you can see the same school playground, where children in heavy ski jackets are involved in a timeless game launching themselves from the top of a flight of concrete stairs to the ground below, cushioned with thick blankets of snow. The basic facts, after all, are well-documented. He travelled extensively, while also making his way up the ranks of the British intelligence services by 1944, Kim was appointed head of a newly formed anti-Soviet section, and was later sent to Washington where, as the top Secret Intelligence Service representative, he worked for several years in liaison with the CIA and FBI. Understandably, as a consequence, he is loathed by many. In those days, correspondence had to be sent to a PO Box; and in his reply, Kim would sign off under a special code name, Panina (a combination of Pa and Nina, the alias used for Kims wife). Rufina Pukhova, his Russian-Polish wife, said Philby struggled to control his drinking by downing only two glasses of cognac a night and then handing her the bottle to hide. Given a heros burial in Moscows Kuntsevo Cemetery. I am going to England in July for a Filby reunion at the town Filby. The fight against Fascism and the fight against imperialism were fundamentally the same fight.. He worked as a journalist until 1940, when Guy . He married Litzi Friedman, a fellow activist and an Austrian Jew, to help her escape persecution. The Philby talent for putting on an act has been inherited by Charlotte, in a sense: she worked in theatre as a child, training with Anna Scher, whose radical Islington theatre group has spotted such talent as Kathy Burke and Phil Daniels. But so it was. In her article, published yesterday in British daily The Independent, she describes Kim Philby as a proud man, and one who chose to publicly stand by his actions. But he also did it to impress her. And perhaps he felt that he certainly resented having to be escorted pretty much wherever he went for his first years in Moscow, as Rufa attests. Over the years he did everything that was asked of him: he gave everything he had to the cause, and yet still Moscow was deeply suspicious of a man who has been described as their finest and most loyal servant. In the capital, he became a magazine correspondent, then a teacher and analyst in a research institute for foreign and economic affairs. Amnesia in Literature and Film In his diary for the London Review of Books, Bennett wrote: Philby does seem to have been responsible for the betrayal and presumed torture and death of a network of agents in a way thats never been proved of Blunt. Entering through the front doors and under a rickety, freestanding metal detector, its like walking through a time-warp. Theirs had always been a stormy marriage, punctuated by bad behaviour on both sides and terrible rows. As I step in from the balcony, my eyes settle on a single point. 1941Transferred to SIS Iberian sub-section. Philby, though, began seeing Melinda on the side, confessing as much to his wife and saying that he was just trying to make [Melindas] life happier as she had been miserable for the last 15 years. The first reports that Russia ranks 143rd in a list of the worlds freest economies, just one spot higher than countries with repressed economies like Vietnam, Ecuador, Belarus and Ukraine, while the next tells how oligarch Roman Abramovich, whose wealth is valued at 7 billion, has just snapped up 35 notable artworks to decorate his 560ft private yacht. Kim even duped his own children, and left them behind when he fled to Moscow. In a secluded area next to the domed restaurant (one of Kims favourites), the dimly lit bar is serviced by grey-skinned waiters; faux-marble columns run between clusters of heavy red and gold chairs, frequented by groups of men in out-dated suits, briefcases and thick-rimmed glasses, knocking back glasses of vodka, under a thick circle of cigarette smoke. The pair returned to England in May and, by this point already an appointed Soviet agent, Kim found work as a foreign correspondent. Having secured Kims first meeting with the Western press since his arrival in Moscow, Sayle says he finds him a courteous man [who] smiles a great deal, and his well-cut grey hair and ruddy complexion suggests vitality and enjoyment of life. Kim sacrificed everything he had: he risked his life and the lives of others, he betrayed his colleagues and duped his family and friends (even spying on his own father at one stage, as will be explained shortly) because he genuinely believed from the point when he joined the movement and set his sights against the seemingly irrepressible rise of Fascism that Communism was a cause worth holding dear above all else. Doubtless Jeremiah faced similar problems.. I love those images of him as a real person; for me, thats where the clues as to who he really was can be found. 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