Kim Philby: Britain's Most Dangerous Spy Was Also A Terrible Human Being

In this episode, James is joined by Antonia Senior (author of Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire) to discuss Kim Philby, the most notorious member of the Cambridge Five spy ring, and explain how a Cambridge-educated British intelligence officer became one of the Soviet Union's most damaging Cold War agents.

From his privileged upbringing and communist radicalization to his recruitment by Soviet intelligence and rise inside MI6, the conversation challenges the popular image of Philby and the Cambridge Five as glamorous ideological rebels, arguing instead that these notorious spies were driven by a mixture of revolutionary zeal, personal ambition, narcissism, and moral indifference. The episode also explores the real-world consequences of Soviet espionage, including betrayed agents, failed intelligence operations, and Stalin's expansion across Eastern Europe after World War II.

Covered in this episode

• Kim Philby's early life in British India, his father St. John Philby, and his education at Trinity College, Cambridge.

• How the political climate of the 1930s and debates over fascism and communism influenced a generation of Cambridge students.

• Why the Cambridge Five understood the realities of Stalinism and cannot be dismissed as naïve anti-fascists.

• Philby's marriage to Litzi Friedman, his connections to Austrian communists, and his recruitment by Soviet agent Arnold Deutsch.

• The origins of the Cambridge Five and the recruitment of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross.

• Philby's activities during the Spanish Civil War, including allegations of his involvement in a plot to kill Francisco Franco.

• How World War II created unprecedented opportunities for Soviet penetration of British intelligence, MI5, MI6, SOE, and the Foreign Office.

• The extraordinary level of access enjoyed by the Cambridge Five, including British cabinet discussions, Churchill's briefings and Bletchley Park intelligence

• The Konstantin Volkov affair.

• Philby's role in Cold War intelligence failures, anti-Soviet operations in Eastern Europe, radio games, and missions into Poland, the Baltic States, Albania, and Georgia.

• Project Venona, the identification of Donald Maclean as the Soviet source codenamed Homer, and the dramatic defections of Maclean and Guy Burgess.

• Philby's final years in Beirut and Moscow, his deteriorating personal life, the collapse of his reputation, and his disillusioning experience inside the Soviet Union he had served for decades.

Mentioned in this episode

Kim Philby, Cambridge Five, Harold Adrian Russell Philby, St. John Philby, Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Trinity College Cambridge, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Cold War, Soviet Union, Communism, Fascism, Anti-Fascism, British Intelligence, MI5, MI6, NKVD, KGB, FSB, Antonia Senior, Stalin's Apostles, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Arnold Deutsch, Theodore Maly, Litzi Friedman, Edith Tudor Hart, Vienna, British India, Arabia, British People's Party, National Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco, The Times, World Federation for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism, William Norman Ewer, Daily Herald, Federated Press of America, Communist Party of Great Britain, Special Operations Executive, SOE, Operation Barbarossa, Operation Husky, Sicily, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Bletchley Park, Imperial Defence Committee, Konstantin Volkov, Stuart Menzies, Yuri Modin, Oleg Kalugin, Albania, Poland, Georgia, Baltic States, Lithuania, Eastern Europe, Soviet Expansion, Stalinism, Gulag, World Revolution, American Imperialism, Soviet Imperialism, Washington Embassy, CIA, Project Venona, Arlington Hall, Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, One-Time Pad Encryption, Homer, Cairo, Beirut, Nicholas Elliott, Peter Wright, Buster Milmo, Eileen Philby, Eleanor Brewer, Hungary 1956, Soviet Defectors, Double Agents, British Foreign Office, Intelligence Failures, History's Devils.

Chapters

00:00 The Traitor Who Helped Stalin Win Secrets

00:59 Who Was Kim Philby?

05:15 Family, Cambridge and Political Radicalization

09:26 Communism, Anti-Fascism and the Stalin Question

11:47 Arnold Deutsch and Soviet Recruitment

19:41 Spain, Franco and Philby's First Missions

23:30 Building the Cambridge Five Spy Network

28:53 World War II and Infiltrating British Intelligence

35:40 How the Cambridge Five Accessed Britain's Greatest Secrets

39:19 Konstantin Volkov and Philby's Deadliest Betrayal

46:27 Cold War Operations, Eastern Europe and Soviet Expansion

48:42 Project Venona, Donald Maclean and the Burgess Defection

59:08 Philby's Exposure, Escape to Moscow and Final Years

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History's Devils is a history podcast exploring the lives of murderers, charlatans, psychopaths, dictators, war criminals, tyrants, demagogues, revolutionaries, cult leaders, conquerors, fraudsters, and other controversial figures.

History's Devils is hosted by James Crossland, professor of international history and author of:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A well-educated and dashing young spy, entrusted with his nation's greatest secrets in a time of war. A traitor who became one of the most destructive double agents in modern history. This is the story of Kim Philby, a key member of the infamous Cambridge 5 Spy Ring, a group of bright young things who betrayed Britain by passing its military and political secrets to the Soviet Union, giving Joseph Stalin a head start in the clash between East and West that became known as the Cold War. Was Kim Philby a man of principle dedicated to the cause of world communism or a criminal adventurer who is out for himself? The answer's coming up in this week's episode of History's Devils. Our subject today is at least two of these things. In fact, he may well sweep the board and tickle the History's Devil's boxes. We'll we'll see by the end of the episode if he's a winner in that respect. We are talking about one of the most infamous spies of the 20th century. We're talking Kim Philby. We're talking about his career of betrayal. And I've got with me Antonia Sr., the author of a new book about the spy ring, of which Philby was such a crucial component. The book is Stalin's Apostles, The Cambridge Five, and the Making of the Soviet Empire. Antonio, welcome to History's Devils.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Thank you so much. And I don't want to preempt anything, but I think he's definitely, you know, close to a full sweep, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

But I'm thinking that. I'm thinking that. Stay tuned for more, listeners. Stay tuned for more. So I have to tell this story. About 10 years ago, I was at a uh historian history conference, and there's this guy up on the stage, whatever, and he's giving his paper and he's saying, I I really want to get to the crux of what motivated the Cambridge Five to become spies. And he was a he was a new researcher. And this very established professor, whose name I shall not mention in the front row, sort of raises his hand, very laconically goes, but we know it's already been done. There's nothing new here. What are you talking about, basically? And it was very funny and embarrassing. And it's one of these great moments in academia. And that was about 10 years ago. And we can talk all day about what that professor was getting at, which was this idea that these bright young things of the British establishment are corrupted by communism and go on to become these glamorous traitors. But in your book, you take uh, I think a really timely and important angle, which is to say, you know what, let's politics and ideology aside, sure, that's one thing, but let's get to the nub of the matter. These guys were reprehensible shithels. They were terrible human beings. And that alone gives us an insight into motivation. So just in terms of the, I guess that that is the starting point for your book, right? Let's talk a bit, uh, talk, talk more generally about your book and the sort of thrust of what you were trying to do there.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, I think part of the starting point of my book was I was so bored of that, that, that kind of idea of them, you know, this slightly glamorous, slightly roguish, slightly kind of, you know, fabulous guys doing fabulous things in London and fooling everybody. It's this kind of story of kind of pochos betraying other pochos, being protected by other pochos. And I just thought this is so kind of boring and reductive. And is this really the story? And I kind of my starting point was actually I wanted to think about the fact that also this had been kind of written as a sort of almost like a victimless crime, that the only thing they betrayed was their country, and for a long time it hasn't been a very fashionable thing to be patriotic anyway, so it didn't seem like a very big deal to do that. And I wanted, I was sort of thinking about well, who were their victims? You know, who actually, beyond the members of the Reform Club, was hurt by their betrayals, right? And actually, when you kind of turn it round and think, you know, well, well, what did Stalin want from these guys? What was Stalin's foreign policy objective? And therefore, who really suffered from the fact that all our greater secrets during the 17 years when they were spying from Stalin were being handed over to Stalin, and it wasn't the members of the Reform Club. You know, what Stalin managed to achieve in the 17 years these guys were spying for him was basically domination of half of Europe, and they helped in that endeavour. Uh, so I wanted to look at it from that angle. I wanted to kind of just move away a little bit from the sort of, you know, uh Ruper Everett languorously being in, you know, oh I could, I could, I could piss and moan all day about various depictions of these guys on screen.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Uh but but I won't. And and for the purposes of brevity and because I don't I just do not have the stamina for a five-part episode chronicling each of these bastards, I've I made the executive decision to focus today on Kim Philby because to my mind, he's very key. He's the first one of the five recruited. He goes on to bring two other members directly into the fold. And as a person, I don't know, maybe I've got this wrong, but he strikes me as the most sociopathic of the bunch. And that's saying something given how wretched the other four are. That's just my personal interpretation. Maybe, maybe we'll we'll come to a more nuanced appraisal, but I really don't like this guy. So, a few basic details on who Kim Philby is, where he comes from, and I think his origin is kind of important here. He is born Harold Adrian Russell Philby in Ambala, India in 1912. He clearly didn't like any of those names because he goes on to be known as Kim. The name Kim is interesting because it says a lot about the type of environment Philby was raised in. His father, St. John Philby, was a typical Victorian adventurer, intelligence officer, did a lot of work in Arabia and British India. And the name Kim, by which his son comes to be known, is lifted from the Rudyard Kipling novel Kim, which tells the story of intrepid, dashing British spies risking life and limb against the horrible Russians in British India and Central Asia. So the bottom line is the young Harold Adrian Russell was born into this sort of windswept and interesting life of his father in many respects, tied to that culture of Victorian adventurism and the British intelligence community. As a side note, I find this fascinating that St. John Philby is a political yo-yo. In addition to being this sort of passionate Arabist who's enamored of Islam and into socialism as a young man, by the 1930s, he takes a bit of a turn, doesn't he, to the uh to the right and starts joining the anti-Semitic British People's Party uh standing as elections for as a candidate.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah, he's one of the very few people to actually be locked up for being a hardcore fascist by the British when the war opens. Which is saying something. Yeah. And he also he has uh like he marries a kind of five foot two, sixteen-year-old slave girl at one point. I mean, he's quite a colourful character. He's a he's a he is also a horrible character, right? You know, he's he terrorizes his family in quite a kind of uh a profound way. But yeah, I think it's his anti-Semitism that leads him to National Socialism. I think he's one of those guys who reads the socialism in National Socialism and allows himself to believe in it there because he can get there by his hatred of Jews. So yeah, he's just all round pretty horrific.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Recognizable type. And uh yeah, I I I think it's fair to say that there m there's got to be some impact on young Kim from that. Um, as to his education, which is always the important sort of origin point of this story, uh Kim Philby is educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He studies history and economics. He graduates in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany. We're what, five years or so on, give or take, from Joseph Stalin consolidating his rule in the Soviet Union. So we got these two established blocks of extremist ideologies, fascism and communism, in Europe at this time. Kim shows some curiosity about communism at Cambridge, but it's not really until he graduates that he he goes full red, as they say, uh starts attending socialist activist meetings. And by the mid-1930s, he's involved in anti-fascism groups. And I think it's worth noting that this is something that draws a lot of people into communism at this time, is that it is obviously the ideological antithesis to fascism. So it's it's anti-fascists going communists out of a hatred of fascism, is a big draw for a lot of people. And Philby seems to be one of these guys. He he ends up in Vienna in 1934 working for a communist group called the World Federation for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism, which is very un not catchy and try to acronym that. But they help refugees from Nazi Germany. He falls in love with a fellow anti-fascist, uh Litzy Friedman. They marry in 34. That does not last long. Split by like the late 30s, I think. It's 37. Doesn't last long. But again, it's that thing of these two idealistic young people uh doing right for the world and striking back against the darkness of fascism, falling in love. That's one way to look at it, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Yeah, I kind of I I mean, I I I push back a little against this. So in the continent, there were, you know, politics had become quite radical. You know, you that these these really did seem to be the only two options. But in Britain, the membership of both fascist and communist parties were actually very small in the 30s, right? And there was a very strong tradition in Britain of a socialism that engaged with democracy, a socialism that wasn't revolutionary in intent, and it was entirely an option, right? So these young Cambridge graduates, yes, I agree, and I give them some credit for their violent anti-fascism, and I understand that that was a strong motivation factor. But I also think that this argument that they didn't really know about the horrors of Stalinism when they signed up to it is also complete bollocks, right? Because if you look around in the 1930s, everything was known about Stalinism. You know, that we knew about the famines, we knew about the terror, we knew about um de-kulakisation, we knew about the cost of industrialisation, we knew about slavery in the gulag. It's just that during the war, we set out to forget all of these crimes, and then in the 19 sort of late 1940s, early 1950s, we rediscovered them as if for the first time, right? But in the 30s, it was entirely possible to see exactly what Stalinism was. And it was okay, so maybe you had to work a bit harder to find the information. But I my argument is that if you've agreed to spy for a country, the least you can do is pick up a fucking book on it or read a newspaper.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Um particularly if you're a Cambridge educated graduate. I mean, you would think, you know, reading reading a book doing your research should just come naturally, like breathing in and out, you would hope.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

You would, but so that's my contention is they knew they didn't care, right? They were revolutionaries, they wanted revolution, they wanted it to be bloody, they wanted people to get hurt because that's what revolutions do. They flame, you know, they they kind of burn everything down in order to build it up again. So this is what they wanted, these young revolutionaries. They wanted the world to burn. Um, and I think we're too kind to them if we just say that, you know, they're um young, you know, sweet anti-fascists who just wanted to be mean to Hitler. No, they wanted to burn down the world and remake it in an image that has demonstrable problems.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah. Which brings us to the point of his recruitment. Now, a precursor story that I think is important to tell here. A lot of people believe that the Cambridge Five is kind of like the first big zobby at Gambit to try to establish espionage in Britain. And that's not true at all. There were there were precursor attempts in the 20s and 30s, probably the most well-known of which occurs under the auspices of a man named William Norman Ewer, who works for left-wing newspaper, the Daily Herald. He establishes a spy ring base at the Federated Press of America office, which was headquartered on the Strand in central London. They are uh British-born spies working for Moscow. Their job, aside from disseminating propaganda, they're their actual attempts to try to infiltrate MI5 and MI6. They managed to get some spies into special branch. They never get infiltrate five and six, though, but but still there is this attempt there, and for reasons beyond the scope of this episode, UA's spy ring falls apart by the end of the 20s. But there is proof of concept there. Um, you mentioned before that, you know, the the Communist Party of Great Britain is not some great political force. Their membership tops out at, if we're being generous, about 5,000. And that's in the mid-20s. By the time we get to the 30s, you know, this is this is not really a thing. I've spoken at at length in other episodes about British fascism and how that wasn't nearly as big a deal as we like to like to believe that it was. But in the midst of all this, you get these people being sent over by Moscow who are called the illegals. These are Soviet agents who travel not just to Britain, but to other Western countries, embed themselves, set up spy rings comprised of local people. And the two illegals we need to think about with Kim Philby and the Cambridge 5 are Theodore Malie and Arnold Deutsch. Malley works for the NKVD, which is the Soviet precursor to, well, one of the many Soviet precursors to Putin's FSB. Malle goes to Britain in 34, I think it is, sets himself up controlling other illegals there, one of whom is this fella, Arnold Deutsch, who is enrolled at uh, I think he's like a postgrad or something at University of London. And uh that is not a random decision. What who is who is Deutsch? What is his what is his his plan and what draws him to Kim Philby? What does he say to Kim Philby? How does he bring him in into the fold?

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Yeah, so Arnold Deutsch is a really fascinating character. He he's he's part of a kind of circle of Austrian communists um who who cluster in London. Um and he is a he's trained in psychology and he's a communist, and he sort of belongs also to the he's an adherent of this movement which sort of marries the two. It's called the sex pole movement under a guy called William Reich. So they have this kind of idea that you know if you have sufficient promiscuous sex and you masturbate enough, you're gonna end up with utopia. Which I guess I mean solid premise, yeah. I mean, it's just I prefer it to Bolshevism as a tactic, to be honest. But um anyway, it doesn't work, it turns out. So Deutsch is a is a is a kind of he's a thinking man, he's a he's a very uh clever man, and it does seem to be his idea that he looks around and he sees that even though, as we've both said, that there is a small communist movement, what he does see is that within that small communist movement there is this kind of weird, almost social contagion of rich young Britons kind of cosplaying as revolutionaries, right? He could that is a thing and he can see it, you know. Mark and Mugridge writes brilliantly about it in his book about the 30s. He talks about sort of debutants lecturing their papas about um the working classes as they're being served kippers at breakfast by the servants, you know, it's this kind of vibe. So he um so he sees that and he thinks, right, well, maybe I can find some kind of bright young things who are about to embark on careers in the British establishment, and I can get them now, and then we can kind of watch them grow and we can help them grow and they can become agents. So he sets out to look for the right people. And you know, subsequently, with hindsight, it will become the Cambridge Five, but it's a it's it's a it's a coincidence that Kim Philby went to Cambridge. Basically, his connection with Kim Philby is through the Austrian connection, it's through Litzy, his wife, that Philby, much to the horror of his parents, brings home from Austria, you know, turning up with a with a communist children. Communist foreigner, yeah, good grief.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Good grief.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Exactly. So um, yeah, so this is this is the link. So Litzy is friends with another um Austrian female communist called Edith Tudor Hart, and she knows Arnold Deutsch. So it's through this connection that he ends up on a part bench in 1934 talking to Kim Philby. And effectively, what he says to Kim Philby is look, you want to serve the revolution, but you are not a worker and you will never be a worker. I can offer you an alternative vision of how you can serve the revolution, and they kind of seduce each other on that part bench. They both sort of become the person the other one wants to see. So actually, I found some evidence of Arnold Deutsch, you know, being referred to by his colleagues as being quite difficult and quite bumptuous and quite grumpy. But Philby, that's not how Philby describes him. Like he's marvellous and his eyes are alive and he's a shining, dazzling presence. You know, they you know, he's setting out to seduce him, uh, and he's it's a mixture of personality and kind of both of them understand the ideology, and it's it's that that brings them together. And also, you know, Philby's an adventurer and a narcissist, and he looks he wants the excitement, and it sounds like a great wheeze, and he's had great fun in Austria running about playing at Revolutionaries. Um, you know, blood on the cobbles, he enjoyed all of that. And now this is his chance to do something kind of elite, and also at the same time, one of the reasons he didn't join the Communist Party at Cambridge is because he wanted to join the Foreign Office, and there's very little screening, but the screening they do do is are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? So that's another reason why Kim Philby doesn't join. But he doesn't get into the Foreign Office anyway, and this is a real blow because this was supposed to be his future mapped out. So Deutsch also finds him at a slightly sort of almost vulnerable stage. He doesn't really know what he's gonna do, he doesn't know who he's gonna be, he's got this overbearing father, he's um he's and he's a terrible man.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

So he's what's that that's an interesting point. So, in an alternative timeline, you know, he does get the gig at the foreign office, breezes through his civil entrance exams, it's all it's all apples. You know, does it is this not appealing to him? Or does he just go, well, you know, I'll just have I'll get my kicks being off in some embassy somewhere instead?

SPEAKER_01 18:24

I think it is appealing to him anyway, because if you read his very stylish, very slippery memoir, he gets such a kick out of fooling people, he gets such a kick out of those instances, and you see them all over his career, where he is the only person who knows about five different things, like so that he's keeping secrets from, you know, at some points he's keeping secrets from the British, the Americans, and the Soviets, you know, all at the same time. And that those are the bits which cause him the most excitement. So I think the chance to be the spider at the centre of a web that only he knows exists, I think would be attractive to Philby actually whenever he was repeated.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

And that, I mean, that is that is such a recognizable type in the intelligence world, particularly in this time period. You still get them to this day, though. The the the people who are it's the it's the allure of I I know the thing that you don't. It's it's a it's a classic, it's just you know, the weakness of human psychology, it just gets people every time. And for this personality type, it's definitely there. And um his first assignment, if you like, or the first the first time he sort of sees action in this in this environment is in Spain during the uh civil war in the end of the 1930s. He's actually there working for the Times, I think. So he's a journalist at this point, which again, to your point about the the in the hindsight looking at them and going, well, you know, Deutsch had this all figured out, these men are gonna go to high places. He's just a goddamn journalist at this point. He's just a war correspondent. He's not he's not Kim Philby, British intelligence. He's he's just some guy going to see what's what what the crack is in Spain. Now, there was an MI5 file declassified in the early 2000s, which was very interesting, contained a story uh by a Soviet defector, a man by the name of Walter Kavitsky, who claimed that Philby had been instructed, whilst he was in Spain, to assassinate the fascist Francisco Franco. Now, Philby is not named in the file, but he's described described as a young Englishman, I'm quoting here, a young Englishman, a journalist of good family, an idealist, and a fanatical anti-Nazi. And someone, don't know, scribbled in the margins, probably Philby. I don't know if this is true. It seems it seems a pretty advanced mission to give to some guy you've just recruited. Go go assassinate this Spanish fascist who's in the middle of a civil war. It seems a bit much. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

That's the only and also that's the only bit of evidence for the Franklin assassination thing. And like Kravinsky is normally very reliable, so I'm not so I uh you know, I don't discount it out of hand, but there's no there's no corroborating evidence. Philby denies it, but he isn't a reliable witness, so his denial means nothing.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Just one of these many little little stories that is inevitable when you look at spies.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah, but he does, I mean he does wheedle his way into Franco's camp, but you know, so Philby ends up getting a a medal from Franco for being such a sort of excellent fascist friend in his column writing for the Times. So Philby will end up will end up after the war with medals from uh Franco, uh the British and Stalin, which I suspect must be the only triumvirate thing. I know, I mean that you know, I hate it.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

So Franco didn't really do his research either, did he? This this guy who's been who's been helping out Nazi refugees for some communist group. Yeah, you're a good fascist.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

I know. Well, I mean, Phil before. One of the things he does, you know, he also burnished his fascist credentials by having sex with a beautiful fascist woman, Frances Hogg. So fascist adjacent. So um, what a sacrifice. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Anyway, spoiler uh Franco is not killed. There is no no grand assassination, and he he returns to Britain. Now, this is where we get into uh Philby recruits the first two members of what's going to become the Cambridge Five. Let's have a quick because these guys are gonna turn up in the story. We have to talk about them. Um let's have a quick overview. We've already discussed Philby, but the other four members of the Cambridge Five, who are these guys? What's the what's the what's the myth and the reality of them? How about we use that as a as the framing?

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah, so uh the myth for a start is that it's a ring, right? Which suggests kind of a closed circle. It doesn't really work like that at all. So what happens is Philby's asked to draw up a list of other of these kind of well-connected young reds. And top of that list is Donald McLean, who he knows from Cambridge. Donald McLean is a very strong Marxist, very good connected family. Again, the one of the common denominators is they all come from families who've actually been quite quite left-leaning. They're not really, really pucker nobility that they're often described as. They're often quite sort of fringes of respectability. So, in order for the the sons, the five, to kind of kick back, they have to kind of go harder left in order to in order to sort of you know provoke their families. Donald McLean does join the foreign office and therefore is incredibly seen as a plum. And what happens with the Cambridge Five is that over the course of the 17 years that they're spying for Stalin, they kind of are variously important to the Soviets at different times, right? So in this pre-war period and elsewhere, Donald McLean is always is massively cosseted by the Soviets because he's in the foreign office. Then, so bottom of the list that Philby gives to the Russians is Guy Burgess. And Guy Burgess is another friend from Cambridge, and Guy is bottom of the list because even though he's very clever and very, very idealistically committed to communism, he's also incredibly flaky, and people either love him or hate him. He's outrageous, he's sort of incredibly promiscuous.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Could be the origins of the term hot mess.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

Yeah, he is a hot mess. That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah, he's uh constantly drunk. Constantly drunk, not legendary, just not someone you look at and go, yeah, spy. You know, subtlety, discretion. That's not Burgess.

unknown 24:29

No.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Burgess. I mean, he pretty much tells people he's a spy, but on a number of occasions when he's burgess. Yeah, and and whenever Guy Burgess gets pissed and tells people he's a spy, they all think, no, you're not. The Russians are sentenced is a pretty good cover.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

It's like no one's gonna boy this dickheaders. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Exactly. So, but Burgess, so he watches McLean and Philby do what they've been ordered to do by Deutsch, which is ostensibly give up all their communist leanings, and he is like, this doesn't make sense. So Guy Burgess effectively badgers them until they tell him what's going on. Okay, and then he's kind of recruited by the back door. Then from Burgess they get to Blunt, although it's not quite clear who actually recruits Blunt and how he's actually recruited, but Blunt is supposed to stay at Cambridge uh and be a talent spotter. Now I think Blunt is actually unbelievably sinister because you know he's in his late 20s when he's recruited, he's older than the others. His job is to stay at Cambridge and recruit people, which he does. And we have sort of we have the kind of insight of how he would recruit them. So there's one boy called Michael Strait, who is a communist. Michael Strait's best friend gets killed in the Spanish Civil War. When Michael Strait has survivor guilt and is miserable because his best friend has just died in the Spanish Civil War fighting against the fascists, Blunt calls him into his beautiful kind of book lined office in Trinity, you know, and Blunt's a very respected elders elder, you know, academic, he's established. And he recruits this 18-year-old to spy for the Soviets at this moment of his at this moment of vulnerability. I mean, it's grooming basically. Blunt is a horrible groomer. And then from there they get so every in the Cambridge Five, like John Cancross is always the outsider because he's not particularly clubbable, he's not particularly charming, he's not particularly handsome, he's not that's how I've always understood Cancross.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

He's the boring one.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

He is sort of the boring one, although, having said that, there were loads of documents released by MI5 uh in January of last year, some of which I used, but there was loads on Cancross uh that I think puts him in a slightly more interesting and sinister light. And I would like to see a proper. There means a couple of really good biographies of well, one really good, one quite good biography of John Cancross. But I think he's had too easy and a ride. He was a pretty sinister character, too, actually. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Um that's that's the next project then. That's that's sorted. Alright, so um uh back to Philby. So so this these these Nerdy Wells are getting assembled. Philby, uh, we're now in we're now in the Second World War, right? The Spanish Civil War's over. Philby's back. He's working as a journalist, but he's recruited in MI6. I think it's in is it in like the fall of 941? I think he starts working for MI6 officially, but he had been he had been doing some work for them before then, I think, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:29

So before then, he'd been effectively in a kind of prototype, early kind of SOE type operation.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Um SOE, just for people listening who aren't aware, that's the special operations executive set up in the summer of 1940 to blow things up.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Yeah, so in its early incarnations of there was a kind of idea to sort of, you know, start sending people to make mischief. And it looks like it might have been Guy Burgess's idea, actually, unbelievably. But anyway, so Philby is working as an instructor on these kind of courses. Uh he's teaching people propaganda and whatever. But it's after Barbarossa that he really wants to get involved more, so he manages to get brought into um MI6. So this is the point where basically, up, you know, we were talking about Deutsch's plan, you know, all of these men could have just faded in into insignificance, perhaps apart from Blunt, apart if it had and McLean, if it hadn't been for the war, because MI6 increased its staff tenfold, MI5 increased its staff tenfold, SOE was also looking for people, 16,000 people who'd buy SOE.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Um and they grab they grab a like they grab journalists, they grab Whitehall washouts, they grab Oxford Dons, they grab, you know, people in their in their mates address books. The way SOE is formed is very ad hoc.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Yeah, but it's the same for all of them. They're all competing over the same people, right? Because and they don't have time to vet properly, even if they wanted to. So they think that it is a reasonable way to recruit people into the most secret parts of British governments is by hiring on who is a good chap, right? Is he in your club? Does he know your cousin? Would you take him for a drink with your wife?

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Does he know his cheeses?

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Yeah, does he know his cheeses?

SPEAKER_00 29:19

His wines, does he understand the subtleties of Sherry?

SPEAKER_01 29:23

Exactly. Now it seems absurd to us now, of course, but then we have had the Cambridge Five happen, right? We have had the moment of realisation that you could have the enemy within. What these guys were operating in was a very extreme moment where Britain was facing a sort of existential threat against its very existence at the beginning of the war. It was fighting alone, it needed to expand these secret parts of government. It didn't have time to vet, it didn't have resources to vet, right? So, you know, like all hands on deck. It's all hands on deck. And SOE, for example, you know, other bits of government were slightly more screamish about recruiting known communists, but SOE recruited known communists.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Yeah. They were like, And they and they got in a they got a lot of shit for as well. I mean, MI6 just looked down their nose at these, you know, these wild reds and all this kind of stuff. There's a lot of a lot of bitchiness between these various. Yeah, there's massive.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

And rivalry, and that that's part of why, you know, why the they kind of allied to the kind of issue of who's you know, of checking people too properly. Because if someone looks apart like Philby, they all want him because he's he he look he you know, he looks like a guy who could do the job.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Definitely, definitely. And and given given his career up to that point, he's the kind of guy you'd look at and go, yeah, this this guy's been in the Spanish Civil War, he's he's been a journalist, he's he he knows his shit. We can at least get him, as you said, he's he starts off doing propaganda, which is typical for journalists they recruit. You start there and then you realize he's a good chap, and you and all of a sudden you're working for MI6, and he's responsible for a lot of shit. Like he's in charge, like in intelligence uh that's coming from Spain and Portugal. I guess that's because of his experience in the Civil War. North Africa, he ends up working uh on stuff there. He's also ends up doing liaison work with the Americans. Um it's a lot. I I guess I guess to just step back and get the wider scope of things. You mentioned before it's it's erroneous to think of the Cambridge Five as a ring that's cooperating. But how what are the rest of them doing? And are they are they communicating with each other? Are they sharing notes or are they just kind of doing their own thing and it's and it's only after the fact that we kind of look at them as this cohesive unit?

SPEAKER_01 31:40

So it's complicated. Basically, Donald McClain, as soon as he is signed up by Philby, he then distances himself and and you know he will he will bump into them a little bit, but he's really out on his own. John Canecross is never really in the club, right? So he's recruited and then sort of left to it. He's handled by the Russians separately. So, for example, at one point, him and Donald McLean are working in the same bit of the foreign office, um, but they have no idea that each other is a Soviet spy, right? I don't think he knows he doesn't know Donald McLean's a spy until after the defection, actually. I mean that's how out the loop cancross is. So the other three, from the inside, Anthony Blunt describes it as an isosceles triangle with Burgess at the apex. So Burgess is very close to Philby and Burgess is very close to Blunt, and sort of Blunt and Philby have a friendly but not close relationship at the bottom. Um, so that's how it looks from the inside. And Burgess and Blunt often kind of work as a team in lots of ways. Um, but Philby is largely on his own.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

So there's there's moments of overlap, but generally they are in their own spheres of operation in many sense, and and between between them, you know, as you say, FO, MI6, MI5, they're covering a lot of bases, and and that's why they're so notorious, I guess, because they blunder into these positions. As you say, it was never, it was never Deutsch could not know that this was going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

No, and the only reason it happened was the war, but because of the war, at various points, they have access to uh the British Cabinet minutes, the Imperial Defence uh Committee minutes uh in the run-up to the war, which is about the kind of war preparedness of the entire British Empire. They have access at points to everything in the Treasury, everything in the Foreign Office, everything in MI5, everything in SIS. They also have oversight, Blunt and Philby between them through their work of everything coming out of SOE. Uh they have access to Bletchley Park. Uh, then later in the war, uh Donald McLean is at the Washington Embassy for the Foreign Office. So there is a point right at the end of the war where the Russians are getting, or the Soviets are getting, the personal correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill, just as Roosevelt and Churchill are trying to manoeuvre to stop Stalin doing his land wrap. So, I mean, the level of access they have is unbelievable. I mean, it the one of the ones that always blows my mind, and this is not a filthy one, it's a blunt one, is during the war, MI5 realised that MI6 were getting a lot of the glory, and Churchill didn't know enough about what was going on at MI5. So they decided to do like a fortnightly briefing for Churchill, and they gave the job to Asty Blunt, right? Which gave him license to ask any questions he wanted of any part of MI5 and write this fortnightly briefing about the entire activities of MI5 for Churchill. So everything that Churchill knew about MI5, the Soviets knew.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

I mean it's it's it's over like it's it's always overwhelming when you read about the Cambridge Five and the fact that they just seem to have that they know everything. There isn't there's in a filing cabinet they can't open. Like they they they've got access to everything. And I think that the danger sometimes with that is that you're looking too too much at the forest without regarding the trees. Yeah, and and seeing the thing. And one thing that really strikes out to me in the story of Kim Philby is the work he did to basically guarantee the death of a Soviet official who was trying to defect uh from the Soviet Union to Britain. A man by the name of uh Konstantin Volkov, who's in Istanbul in August 1945, right at the end of the war. He says to the British consulate there, if you give me, I think it's like 30,000 pounds and asylum in Britain, I'll give you the names of hundreds of Soviet secret agents, like everyone I know. And amongst those names would have almost certainly been members of the Cambridge Five. The Volkov case is passed by the head of MI6, Stuart Menge's, to Kim Philby to process. So what does Philby do? Tells Moscow all about it, and then he concocts some excuse for Mengees to say why he can't get on a plane to fly from London to Istanbul to promptly retrieve Volkov and his wife. So, in other words, having outed Volkov to the Soviets, he then leaves them to whatever fate Stalin deems for them, which, given this is Stalin, we can we can imagine, but we don't know. To this day, we don't know. The last time anyone ever saw Konstantin Volkov and his wife was them entering the Soviet consulate in Istanbul. That was in the first week of September 1945. Odds are they're still buried under that building. And and that's on that's on Philby. Like this this fucking guy's got blood on his hands, like literally, he he guaranteed these people's deaths. And I guess the the thing that that draws me to thinking about is can we tie other members of the Cambridge Five to specific deaths?

SPEAKER_01 36:27

Well, we can, I mean, I think we can tie Philby to lots of deaths and misery more explicitly. And we can't, and you know, the the other members of the five too. I mean, uh, if if you want, I think Philby is the one who has the most explicit blood on his hands. Um so um, so yeah, he he absolutely screws over Vorkov. But then basically, what happens is in September 1944, Kim Philby is put in charge of MI6's counterintelligence operations against uh the Soviet Union, which means that every source of human intelligence operation against the Soviet Union for the next couple of years, Philby knows about.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

The the mole in the pay of Moscow is being told to find moles in the pay of Moscow.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Yeah, exactly. And there is some evidence as well that he was um, you know, definitely kind of pushing missions as well to send people over the Iron Curtain. There has been a kind of historians have kind of had a revisionist moment where they've said maybe he wasn't quite as responsible for some of these as as we think, but actually I you know trawled everything, and I think he absolutely was. So in late 44 and into 45, all of the Western intelligence services are kind of looking for recruits amongst the displaced people of Europe, you know, the people who are stuck behind the Iron Curtain. And they have a plan that basically they're not going to be able to spy on the Soviet Union through Russia itself because it's going to be too difficult to have agents in Moscow. It's just too tight in a totalitarian world. So they have a specific idea that they can maybe infiltrate people into the kind of new restless fringes like the Baltic states and Poland and stuff. And we know about this plan because it was drawn up uh, you know, by um uh MI6 and the whole thing was leaked to Philby. So we found that plan in the Soviet files. So, and then according to Philby's handler um of the time, a guy called Yuri Modin, there was not an operation that they didn't know about. So they were parachuting men and um sending them by boat to Poland, into the Baltic States, and later on into Albania and into Georgia. And we could when he is um he's posted to Istanbul in 1947, and then we have specific evidence of him sending young Georgian boys physically across the border. He's the one who takes them to the border and pushes them across it, right? Straight into the hands of the Soviets.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Jeez.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

So um he he is responsible for an extraordinary number of deaths. Now, the problem is it's quite complicated because we it's hard to tie him specifically to each one. And the other reason it's really complicated is because the Soviets didn't kill everybody that was sent. What they did was they began to set up these things called radio games where the Soviets would set up fake organizations within these new Soviet republics, which the British and the and then subsequently a bit later on, but with Philby's oversight, the Americans begin to send, you know, partisans to or send expats effectively, they train them up and they send them to these fake organizations because they think they're real. So Philby is kind of has enough operational detail to be able to help them play these radio games. But he um in those Albanian secret police files, you can see where they try and play a radio game without someone on the other side, and they can't do it because what you do when you're you're playing a radio game is you know you've captured a partisan. Say you've captured an Albanian partisan, you know that he's been sent by Italian and British intelligence, he's on his own in a room, suicidal, you're threatening him. He's sending messages across the radio saying, send more money, send more arms, send more men. But you have no idea if he's putting secret codes into these messages to alert Western intelligence on the other side, right? So, what Philby gives is visibility. So every time the Soviets are playing games from 1944 until Philby gets kicked out in 1951, he has sufficient access and sufficient intelligence to be able to tell them the other side of the picture that the games are working, that this is you know that that we're fooled. And like you can see in the Lithuanian files, for example, you can see these games developing, and that so much of uh of what's happening is that you know there are fake agents on the fo on the on the radio to British and American intelligence just playing. And the only way it can work is if it's visible on the other side.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Like he as you say, it's it's messy, but but he he's integral to that. He's integral to these things which seem small, but again, at this time period, we're in the nascent stages of the Cold War. That this is this is a lot of moving pieces in Eastern Europe, in particular, where Stalin's trying to consolidate what he's doing. It's this is important stuff. And at the top, I said, but the reason I wanted to focus on Philby is because to my mind he's most sociopathic. And this this kind of proves my point. He's he's getting involved in this stuff where he knows damn well these people are, if they're not going to their deaths, they're gonna be, you know, maltreated, tortured, abused, used, whatever, by some way by the Soviets. And he the thing I keep coming back to is okay, this guy, in theory, he joins the the great and righteous cause of communism in the 30s because he hates the fascists, wants to kick back against against Hitler. It's now 1945, Hitler's blown his head off, the Reich's in ruins, fascism's done. What what is he hoping to achieve here? What what is he now now? We're just talking, we're talking sending Westerners to their deaths in the name of helping Stalin consolidate his rule of Eastern Europe, basically.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

We've come a long way from fighting the good fight against the fascists.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

It's internationalist communism, right? It's world revolution. So, but what what's quite funny about Donald McLean and Kim Philby to a certain extent is that they get very exercised about American imperialist hegemony in the kind of late 40s and into the 50s. But but they don't have a sense that that's exactly what Stalin is trying to do as well. You know, if if the Americans want power and and influence over you, that's imperialism. If Stalin does, he's gifting you the utopia, right? So they are still revolutionaries, they still think that this is a boon for the people of Eastern Central Europe, and they will understand that once they once utopia is granted. But it is also, but it's kind of so cruel because it also comes with a kind of massive dose of Anglo-centrism. So Philby describes being in these meetings. So later on, uh in um in 1949, he's posted to to Washington, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, but you know, he talks about these meetings in Washington where they're talking about the men that they're sending into these across the Iron Curtain on these unbelievably dangerous missions, and they're just taking the piss out of them. You know, they call the Albanian recruits pixies, like it's a really derogatory term because they're all really small. And they um and he he says, you know, in our there's one meeting where in his memoir, and he says, We never for us we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that the Albanians had only just come down from the trees.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

Like it's this kind of non- It's like it's it's that it's that you know, uh hubris arrogance, indifference to to human life and and discrimination, you know. Makes him a perfect Soviet citizen in many ways. Like he's got he's got all the he's got he's ticking all the boxes to be a to be a uh you know upstanding member of the Soviet Union. And We'll get to this shortly when he experiences that utopia. Perhaps it's not exactly what all it was cracked up to be, uh, but that punchline is to come. So you mentioned he's in America in in 49, working with CIA, fighting against the godless communists, etc. The good times for for Philby's rampant hypocrisy, however, are not going to last forever. And that's in part because of one of my favorite intelligence operations of the 20th century, something called Project Venona, which um uh basically just to explain this to folks, in the early 1920s, Soviet intelligence adopted something called the one-time pad to convey secret information between their spies in Moscow. The one-time pad is this simple, ingenious invention. Sender of message has a thick pad of paper, receiver has the same thick pad of paper. Each individual sheet of that pad has a cipher code. You send your message with that cipher, then you tear off that piece of paper, you set it on fire so it cannot be used again. Don't throw it in the trash. That's stupid. Set it on fire, and then the next time you send a message, you simply use the next sheet of paper with a different cipher. It's a primitive form of end-to-end encryption, the same kind of stuff that lets Signal and WhatsApp work today. I love that it's analog and it's about as foolproof a method for sending secret information as you can find. However, anyone who understands Signal's intelligence will tell you there's no such thing as an uncrackable code. And that's because of the capacity for humans to screw things up. And during the chaos of 1941, when Hitler and his armies are banging at Moscow's door, the factory that produces these one-time pads gets sloppy. They produce duplicate pads with the same ciphers on them, which means that the codes are being reused by the Soviets for more than one message. And American cryptanalysts soon figure this out that the same letter and number combinations are happening, and they start to be able to read some of the Soviet communications. Now, it's it's only comms that are sent between 1942 and 1945, maybe maybe into 46. But this leads to the creation of a dedicated project to uncrack all of this information, and that's Project Venona. And this moves very slowly. They start working on these Soviet comms in like 43. It's not until 46 that the Americans are able to start decoding communications. They figure out that there were lo and behold, there were some spies at Los Alamos during the during uh the Manhattan Project. Cryptanalysts at Arlington Hall, Virginia, working on Venona material, realized that there was there was an agent in Washington, DC, a Soviet agent codenamed Homer, who's there in 44. This Homer character is sending messages to Moscow saying, you know, I have to leave soon for New York because my wife is there and about to give birth. Now putting personal information into encrypted messages, pretty fucking dumb, but these are the these are the fellas we're dealing with. Again, that's that hubris. And the dumb party wasn't Philby in this case, it was your man McLean. Because of the information about his wife, New York newborn child, the the Venona project are able to kind of triangulate this and go, hang on a minute, this Homer guy might well be this fella.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Yeah, so it's a bit so it's a bit earlier than 50 that they realize that there is probably a spry in the British Embassy. They're just confused because there's also a guy called Gomer, and well, it turns out Gomer and Homer are the same guy, and then G and anyway, but but yes, by 1950, they are very sure that there is there was a spy in the embassy. So there is a um when Philby arrives in Washington, he is basically he is basically one of the very small team investigating who this spy could possibly be. Of course he is, of course he is. Yeah, so which uh is extraordinary. So he kind of starts throwing out some red herrings where he can. He's trying to like, there's another guy who fits the um the the kind of the possible MO, and everybody the Foreign Office already find this guy deeply suspicious because he's teetotal. They don't like that. So Philby, you know this time.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

I mean, non-drinkers in the I know the amount these guys. Very suspect, very suspect.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

Yeah, so Donald McClain, I mean, it's he knows that he's beginning to get under suspicion and it sends him mad. Like he's in Cairo and he has a total breakdown. He kind of rampages, he goes on a rampage with a friend of his, and they are they trash this American girl's flat and they're found in her bed giggling and gnawing on a leg of mutton, which I always think is a particularly well Doritos weren't invented then. Yeah, that's true.

unknown 48:27

That's true.

SPEAKER_01 48:28

Um, yeah, it's the absence of skips. Um, so anyway, so um Phil B is put in charge of this. Uh well, not in charge of it, he's one of the team working on who this mole could have been. Um, and slowly, slowly, slowly, they begin to eliminate all the possible suspects until they're left with a pretty sure steer. Like you say, there's little clues in there. Um uh they're left with a pretty clear steer that it's McLean, and that's when the shit hits the fan.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

He's got, I mean, he's got to warn McLean, who is who's finished his Cairo bender, he's back in London now, is 51. Um, Philby's also got some heat on him, doesn't he? I think at this time as well. So he can't just up and leave DC and and go and go warn, uh, go warn him.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

But also, Philby's trying to protect himself, right? He yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

Oh, and it would look suspect.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

Yeah, so what incidentally, when John McClain comes back from Cairo, having been absolutely disgraced himself, he obviously, this being the British Foreign Office, gets a promotion. He's now head of the American Department and in charge of all the Korean information.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

Of course he is, of course he is, but still having a breakdown because he knows he's about to be out.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

He's still completely losing it. Um, so yeah, so Philby at the at that point, Burgess also having completely disgraced himself, has got a promotion. So he's been sent to Washington. Uh, so he's out there as well. And then there's this bizarre thing where Burgess is sort of sent home in disgrace for some weird stuff involving a young man and a car. Now, the jury is still out on whether this was all staged to get him home or whether it was just lucky that he had disgraced himself again just at the right time. You know, jury's out. But anyway, so Burgess comes home with a message from Philby: the net is closing, you are about to be unmasked. Uh and then basically, I mean, you know, all so much, so much information has come up out about the defection now. All the MI5 files, um, so so loads were released um in January last year, loads were there's loads of stuff released in 2022 as well. Like, we have a pretty clear picture now of the defection, and I can tell you it is just panic. The spy the spies themselves are panicking, the Soviets are panicking, the British are, you know, like well, they're sort of half panicking but still having weekends off.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Panicking in a British way.

SPEAKER_01 51:03

Yeah, they're panicking very much Monday to Friday, working hours only, um uh with lots of gin. So, yeah, it's it's just a kind of debacle.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

And and at the center of this, as you say, I mean, talk about talk about, you know, the most unreliable person you want as the conduit to try to get McLean out and try to restore some calm to the situation. Guy Burgess, who is who's basically in, you know, he's kind of in that that phase the phase uh like how Charlie Sheen was in the early aughts when he turned up drunk to everything and said he had tiger blood and was winning at life. That's kind of where where Burgess is at at this point. And I don't know how I don't know how in the sort of traditional telling of the story, Burgess very impulsively decides when he hooks up with McLean, he goes, you know what? Fuck it, I'm coming with you too. I'm I'm getting out of here, I'm going to the Soviet Union, they've got plenty of vodka for me to drink, I'm heading off. I don't I mean, is it that impulsive, or is it is there, is or is that a result of the panic you just mentioned, or is there more to that?

SPEAKER_01 52:04

So actually, there are a couple of stories, and we still don't really know. One story is that Donald McLean was in such a state, and he was, I mean, he was in pieces, that the Soviets told Burgess to go to. Um I think that's probably true because Burg because McLean was an absolute wreck, and you can see that in the MI5 watchers reports in the in the weeks leading up. I mean, he is a complete alcoholic mess. He couldn't get to fucking Belgium on his own, right? To Moscow. So, um, and you know you're in trouble if Burgess is considered more of a safe bet than you are, right? Then they are then the question is whether Burgess there is some there is some flickers of evidence to suggest that Burgess thought he could take McLean partway and then come back. Um which seems mad, but then you remember that the Soviets were panicking. You also look at the fact that in Burgess's flat he left quite a lot of incriminating material, which if you knew you weren't coming back, even if you're as flaky as Burgess, you probably would have tidied up a bit better.

SPEAKER_00 53:16

You would hope.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Um so you know, the jury is still out for me. I think um and we don't know. One of the missing parts of the puzzle is how McLean and Burgess were winding each other up on the way, right? These are two alcoholic misfits whose lives are ruined.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

Astonishing they even make it, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 53:38

It's the ultimate sort of buddy cop film from hell, is their their trip from London to Moscow via because they get on a ship to France, I think, and then they've got to get from there. Like it's yeah, why's no one made this film? I want to see this film. This is a disaster. This is it.

SPEAKER_01 53:52

I that I would pay, I would watch that too. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

But whilst this is all happening, Philby, who who fears the inevitable that he's gonna be uncovered at this point, he he he starts thinking, you know what, I I gotta I gotta dissociate myself from this. And he resigns from MI6 in uh July of 51. And there's speculation about this third man that continues throughout the mid-50s. Philby's name is is is is raised a few times. They can't really pin anything on him for obvious reasons. The Soviets cut off contact. Philby is no longer particularly useful either. He's no longer with MI6. What what intelligence can he get? He's got this cloud of suspicion over him. Is he really that naive that he thinks I can just kind of resign from MI6 and that'll be the end of it? No one's gonna no one's gonna pound me anymore.

SPEAKER_01 54:38

No, I don't think that's really how it I don't think that's how it pans out at all. He has to resign. They know very quickly that he's invocated. Um there is a they just can't prove it. They can't prove it. This is one of the things that comes out very clearly about how difficult counter-espionage is. It is so hard to prove that these guys are spies. And it's even harder to prove in any way that allows you to take them to court. So, what we've got, for example, is in January 52, the British government um hired this top barrister who used to work with Philby, this brilliantly named Buster Milmo. Um, and we've now got the full transcript of Buster Milmo's interrogation of Philby. It's like 40 pages, and that ought to be like a two-man play. That's like a that's like a serious thing, not like a buddy movie, it's like a two-man play with like top actors. Anyway, he absolutely goes for the jugular, and Philby twists and turns and evades. And at the end of that interview, the British government basically goes to the Americans and says, We know that Kim Philby is a spy, we cannot prove it. We are, you know, we're gonna attempt to prove it. So for the whole of the 50s, they carry on watching him, they watch him treat his wife, Eileen, with what the MI5 watchers call unbelievable brutality.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

Um this is his second wife, right? Because he's the first wife he's left. And she, I mean, she's um she's a bit of a lunatic herself, isn't she? Isn't she she kind of has a mental breakdown or something?

SPEAKER_01 56:11

She does, but then she's married to Philby. So there's one when she had her worst breakdown, she's in Istanbul, she's got Guy Burgess living in her basement, she's got four children under the age of seven, she's married to a sociopath, and she's got Kim Philby's mistress living in the attic. Oh, right, and this is when she has her breakdown, and then she's for like the rest of history, you know, considered a lunatic. Now, one other fascinating fact about Kim Philby being a terrible dickhead is when um she commits suicide, Eileen, in I think 57, and her psychiatrist, who knows all the secrets of the Philby marriage, the first thing her psychiatrist does is ring her GP when he hears that she committed suicide and said, Check her body for puncture runes. Philby's had her murdered.

SPEAKER_00 56:58

Huh.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

Uh, and later on, Peter Wright puts that accusation to Anthony Blunt, who knew Philby quite well, and he says, Did he kill Eileen? We think he probably killed Eileen. And Anthony Blunt said, I don't know, but he was certainly ruthless enough.

SPEAKER_00 57:12

I mean, I I can believe it. This again, we we've seen already that he there's an indifference to human life. He clearly doesn't care enough about her to let her get into this state in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 57:23

Oh, well, he's delight. We have we have it on record that he's delighted she killed herself. I mean, you know, it's just whether it's whether he actually and and you know, you can also see in the more recent MI5 files release that Eileen was on occasion teetering on telling MI5 everything she knew.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

Because she she knew quite a lot of what his deal was, yeah. Enough about it, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:46

So she was constantly on the verge of talking to MI5, and then what would happen is you could watch the MI5 watchers watch him then turn on the charm. You know, he's got a mistress on the go. Obviously, Philby's always got a mistress, but you know, he she will be about to crack and then he'll move home and he'll be nice to the kids and he'll be nice to her, and then she'll decide not to crack, and then it's a cycle that repeats.

SPEAKER_00 58:07

It's a typical abusive relationship, basically. He's he's he's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:11

I mean, and Donald McLean's another one. I mean, Donald McLean strangled and beat his wife, you know. I mean, these a lot of attention is paid to the homosexual members of the five ring, but you know, it's the heterosexual ones who we've missed.

SPEAKER_00 58:25

Wife beaters and abusers and possible murderers, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um a lot of this drama with his wife is unfolding in Beirut, to which he moves in um 56, I think it is. He remarries his third wife, Eleanor Brewer. That does not last long. At this point, Philby is hitting the bottle pretty hard, uh, joining some of the Lebanese Syrah, as I would, my favorite wine. Um, he's he's down and out in Beirut. He's lost his country, he's lost his career, he's lost his life of adventure as a spy. And so all that's left really is the communist utopia. And so in uh 1963, Kim Philby makes plans to follow in the footsteps of Burgesson McLean and defect to the Soviet Union, leaving Eleanor in Lebanon in the process. Now, there's conflicting stories about his defection. Basically, it's it's the question of whether or not he hoodwinks the British, who, as you say, are watching him and is able to kind of slip the net and get to the Soviet Union without them knowing. Or more tantalizingly, British intelligence actually let him go because they're like, you know what, if the if if this gets exposed, what a headache, what a humiliation, what a fuck up. How about we just let him go to let him go to Moscow to rot? How about we let him do that? Where do you fall on this?

SPEAKER_01 59:42

Yeah, so generally, if it's a choice between conspiracy or cock-up, I always go cock-up. But in this case, because as I said, there were a big dump of files in January last year, and there were flickers in those files that confirm nothing but made gave me pause to think conspiracy. So his old friend Nicholas Elliott goes out to uh Beirut and confronts him and says, We'll give you immunity from prosecution if you confess, because we've got this extra evidence. Now, even that extra evidence is a whole nother story. That story's been slightly mistold as well, but anyway, we'll depart that for a minute. So he says this to Philby, Philby accepts, and then it takes there's like there's there's a couple of conversations, there's some, you know, he he writes a very limited confession, and then two weeks later or ten days later, he defects, right? Now, in the files which you can see, which are MI5 files, MI5 are cross because it's MI6 who've gone to confront him when it's MI5 who should really be in charge of this mission. They are cross because then they they are very delighted that he's finally confessed. They send reams of questions for MI6 who are now handling it, to put to Philby. And there is nothing in the files to say that any of those questions were ever put to Philby, which doesn't mean they weren't, but there's they're not there, right? Then the last little bit is they contact the Americans quite quickly and say we've got a confession out of Philby, and then they say to the Americans, This is a delicate moment. We are debriefing Kim Philby. Do not watch him, because if he knows that you're watching him, he might spook and clam up. Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:26

Okay, that's a bit sus.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

That's a bit sus. So we have like Nicholas Elliott goes there, has a couple of kind of conversations that we've got, and then he leaves, and then it's up to this guy, Peter Lunn, who we have very little information on, who is the Beirut chief. And then like 10 days later, he's gone. Philby goes off to the Soviet Union with no trail of what's happening in between, of any debriefing, of any questions being put to him, and the Americans warned off.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

Yeah, it no, it is suspect. It's yeah, and and I don't know, I can see the argument for just letting him walk, to be honest. These people work in intelligence. I think they know probably better than Philby does what he's letting himself in for, you know, uh in the in the communist utopia. Oh, exactly. Which leads us to the to the fun bit of catharsis, the the final days of Kim Philby. Let's let's get into it. So um he winds up in the Soviet Union, where again Burgess and McLean are already there. They don't spend a lot of time with each other. This is not, you know, happy reunion of the super friends by any stretch of the imagination. They're all drinking heavily. Um I think he arrives with this expectation he's gonna be welcomed like some sort of conquering hero, but he's not really given that, is he, from the Soviets? He's not sort of treated like which, given what he's done for them, you would think some red carpet is gonna be rolled out somewhere, but instead they kind of you know, here's your shitty apartment and here's your ration of vodka and have that at sunlight. That's kind of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:05

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, when he gets there, like so he's furious with Burgess because it's Burgess going that brought the whole ring down. If McLean had gone on his own, they could have all survived. Because as we talked about earlier, McLean's out on a limb, right? But it was Burgess going that brought Philby down. So he's furious with Burgess. He does hang out with McLean for a while, but then he sleeps with McLean's wife.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

Of course he does. He has to.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:30

So that breaks down that relationship. That actually does sober McLean up, so it does have one.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:36

Oh well, silver linings.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

Yeah. Anyway, so um, you're absolutely right. Then he's got this shitty apartment, he ends up marrying again to a Russian woman, and there is an account by a um KGB man called Oleg Kalugin, who is basically in the 70s, early 70s. He's put in charge of like recruiting ideological foreign agents. But he, as he points out in his memoir, this is post-Hungary, post-Czechoslovakia. There aren't really any and believes this shit anymore. Nobody believes this crap anymore. And the ones that we did persuade we have left to fester and rot in these shitty apartments.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:14

It's not a good advert for recruitment, is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:16

So he goes to find Kim Philby, and he, you know, he there's a description of him kind of going up in the lift in this terrible apartment block that smells of wee, and the and he kind of knocks on the door and the door opens, and this like horrible, shabby, angry drunk opens the door and starts ranting at him in atrocious Russian. It's the great Kim Philby. So, what Kalugan does, to be fair, is like he smartens him up and he gives him a job. So he spends the last few years of his life basically smartened up, given a little bit more kind of access to you know the good stuff that the kind of top people get in the Soviet Union, and they send him out to places like the Baltic States, actually to Cuba, even, where he kind of proselytizes for for the cause. So, um, and then he dies, you know, uh not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Kalugan stands over yeah, and Kalugan sort of stands over his coffin, um, thinking, Jesus, you know, this this god that we both served, like, was it all just complete nonsense?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

Yeah. I interesting if he could have held on for a few more years just to see what he thought of all that. You know, the wall comes down, that would that would have been that would have been fun. But uh no, he dies of a heart attack in 1988. He does finally get his flowers after death. He's given the rank of KGB general, posthumously uh awarded medals. Still lauded by certain folks to this day. Uh certain folks in Russia, at least. In Britain, however, he will forever be associated with the Cambridge Five, which is a collective synonym for traitor, basically. Um the the fates of the other Cambridge Five, uh just briefly, what what what miserable us leaves Good So

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

Apart from Sean Cancross, who dies in his bed in the arms of his very young um opera singing wife. So again, he's the odd one out.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:08

Again, he's he's he's the boring one. Well, and the young opera singing wife is not that boring, but you get what I mean. Like, you know, dies in his bed comfortably. No, no, no fun with fun with Khrushchev, you know, nothing like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:21

But yeah, no, McLean and Burgess, Burgess dies a miserable alcoholic's death in Russia, very unhappily. McLean does seem to have actually not minded that he was probably the happiest in Russia, but you know, he sort of eventually um sort of gives up as well. And Ansi Blunt is obviously the one who's always um, you know, uh considered to be the one who got away with it. But actually, again, these MI5 files in January show that you know he was interviewed more than 80 times by NI5. He was he got ulcers from the stress, he was drinking like a lunatic, he was being carried out of some of these MI5 interrogations insensible with drink because he was so stressed.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:58

This is whilst he's he's he's what was he uh he's the he's keeping the queen's pictures.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

He's keeping the queen's pictures and director of the Court Institute. So on the surface, he is a member of the establishment. Behind the scenes, a lot of people know he's being spied on by all his best friends, he's being blackmailed by some of his former lovers, he's being tormented by MI5, his phone is bugged, he's being watched for decades, right? So he did not have a miserable final time of it. And the problem that they had with Blunt, the problem they would have had with Philby, the problem that they had with all of them is it was almost impossible to prove, right? And this is um, I always think this about the these bastards, you know, the thing that protected Blunt and the thing that protected the others when they were in the UK was that we had this stupid bourgeois insistence on evidence and the rule of law, right? And the master that they were serving, a single whiff of spying would have been enough to get them fucking shot in the head or sent to the way. And um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:02

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's hard not to come away. I mean, I I've never never been a fan of the Cambridge 5 since first reading about them. But the more these MI5 files get out, and the more we sort of learn about the actual individuals, again, again, to go bring this full circle, go back to the the myth, myth busting, you know, it's very instructive, I think, to think about them as individuals. And we do see this these recurring themes with them of you know, drunkenness, self-centeredness, uh, sociopathic behavior. These are I I don't care what their politics are. I don't I don't care if they were anti-fascist, or plenty, plenty of good-hearted anti-fascists in the world. Um, plenty of people who decided, you know, to opt for communism, and then once they figured out what it was, they went, Oh, hang on a minute, this kind of looks a little bit, a little bit nasty. I'll just go back to being a liberal or whatever. Like, like these guys aren't any of these things. These guys were hardwired to become the nasty bastards that they were, it seems, and struggling to find sympathy.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

Yeah, I mean, I started researching the book thinking I wouldn't like them, and I ended the book literally hating them with a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:13

Wanting to dig up their corpses and beat them.

unknown 1:09:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:17

I mean, they are they're just horrible. It's like a combination of a terrible ideology and utterly toxic personalities. Because as you say, it's perfectly possible to be a communist in 1930s Britain and not be a murderous traitor. Right.

unknown 1:09:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:34

Well, myriad examples of people who who were allured by communism and and believed in it and believed in it with the best intentions and and you know went in, ended up being progressive socialists or whatever else, and all this. These guys have got no excuses. You said at the start, by the time they're recruited, anyone who's paying attention knows what the Soviet Union is. Uh to act to act as if you know it's it's gonna be this wonderful paradise and the West is doomed and the Soviets is gonna save the planet. It's there there's a degree of cognitive dissonance there that's very difficult to forgive, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:07

And let's not forget, for at least 18 months, when they were starting in their service and they were being most useful, um, you know, Stalin and Hitler were allies, right? And Philby, when Stalin and Hitler were allies, was actually out of contact with the Soviets. It would have been incredibly easy for him to just slip off into the dark night and never worry about it again. He doubled down, he worked really hard to get his information to Moscow when Moscow was allied with Berlin.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:35

Yeah. Well, that is a that is a fittingly grim note on which to end this. It tells us a lot about the man. Thank you so much, Antonio. Where where can people find you on the line? What are your what are your handles and so forth?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:48

So on um X, I'm at Tony Senior, and then on sort of other channels, I go through the podcast that I do with my colleague Roger Morehouse, and we're the history book buffs at History Book Buffs. You can find us on Instagram and all those places.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:03

Excellent. Thank you so much for being on this episode of History's Devils. And uh thank you, dear listener. Do continue to like and subscribe and hit buttons and leave comments and let us know what you think about the Cambridge Five. Let us know if you have a more sympathetic view. I'm curious to I'm curious to hear hear differing opinions on this, and uh tune in next time for another edition of History's Devils.