Kim Philby, Super Spy: Part One, Codename Sonny
52:12 Share

Disclaimer, this episode contains strong language. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in.

You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. I had been instructed by my Soviet handler to distance myself as far as humanly possible from any hint of leftist associations or sympathies. Now I was ready to take on the British establishment.

It's July 1937. The location is Spain. Civil war has been raging for over a year. Nationalist forces have led an all-out assault on the left-wing Republican coalition. The country has become the focal point for the global clash between two ideological forces. While fascist states Germany and Italy were funneling resources into Spain, the Soviets were flooding the country with agents determined to bolster the cause of international communism.

Into this chaos arrived a 25-year-old Englishman. He'd been given a letter of accreditation from the London General Press. He quickly started writing articles that favored the nationalist side. He sent one after another to the Times of London newspaper until, eventually, they offered him a job as a correspondent.

Although married with an Austrian wife in England, the young journalist fell for a fascist sympathizer, an aristocratic English woman nicknamed Bunny. Together, they toured the country, gathering pro-nationalist news stories. And then, one weekend, it all came crashing down.

The young man decided to sample the ancient national blood sport, so unfathomable to outsiders, yet threaded into the DNA of the Spanish people. He wanted to go to a bullfight. I left Bani in Seville and headed to Cordoba by train. It was one of those old rickety numbers with wooden floors and wooden seats and a third-class carriage full of peasants and students. There was even a goat on board. He'd been reassured he didn't require a special permit for the trip.

I checked into a cheap hotel, grabbed some local nosh, washed it down with a semi-decent red and passed out in my clothes. He was woken by a loud hammering on the door. The young man leapt out of bed. The door splintered open and two members of the Guardia Civil National Police Force stormed into the room and arrested him.

They demanded to see my permit to travel. Apparently, I did need one after all. When I failed to produce it, they dragged me across to the police station and started searching my bag. I knew it would be a couple of minutes before they started on my clothes. And if they did that, I'd end up in front of a firing squad. Thinking on his feet, the young man pulled out his wallet and threw it across the room. The guards scrambled to retrieve it. While they were distracted, he reached into his trouser ticket pocket.

He carefully pulled out a folded piece of paper, scrunched it into a ball and the guard's back still turned to him, swallowed it. The paper contained instructions for the use of a Soviet intelligence code. And the code was in the young man's possession because he wasn't a supporter of the right-wing nationalists after all. That was just his cover. In fact, he was the very opposite. He was an agent of the international arm of the GRU.

If the guards had found the paper, he would have most likely been executed on the spot. Which would have put a damper on things, that's for sure. You see, covering the Spanish war was just a small part of a much, much more important mission. The mission he had been given was to penetrate the heart of British intelligence. The young man's name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby. But he went by his childhood nickname, Kim.

I'd been something of a red since university, although I'd never actually joined the party. But I had been instructed by my Soviet handler to distance myself as far as humanly possible from any hint of leftist associations or sympathies. My Spanish adventure was successful in establishing cast-iron conservative credentials.

Now I was ready to take on the British establishment. In doing so, Kim Philby was to become one of the most notorious and successful Soviet double agents in the history of espionage. But how had Philby arrived here? What was motivating this young, well-heeled Englishman to betray his country so spectacularly? To answer this question, we will need to cast back to the start of his career.

recalled in the secret memoir he was writing at the time of his death. This memoir was Philby's last chance to set the record straight, and it also allowed for him to reflect more deeply on the formative experiences of his life.

Spyscape has recently acquired these unpublished writings for its collection of historic spy secrets. Using this memoir and Philby's other published writings, bolstered by meticulous research and dramatized with the help of an actor, we have brought him back to life. Our mission: to tell the remarkable story of how Philby penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence as a Soviet agent.

Welcome, then, to Kim Philby, Super Spy. Part 1, Codename Sunny. I was born on the 1st of January 1912 in India. The jewel in the crown of the British Empire, as people like to call it. Almost from birth, then, I was quickly exposed to the rank hypocrisy and unequivocal cruelty that lay at the heart of British society.

Philby quickly developed an affinity for the ordinary Indians who populated his home as staff.

It was said that English was in fact my second language. Apparently I prefer talking Hindustani. - Philby's mother, Dora, typically for a woman of that time, was responsible for raising the children and running the household. But it's Philby's father, Sinjin, who clearly had the biggest influence on the young boy.

After Dora moved Kim and his sister back to England, the job of raising the children was frequently left to their grandmother. The Philby parents spent a lot of time abroad and became remote figures, especially St. John.

Then, when I was about six or seven, my father showed up from one of his Arabian adventures. By then, I had acquired a passion for maps. He led me to believe he was something of a cartographer himself. So he took me to the Royal Geographical Society, and we went into one of the map drawing rooms. He took out paper and pencil and started drawing a map. But it soon became clear to me he didn't have any sketches, measurements, nothing. It was all just made up, a figment of his imagination.

But Philby's father also took him to sports matches. And so began my lifelong love affair with Surrey County Cricket Club and the Arsenal football team. But Philby was forming other, deeper convictions at the same time. Convictions that would shape the spy he was to become. My grandmother was a good Christian, but her attempts to encourage me into the ranks of the God-fearing backfired somewhat.

This god they wanted me to believe in seemed very selective in who he wanted to save. I said to my grandmother at the time, "Why just one leper? Why not all lepers?" She had no answer for me. So I rejected God there and then. By the time I left kindergarten, I was a committed atheist. - Philby was bright and hardworking. And although plagued by a stammer, he soon developed a considerable charm that won him friends and lovers.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was a fully formed anti-imperialist. But there was still an old-fashioned romantic streak running through me, which I must have inherited from my father. I may have had my hair turned by leftist politics, but that wasn't going to stop me wooing the opposite sex with a poem or two. So long as it was written by Shelley, of course.

By 1929, when Philby arrived there, Cambridge University was quickly becoming a magnet for young men and women drawn to a radical and fast-growing ideology, Marxism. I was there to read history. But the history they taught at Cambridge felt like propaganda for a system that I loathed. The Great Depression had decimated the lives of ordinary people. And here we all were, the privileged upper classes, all carrying on as if nothing had happened.

For Philby and his fellow radicals, this failure of the capitalist system was responsible for the shadow of fascism that was darkening Europe. Old England was dying, and there was no match for this ruthless new fascist ideology that was capturing the hearts and minds of the Spanish, Italians, Germans. Socialism in Britain was a watered-down joke. How could anyone take the Labour Party seriously when it still supported a monarchy? No, it was time for something new.

something powerful enough to stand up to those thugs. Philby soon found himself consorting with fellow radicals. For a while, he clung to socialism over communism, but two things changed his mind. During one of the long vacations, I rented digs in Huthwaite, I mean Nottingham in the industrial Midlands.

It was my first experience of working class life. I remember my grandmother warning me off playing with the poorer children lest I catch something. But despite the horrendous conditions they lived in, they had this sense of community that refused to be crushed. I was deeply shaken by it. On another of his vacations, Philby traveled to Germany, Hungary and France on a motorbike. Arriving in Berlin shortly after the Reichstag fire, the atmosphere was distinctly threatening.

Hitler had been chancellor for less than a month, but it was clear something had changed for the worse. The communists were his biggest competition for the hearts and minds of the German people. So he framed them for the fire and then launched his purge to drive them out of the country. Philby also witnessed a foreshadowing of the violence to come. Stumbling upon an anti-Jewish demonstration, he remonstrated with some of the organizers. And the next thing he knew, he was being threatened with clubs and knives.

His eyes had been opened to the looming catastrophe that was to engulf Europe. On my last day at Cambridge, I'd been awarded a college prize, 14 pounds, I seem to remember. I used the money to purchase the collected works of Karl Marx. I decided to become a communist.

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work...

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s,

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away, because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. What should I read next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

Shortly after Philby's graduation, his father Sinjin surprised him with one of his rare visits. Philby Sr. had just finished writing his book, The Empty Quarter, which described his trek across a vast section of the Saudi Arabian desert. Sinjin had become what was termed a fully-fledged Arabist, converting to Islam in 1930.

He paid Kim the generous sum of 50 pounds, four and a half thousand in today's money, to proofread the manuscript. Philby had been approached by the French Comintern, or the French wing of the International Communist Party. Through some Cambridge contacts, they'd heard of his recent conversion. They suggested he go out to Vienna to help the communist underground in their efforts to shore up influence and repel the conservative onslaught.

However tentative his commitment to communism had been beforehand, his ensuing adventures in Vienna were to harden him into a man committed to the overthrow of the old order.

I'd already visited Vienna a couple of years earlier. This was a very different place. After the Great War, Austria had essentially collapsed. Just like Spain, the country was now split in half. You had the progressive urban-dwelling left on the one side and the conservative, God-fearing monarchists on the other. And all the while, Austria's German neighbors, under Adolf Hitler's leadership, were making preparations to annex the country and take control.

Lizzie brought Philby into the communist underground.

He was initially tasked with couriering letters between activists. The government clampdown meant the conventional mail service couldn't be trusted. But when the conservative government launched its all-out attack on the communist insurgents, declaring martial law, he and Lizzie started smuggling people on the wanted list out of the country. Suddenly, everywhere, the left was on the run. But it wasn't long before Lizzie herself would end up on that list.

And I made the decision there and then I'd marry her and get her back to London. Which is exactly what he did. Philby and Lizzie tied the knot in Vienna Town Hall in February of 1934. But you know, things had shifted in Britain too. We look back now and think of the United Kingdom as this shining, solidly beacon of resistance against the fascist assault. But back then, it could have gone either way. There were significant, powerful elements in the establishment who were convinced Hitler was a good thing.

including members of the royal family. The Peasland wasn't just driven by resistance to the idea of another war, you know. It was being run by elements determined to form an alliance with the Nazis. And within the circles I was moving in, this was the preoccupation to stop them. Philby and his new bride moved in with his mother, Dora, in West Hampstead.

Their first instinct was to approach the British Communist Party offices in King Street and join up officially. It's funny, but in all this time, I had yet to actually join the party. Which was an omission that would soon count in his favor. Philby and Lizzie showed up at Party HQ the day after their arrival in London, ready to enlist. Had they done so any earlier, this would have gone down on Philby's record.

As it happens, party recruiters were being extremely cautious at the time. They were suspicious of infiltration by both intelligence agents and undercover fascists. So the Philbys were turned away and told to wait six weeks while the necessary checks were carried out. It was very frustrating. I also needed a job. We couldn't go on living with my mother. So I started preparing for the civil service exams.

On May 1, Philby attended the annual party rally in Camden, northwest London. He bumped into a few old Cambridge acquaintances who'd been public supporters of the communist cause for some time. They quizzed Philby about his adventures in Austria. Not one for self-promotion, even Philby's understated account of his work rescuing party members whose lives were in danger would have sounded extremely courageous.

A few days later, one of these "friends" visited the Philbys. Philby himself protected the identity of this visitor and took their name to his grave. Even his unpublished memoir refuses to give up their identity. Historians are divided, but according to Kim Philby's granddaughter, Charlotte, the unidentified friend could have been a woman named Edith Tudor Hart.

Tudor Hart, whose birth name was Zujitski, was an Austrian-born woman of Jewish heritage who had befriended Lizzie in Vienna before they both fled the right-wing purge of communists. Tudor Hart was actively working for the international communist movement. After settling in London, she worked as a photographer and simultaneously went to work recruiting agents for the Soviets.

Not that Philby knew any of this that sunny day in June 1934. My friend asked me if I'd go for a walk. We headed off up West End Lane. They were curious as to how my party membership was progressing and I said, essentially, that it had stalled. The friend nodded and then told me that they'd been approached by a man of what they termed decisive importance.

A few more days passed, and the appointed day arrived.

Philby took the bus to Chalk Farm Station and met his mysterious friend. I was rather crestfallen to see they were alone. But not for long. The two of them headed across the canal into Regent's Park. It was July 1st, and a warm English summer was in full bloom. After a while, they came across a short man in his thirties, sitting on the grass. When Philby and his friend approached, he quickly got up.

Otto asked Philby to join him on the grass.

He spoke of the rise of fascism in Europe and the threat of Japan in the East. He berated the Western democracy's equivocation over these twin threats. Then he told me of the difficulties the Russian service had had in recruiting British agents. He went on to explain that most of the people recommended to him were card-carrying members of the party. The issue, he said, was that these people were known to the authorities and would never get access to the deepest parts of the security establishment. Whereas a real bourgeois, he said,

Amongst other bourgeois, that was a whole different prospect. Although Philby flinched at the idea of being described as bourgeois, it started to dawn on him what was being asked of him. That I was being recruited by the Russian security service was a given. And then he finally said it out loud. He wanted me to join the British service, the SIS. Not the fringe's mind. He wanted me to penetrate the very core.

They needed a man on the inside with access to the deepest intelligence. And then came the killer blow. I was to erase my socialist past, to cut all ties with every single one of my communist friends. I remember by this stage, all of my friends were communists. I was to establish my credentials as a right winger, an establishment figure committed to empire, state, monarchy, all of it.

Philby knew he wasn't supposed to address Otto directly. He drew a deep breath, knowing that his answer would dictate the future direction of his life. I said yes. But then Otto issued a warning. He told Philby that it was well known that he was not afraid of danger. His actions in Austria spoke for themselves. We don't like danger, he said. We like safety. An agent willing to put himself in danger is of no use to us.

And then his voice dropped, almost to a whisper. "We are playing the long game," he said. "Penetrating British intelligence may take years. The only objective is victory, no matter how long it takes." And then a final word of caution. He told me, "I must prepare myself to be despised by those I trusted, even by those I loved. My cover had to be comprehensive. There could be no anomalies, no special cases."

Otto then gave Philby a short lesson in evasion tactics to shake off anyone who might be following him. He instructed Philby that he was never to take less than three or more forms of transport to their meetings. He escorted him to Great Portland Street Underground Station. Then he asked me how I was getting home. I said, by bus. He looked at me and said, only bus? I was a little embarrassed. I'd botched my first test.

Otto then told him to get on the first bus in any direction. This element of his spycraft, though tedious, was essential if they were to maintain contact. He also warned me how bloody sick of it I'd get. And he was right.

Over the years of our meetings, I became increasingly resentful of these elaborate journeys. But I understood his point. So I hopped on the next available bus. On that warm July afternoon in 1934, as Otto faded from view, it suddenly dawned on Philby that he was now working for the Russian Secret Service.

The year is now 1936. The Spanish Civil War is raging, and fascism has continued to capture power across mainland Europe. For over two years, Kim Philby has been reinventing himself as a right-wing conservative.

This is the cover he had been instructed to create by a man called Otto and a Hungarian named Theo, later identified as Theodore Marley, an ex-priest recruited to the Soviet cause. The two of them had become his handlers, or control, in the Russian intelligence service. I never learned Otto's real name at the time, but I discovered a few years later that he was a Czech named Arnold Deutsch.

Philby's first task had been to provide a list of a dozen names culled from his friends who, the Russians hoped, could also be turned into Russian agents. Two of those names, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, were to become synonymous with the Cambridge Five, the legendary spy ring that was being formed at this time. I had no idea then that Otto's instructions to me contained the seed of what would lead to my undoing.

But that was all a very, very long way off. Keen to make a good impression with his new spymasters, who by now had given him the codename Sonny, Philby supplied the names of all the people he could recall being associated with who had ties to communism. I divided them into three categories. Communists, sympathizers, and the rather vague grouping I called others. He then systematically broke off his relationship with every single one of them.

All but one, his wife, Lizzie. I'd been working as a journalist for a publication called The Review of Reviews. The money was just enough to squeeze by. I'd also joined an organisation called the Anglo-German Fellowship. This was a collection of English fascists, appeasers, anti-Semites, dyed-in-the-wool capitalists, rabid anti-communists, aristocrats and hedonistic society types like the Mitfords.

To give you a flavor, at one meeting, Lord Readstale rose to his feet and declared Hitler to be the greatest man of the 20th century, to resounding approval. I had to hold my tongue so often, I'm surprised I didn't bite the damn thing off. But Philby's patience paid dividends. He was offered a full-time post with the fellowship. My reinvention was almost complete. Lizzie knew what was going on and she was prepared to go along with it up to a point.

The solution came in the form of the Spanish Civil War. And so we return to where we started this episode. Philby, listeners will recall, had travelled to Spain to cover the nationalist campaign in a move to bolster his right-wing profile.

His efforts paid off. "Just a few days after my scrape with the Guardia Civil, I was being driven to Teruel, up from Valencia, with some other members of the press corps. There was a particularly nasty battle going on there which we wanted to ride up. It was December and the temperature outside was 18 below zero. It was hideously cold. Anyway, our guys stopped off in a small village to relieve themselves and we stayed in the vehicle to stay warm."

I remember watching the steam rise up from the piss and the cold went wham! It was a direct hit from a quarter to one. A quarter to one was the nickname given to heavy gauge Russian-made artillery. The shell decimated the vehicle, killing everyone inside.

Everyone except Philby. I was a little bashed up. Nothing serious. Whilst in Spain, Philby had also started an affair with a fascist-supporting socialite, Francis Bunny Noble. But this was no ordinary deception. News of the relationship was destined, was designed, to reach Lizzie back in London. Sounds cowardly, doesn't it? Well, I had my reasons.

Don't forget, Philby's orders were to rid himself of all his Marxist-Communist relationships. You have to understand, I couldn't divorce Lizzie. She'd lose her passport, and being an Austrian Jew, she'd be deported. There were no circumstances under which I could allow her to return to her home country now, not with the Anschluss looming. The formal marriage rumbled on for a bit longer, but Philby's infidelity had the necessary effect.

Lizzie had fallen out of love with him. "I had to cut a loose shore, but that didn't mean throwing her to the damn wolves." Meanwhile, the international situation was deteriorating fast.

In less than a month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would declare war on Nazi Germany. And despite the break with Lizzie, Philby's romantic streak, if that's what you can call it, remained undiminished. On the same day that Chamberlain made his declaration, Philby was introduced to another woman named Eileen Furse. Philby and Eileen quickly fell in love and soon moved in together.

Meanwhile, having passed his first real test in Spain, Philby's control was satisfied that he was capable of taking on the immense challenge he had been set. I'd even managed to get a medal for bravery pinned on me by none other than the nationalist leader himself, General Franco. The outbreak of war triggered the next phase of Philby's penetration mission, to join SIS, the British Intelligence Service.

But this was a different challenge altogether. It's not as if SIS were posting job adverts. The closest thing to a recruitment strategy SIS possessed was the Old Boy Network, an unofficial recruiting mechanism that relied on the caliber of a candidate's school, university or gentleman's club.

Added to which, the security services were highly suspicious of anyone who directly approached them. There was a case of "Don't find us, we'll find you."

Philby had no option but to continue enriching his cover in the hope that it would draw the attention of the right people. And the more distance he could put between himself and his leftist origins, the better. After the war against Germany was declared, there was this strange period of non-conflict called the Phony War. I traveled out to Arras in northern France with the press corps to cover the non-fighting. What a sorry bunch we were, me and this collection of drunk veterans from the Great War.

I went to work trying to get interviews with the generals so I could feed strategic intelligence back to Otto. There was this pervading sense that the Maginot Line would hold off any further German advances. An air of complacency had descended. By early 1940, the Germans had successfully advanced on Poland, Denmark and Norway. The Maginot Line was a line of concrete fortifications built across France's eastern border. It was designed to hold back any potential invasion.

I was struggling to find anything to write about. And then suddenly, it all changed. The German forces launched an all-out assault on Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France. By May 1940, France had fallen and British forces at Dunkirk had to retreat from the onslaught. It was the most terrifying thing we'd ever encountered. The Germans were unstoppable. Suddenly, Europe went dark.

With the Nazi occupation of mainland Europe, most of the intelligence agencies lost their spy networks. Worse still, the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, had deployed thousands of agents across the entire continent, including Britain. We were, frankly, caught with our pants down. MI5 and SIS embarked on an emergency recruitment drive.

Not only were there not enough agents, most of them were upper-class amateurs whose effectiveness was dubious. Enter Guy Burgess. Guy was a wild, hyper-intelligent, openly homosexual foreign office fellow whom I first met at Cambridge. Like me, he'd committed himself to class struggle. And like me, he'd reinvented himself as an establishment figure, albeit an unconventional one.

And also like me, he'd been recruited as a spy for Soviet intelligence. Burgess had since joined the ranks of British intelligence, and it was on his recommendation that his friend, Philby, was finally invited to join SIS. They ran some basic checks on me, which Guy told me was nothing more than looking me up in their security index. When they found there was no file opened on me to date, I was cleared.

Elated, Philby couldn't wait to inform his control. - Rather than slap me on the back and congratulate me, he questioned whether it really happened. How could they let me in so easily? For a minute, I panicked. Perhaps they were playing me. - But they weren't. SIS, also known as MI6, were delighted to welcome Philby into their ranks. But things got off to a rocky start. - I tried to get a job at Bletchley Park,

which is where they were decoding the Enigma messages. I thought this was a pretty solid place to begin, but the money was horrific.

I had a growing family by now, mouths to feed and all that. I couldn't make it work. But how was I supposed to tell Control I couldn't actually afford to be a double agent? Indeed, although Philby was still married to Lizzie, he and Eileen were expecting their first child. And the pressure was on to make a decent living. Burgess came to the rescue. There was a vacancy at Section D. I was sent to Bewley in Hampshire, where I was charged with training agents in underground propaganda.

The German propaganda machine was incredibly effective. And once again, the British spy service was lacking. But Philby also started to pick up vital intelligence that he shared with the Russians. It was obvious that the Allies had been thrown by the non-aggression pact Stalin had signed with Hitler, as indeed had supporters of the Soviet Union like myself and Guy.

I quickly learned that Allied strategy was to make a hasty peace with the Germans so that they could redirect their efforts to contain Soviet, i.e. communist, expansion. In other words, the European governments wanted to restore things to the way they were before the German assault. Completely ignoring the fact that Hitler was not the cause of the broken system, he was a symptom of it. The survival of international communism, therefore, was paramount, which is a roundabout way of saying...

If there had been any doubts as to whether I was doing the right thing, there were absolutely none now. - Philby's credibility amongst his Russian handlers was matched by the esteem with which he was clearly being held by his British employers. And finally, in September, 1941, Kim Philby was invited to join Section 5, the Iberian section of SIS.

It was a counter-espionage unit and with my experience of the Spanish war, I was considered the ideal candidate. I met with the section commander, Major Felix Cowgill. Burgess had been fired for drunk driving, so they were on the lookout for a reliable sort. And I fitted the bill. I was in. Seven years almost to the day after Otto had tasked him with penetrating the heart of British intelligence, Philby had done exactly that.

But Philby's ambition had been stoked by his success. Not happy with just working for British intelligence, he started to form an outrageously ambitious new plan. I wanted to run it. In some ways, Philby's work as a double agent was simplified by the fact that, at least superficially, the two sides had the same objective, the defeat of Hitler. But beyond that...

Philby was conscious of how fragile the Soviet situation was. The abundance of intelligence he was able to gather around the Allied plans to divert their military efforts to war with Russia was vital in enabling the Soviets to prepare for this. The other problem we had was the Allied attempts to shore up opposition to Hitler from within Germany. The consensus was that if certain elements of German society, like the Catholic Church, were able to galvanize ordinary Germans into overthrowing the Fuhrer,

It would also prevent Soviet expansion from the east, which was exactly the opposite of what the Russians wanted. In sharing details of Allied strategy, Philby was helping the Russians prepare for all eventualities. In a short space of time, he had become one of the Soviets' most valuable assets. I found out that you could volunteer for something called the night shift. This was manning the station to receive an act on reports that came in at night from all over the world.

So not only had I access to the material passing through Section 5, I was able to pick up intelligence from every corner of the globe where SIS had active operations. Added to which, some parts of SIS used the night shift to share intelligence considered too sensitive for normal channels. I suppose you could say all my Christmases had come at once. Except being an atheist, I didn't believe in Christmas, of course.

All the while, Philby was also cultivating a range of friendships and habits that would define him for the rest of his life. Friends like Tommy Harris, who would later be responsible for the Agent Pujol operation, feeding false intelligence to the Axis powers in advance of the D-Day landings. You can hear that story in the True Spies episode, Agent Garbo.

Philby had also grown close to Graham Greene, who was soon to become a celebrated novelist and the screenwriter of a movie called The Third Man, more of which later. And he'd become firm friends with three men who'd one day join him in the pantheon of infamous double agents, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Donald MacLean.

Along with Philby and a man named John Cairncross, they would later become the notorious Cambridge Five. And all of these men, especially Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Gray and Green, were united by another common pursuit, drinking, lots of drinking.

Did we booze to escape? Is that what you're asking? Of course we bloody did. It's all very good to look back now with a rose-tinted lens of moral superiority. We were at war, in a fight for survival of the dignity of the human race as we saw it. Of course we drank to escape. Each of us had been witness to untold cruelty and destruction, and all the while hiding in plain sight, even from the ones we loved the most.

But Philby's success as a spy was tempered by his increasingly fraught domestic situation. Philby and Eileen had been living together for some time. Eileen had grown increasingly unstable and had resorted to self-harm, a situation that undoubtedly contributed to Philby's toxic combination of workaholism and binge drinking.

As the war progressed, it started to become clear that the German assault was not only stalling. With the Reich suffering defeat in Russia, Africa and Southern Europe, Hitler's vision of a Nazi victory was rapidly diminishing. - With the Germans on the back foot, the need for such an active intelligence service started to recede. Section five started to wither a little on the vine. And by 1944, we were reduced to minor operations.

And with Hitler's influence shrinking, the intelligence Philby had picked up when he first joined the service proved accurate as the Allies started to switch their attentions to the Soviet Union. With the Americans also joining the intelligence game, the Allied objective was now focused on containment.

Communism had spread so far, but it wasn't to be allowed to spread any further, especially with the obvious power vacuums that would open up after the retreat of the Third Reich. And for the British, that meant starting at home. The order came from Churchill that every known agent with communist sympathies were to be weeded out from the intelligence services.

We were at a clean house. Philby was still, technically, married to Lizzie, a known communist activist. It never crossed my mind. I wasn't going to betray now. Instead, Philby launched a counter-offensive which is arguably the most brilliant masterstroke of his entire career. I thought to myself, rather than try and hide from this witch hunt...

Why don't I take the whole thing over? In the wake of Churchill's edict, SIS set up Section 9, whose remit was to focus on anti-communist operations. A retired agent called Jack Curry was brought back to run the section, while Felix Cowgill, Philby's current boss, wound down operations in the Iberian section before he would take over Section 9.

Which is when Philby seized his opportunity. I met with Control and laid out my plan. I could see that he was impressed, but I could tell he was skeptical too. I thought to myself, bugger this, I'll show you.

With absolute precision, Philby started politicking to undermine Cowgill's credentials for the job. But he also knew that he needed domestic intelligence on-side. So he also set about ingratiating himself with MI5, ensuring that when the time came, they would support his bid to take over Section 9 instead of Cowgill.

Cowgill had been a strident leader of the Iberian section and had made many enemies along the way, not least with the Americans, whose fledgling attempts at launching their own intelligence operation, the OSS, he had openly derided. - I made it clear that we needed a new kind of leadership post-war, one that was willing to make friends with the Americans and work alongside them rather than opposition. - Philby also laid out an alternative vision for Section 9.

Rather than a purely domestic intelligence operation, Philby pitched the department as an international community of intelligence gathering that would reach across the globe. It would plant agents in every corner of the world where there was Soviet activity. It was an audacious vision, and it worked. I was appointed head of section, and Cowgill was sent packing.

It's worth taking stock for a moment as to the magnitude of this achievement. Not only was Philby now responsible for offensive intelligence operations targeted at Soviet activities around the world. I was now running a network of agents whose nominal role was to monitor Soviet agents in every country they were active. But what that meant in reality is he was now perfectly positioned to protect the Russian intelligence operation.

Furthermore, Philby's army of SIS recruits could be fed disinformation by the Russians in the knowledge that Philby could ensure it was passed off as genuine intelligence. It was a power move that, were it not for its negative consequences, would be described as genius. But there were consequences. I immediately set off recruiting agents.

In the winter of 1945 into '46, I visited France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Greece to brief our SIS people out there. We had to capitalize on the chaos and disillusionment that followed the collapse of Nazi Germany and recruit as many new agents as possible. We also tried, wherever we could, to take over the abandoned Abwehr networks that the Germans had been running. These were solid anti-Soviet cells looking for a home, which we were more than happy to offer.

While this is double agent spycraft of the absolute highest order, True Spy's listeners should not forget Phil B was in fact recruiting an entire network of agents whose identities he would go on to share with the enemy. Over the next few years, Phil B's unprecedented deception would result in the deaths of more people than could ever be accurately recorded.

It's alleged that every one of the agents recruited, and according to some sources, there were hundreds of them, would end up either killed or imprisoned by the Russian authorities. You're asking how I could do it? Well, I've always made a distinction between the public and the personal. Every nation willingly sacrifices lives daily in the pursuit of its geopolitical objectives. Name a single regime that doesn't make calculations as to how many young men and women it can lose in pursuit of an objective. What makes me any different?

Just because my objective isn't your objective doesn't make me any worse or better than you. War is war. But Philby's reign couldn't last. While he claimed to keep personal and public separate,

It was the intersection of exactly these two elements that was to sow the seeds of his undoing. In five years' time, Philby was to find himself in his mother's flat in front of the world's press, denying that he was a double agent recruited by the Soviets.

And the reason he would be forced into this situation is that he was, ultimately, unable to separate himself from the four other Cambridge spies that formed this unofficial network of traitors. As Otto had instructed me, there were to be no special cases. But there are always special cases, aren't there?

When Philby's old friend and double agent Guy Burgess defected to Russia alongside Donald Maclean, the higher-ups in British intelligence quickly deduced the defection could only have been made possible if someone else on the inside had tipped them off that the traitors were about to be exposed, which is how a nation became gripped by the idea that there was, in fact, a third man.

which is when all eyes turned to Kim Philby. Next week. I managed to get hold of my control and we arranged to meet. He told me in no uncertain terms that the claim was not to be interrogated. Given his mental state, it was likely that he'd break in minutes. We had to get him out of there.

I'm Rhiannon Needs. Tune in next week for part two to find out how our super spy went on to evade detection for another 10 years before making his own thrilling escape. You can see the Philby Papers and other treasures in the Spyscape collection at spiescape.com forward slash spy objects.

Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend?

With Maclean and Burgess escaping so close to being apprehended, there was no other explanation for their sudden disappearance. Someone on the inside must have tipped them off. The higher-ups had been left scratching their heads. There had to be a third man. No one was closer to Guy than me. It was therefore only a matter of time before someone pointed the finger.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.