Kim Philby, Super Spy: Part Two, The Third Man
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Disclaimer, this episode contains strong language and references to self-harm. 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 Rhiannon Meads, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. It's May 25th, 1951. A rented, cream-coloured Austin A70 skids to a halt at a dockside in the port city of Southampton on England's south coast. It's just before midnight. The streets are poorly lit and, at this hour, mostly deserted.

A handsome, if slightly debauched looking man gets out of the driver's seat. He indicates for his passenger to exit the vehicle. The passenger steps onto the docks and breathes in the fresh sea air. He is fairer, harried looking and distracted. A couple of hours earlier, he was eating birthday supper with his wife and measles stricken children in their suburban home just outside London.

Both men light cigarettes to calm their nerves. The darker one offers the other his hip flask. His companion happily takes a swig. His hand shakes from years of alcohol abuse. It was usually whiskey or cognac. As consumption increased, so the quality decreased, if memory serves me. The dark-haired man with the hip flask is Guy Burgess. The fair-haired man is Donald McLean.

Both are high-ranking diplomats, and both men have been feeding secrets to the Russians for years. But their time is up. Maclean has been unmasked by British intelligence. Burgess is convinced he's next. They hurriedly walk up a gangplank to a ferry bound for France. From there, they will travel to Switzerland, Prague, and then Moscow. Neither would set foot on British soil again.

They were now defectors. Which is when all hell broke loose. No one outside intelligence circles knew that the men were Soviet spies. But inside the corridors of Britain's secret intelligence service, known as SIS, and the domestic service known as MI5, a seismic explosion had just been detonated.

These two respected diplomats, who'd had access to highly classified material for years, had been exposed as traitors. 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.

At the time, Philby was in Washington, where he was working as chief liaison between British intelligence, the FBI and the CIA. This posting has been the crowning achievement in his career as a double agent.

A prestigious role at the heart of Washington's elite intelligence network, where domestic and international operations intersect. As soon as I got the news, I left my office and drove straight home, dug out my copying camera, some other bits and pieces that could incriminate me, and buried them in the woods near the Potomac and waited. And sure enough, within three weeks, Philby is summoned home to London.

In part one of this mini-series, we saw how Philby dedicated his life to infiltrating the upper echelons of British intelligence. But this high-stakes game required absolute discipline, and not everyone in Philby's circle was as cautious as he was. Now, in the second episode, we'll see how Philby faced and survived the biggest challenge of his entire career as a Soviet spy.

By 1946, I'd pretty much had everything under control. They gave me a bloody CBE for God's sake. I was an establishment man. If I was a fool, I'd have said I was unassailable.

A CBE, an appointment to the order of the British Empire, is a prestigious honor awarded by the government of the day in recognition of services rendered in the national interest. If ever there was confirmation that Philby had succeeded in deceiving an entire country, this was it. The icing on the cake would have been a trip up to Buckingham Palace to get King George to pin the damn thing on me. But alas, it didn't happen that way.

There were so many honors flying around that year, they delivered it to me at home. There was, apparently, only one blemish on Philby's otherwise spotless image as a conservative establishment figure. He was still married to Lizzie, who by 1946 was living in East Berlin with her communist lover. The war was over. The Holocaust had been brought to a halt. It was safe to cut the cord.

Lizzie offered no resistance to the idea, and in September 1946, the Philbys were officially divorced, which was just as well on several counts. Not least because Philby was now living with Eileen Furse and their three children, with a fourth on the way. In the spring of 1947, Philby received a new government posting.

He was sent to be first secretary to the consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. But in reality, I was there to run the local SIS division. And it's here that a new chink in the Philby armor started to reveal itself.

Well, for a start, it was bloody hard to find anyone reliable enough to be an SIS recruit. And the intelligence itself was barely usable. The Turks insisted on filtering the info before it got to me, so a lot of it was worthless. To be frank, it all got a bit dull and worse. I started to look a tad incompetent. Things inevitably started to stall, with the torrent of intelligence he had up to now been providing for his Russian control slowing to a trickle.

But the challenge of sourcing intelligence in Istanbul wasn't Philby's only problem. It was in Turkey that Aileen's situation started to deteriorate. Aileen, who had married Philby a week after his divorce came through, had struggled with mental illness since childhood. Like her husband, she was also a heavy drinker.

And this combination, alongside Philby's unreliability, fickle work patterns, and rumored infidelities, not to mention the challenge of raising a small army of young children, started to take its inevitable toll. She began having these accidents. Philby is referring to a pattern established in childhood, where Eileen would injure herself in rebellion against situations over which she had no control.

Eileen had many reasons to be unhappy in her marriage to Philby, but up to this point, she had no idea that her husband, the father of her children, was spying for the Soviets. So effective was Philby's cover that she believed he was a loyal agent of SIS. But by the time they got to Istanbul, her condition deteriorated further and the accidents started to happen again.

And then Guy Burgess showed up at our house in Istanbul looking for a bed. Our marriage was already in trouble, but this sent it spiraling. Eileen couldn't stand Guy. It's not hard to see why. The ensuing days Burgess spent with the Philbys were wild. The heavy drinking became so intense that both men lost whole days to drunkenness. Guy Burgess was an upper-class man at war with the British establishment.

A war he had waged since school for the way he was treated for being openly gay at a time when being so was punishable with imprisonment. It was a rage that had translated into action when he was recruited for the Russian intelligence service in the mid 1930s. He and Philby had formed a close bond, a risky strategy given that both of them were feeding national secrets to the Soviets. - What can I say? There was something

Irresistible in Guy Burgess. And maybe all this hiding in plain sight got to me, I don't know. Added to which everything was so serious with Eileen and her dark moods. On the surface, the two of them couldn't have been more different in the way they conducted themselves. While Philby did his share of philandering, and certainly enjoyed his drink, he went to enormous lengths to keep his image clean and his treachery a secret.

Burgess was promiscuous, easily provoked into anger and perhaps most alarming of all, depending on how drunk he was, openly frank about the fact that he was working for the Russians. As a consequence, he was becoming less and less reliable as both a servant of the crown and a double agent. But for now, somehow his cover remained secure.

Maybe Guy's visit was a warning, a premonition of how things could end up. Who knows? If it was, I didn't want to know. I was having too much fun. Burgess eventually left, but his visit, and Philby's compliance in this bacchanalian frenzy, had done lasting damage to the Philby marriage.

Look, Aylin never liked life in Istanbul. The food, the language, the religion, it was all alien to her. I get it. And Guy was just the last straw, but she was miserable before he showed up. So it's not fair to put it all on him. One morning, shortly after Burgess's visit, Aylin showed up at a friend's house covered in blood. She had, apparently, been in a car accident. Only, as far as anyone could ascertain, there were no other vehicles involved.

Philby raced home and arranged for Eileen to go to Switzerland for treatment. But when she returned, she staged yet another accident, setting fire to a room in the house. And then doctors discovered that she had been harming herself in other ways that were taking a toll on her physical as well as mental health. It was time to get the hell out of there before she killed herself or, God forbid, one of the kids.

The Philbys resolved to leave Turkey and return to London. With this unhappy episode behind them, they tried to settle back into a stable family life. But it wasn't long before Philby was given his next post. Although his Turkish adventure was more notable for what it had failed to achieve than what it had, his star was still rising. In August of 1949, he received a telegram. They were offering me the big one.

Washington.

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Stationed in the US Capitol, Philby would have access to intelligence from all over the world, as well as the US policymakers waging cold war against the Russians. To Philby's Soviet spymasters, this was a massive coup. Needless to say, there was no saying no to this. I broke the news to Eileen, I think she was relieved. A new start, a life in the land of opportunity and all that. So she said yes, and off we went.

It's hard to exaggerate the significance of this new posting.

Philby was soon to be rubbing shoulders with some of the most important figures in the history of Western intelligence. People like legendary FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, CIA covert operations mastermind and future director Alan Dulles, counterintelligence head James Angleton, and most significantly for our story, a clandestine operative named William Bill Harvey.

also known as America's James Bond,

Harvey had risen up through the ranks of the FBI before transferring to the CIA. He was later to get into hot water with the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, when he illegally deployed CIA agents in Cuba, intent on overthrowing Fidel Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But in the late 40s, this heavy-drinking, foul-mouthed, philandering, gun-toting, hard-skinned bulldog of an agent...

was still one of the most revered and feared spies in the business. Honestly, I was surrounded by a who's who of American spooks. And there was one other reason this new role was so important for Philby. I hastily arranged a meeting with my control. Funnily enough, we found ourselves back in Regent's Park, the same spot as where they'd recruited me back in 1934. I told him about the new job and he couldn't resist a smile. You know what this means, he asked.

I frowned. It was obviously a rhetorical question. They are grooming you to be the next C. C was the nickname for the chief of British intelligence, the head of SIS. It took me a second to see if he was being serious. I wasn't being falsely modest. I just hadn't yet put it all together. Excited by what this new role might mean for him, Philby entered into his Washington life with renewed vigor.

From an office in the FBI building, just a corridor away from Hoover, Philby was, as he'd hoped, plunged into the very heart of US domestic and international spycraft. And he found the CIA agents he consorted with more than willing to collaborate with him. Well, you see, the CIA was so new back then, it was still finding its feet. They had this idea that we were the grandmasters of this sort of thing.

The Americans made this often completely erroneous assumption that we were clever, that we knew what we were doing, a view I was not about to disabuse them of. In fact, Philby actively cultivated these relationships, both at work and in his private life. He and Eileen became known for hosting lavish, drunken parties in their spacious home on Nebraska Avenue, where the good and the great gathered to let their hair down.

Philby's legendary charm had completely bewitched his American counterparts. I remember waking up one morning, looking out of the window and thinking to myself, "This is it, old chap. They can't touch you now. Maybe I really could be the next C." Which is when his Washington career hit its first major obstacle. It wasn't a good time for the CIA. The Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949.

This was years before US intelligence has said it would be possible. And then communist North Korea invaded the South again, catching us all unaware. Suddenly everyone was wondering what was the point of this vast, costly organization when it had missed these two massive events.

Keen to recover their credibility in the war on communism, the CIA and SIS cooked up an operation that was codenamed Valuable. The idea was pretty basic. The Soviet bloc countries were a mixed bag with Russian control stronger in some countries than others. So the essential concept was to try and pry one of these countries away from the mothership, so to speak, and in doing so open up a way of undermining the Federation, in turn weakening Moscow's grip.

Philby and his US counterpart were joint commanders of the operation. SIS and CIA chose Albania to be the site of the operation. Albania was a reluctant satellite state of the Soviet Empire, with many of its citizens staunchly loyal to its monarch, who had been exiled to Egypt. Hundreds of anti-communist Albanians were recruited and trained to infiltrate their homeland.

Armed with weapons, explosives and gold sovereigns, dozens of teams were deployed, all with a view to recruiting other Albanians to the cause and leading a revolt against their Soviet masters. But with Philby at the helm, the operation was, of course, compromised from the start.

It was the first time my aims as an agent were explicitly in conflict with my aims as a Soviet asset. During the war, we'd all been fighting the Nazis, but now I had to make a calculated decision and risk blowing my credibility as an SIS man by wrecking Operation Valuable. The precise timings and geographical coordinates of the landings all crossed Philby's desk, and he dutifully shared those details with the Russians.

As a consequence, every single team that was deployed was either wiped out or captured. 300 SIS and CIA agents were killed in action. Despite all this, Philby remained unrepentant. Two things you need to bear in mind. First, the CIA were posturing as much as anything.

I wasn't convinced their heart was ever in this operation. It was strategically flawed and frankly bonkers if you really analyzed it. But on top of that, it was perfectly okay with the higher-ups to send these people in, even when they knew that they were getting hammered. So, as far as I'm concerned, its failure is as much on them as anyone. Whatever Philby said outwardly, his 15 years as a double agent were beginning to grind away at his conscience. Not that he saw it that way.

His drinking had increased, and he was often too inebriated to let his true feelings in. In fact, it's extraordinary that he was able to function at all, given how much alcohol he consumed during this period. That said, many of the people he knew and worked with were heavy drinkers.

In those days, no one really bothered to take the time to ask whether there were any underlying psychological issues informing this addictive and self-destructive behavior. That is, until the summer of 1950, when Guy Burgess wrote to Philby, announcing that he too had been posted to Washington.

Burgess was in search of a place to stay and lick his wounds, after being reprimanded by his SIS bosses for his increasingly outrageous behavior. Ah, Guy. His timing couldn't have been worse. And yet, like some Greek play, it was somehow inevitable that he would show up when I least wanted him. Ah!

In the autumn of 1949, Guy Burgess had been on holiday in Gibraltar and Tangier. Loose-lipped with booze, he disclosed highly sensitive information to what appeared to be random strangers, which had come to the attention of Gibraltar's defence security officer. An official complaint was made, and Burgess was summoned by his SIS handlers to account for himself.

By this time, Burgess's alcohol addiction and indiscreet same-sex liaisons, which were back then illegal under English law, had been a cause of increasing concern to SIS. But Burgess, like Philby, could turn on the charm when he needed to, which most of the time meant he avoided severe sanctions for his outrageous antics.

You know, I also think he was so over the top that no one in their right mind would think that he was a spy, even less a Soviet agent. And so it was, once again, that after his missteps on the Mediterranean, Burgess was given another chance. But this time it was decided he should be sent to Washington, where Philby, who was still the star jewel in the SIS crown, could keep an eye on him.

The only problem was, Philby had his plate full. Intelligence sources were starting to point to the fact that there were two, maybe even three Soviet penetration agents embedded within SIS. Intelligence that Philby himself was reviewing. The Venona Decrypts, as they were known, was an operation to review Soviet intelligence that had been obtained through various sources, including code books gathered from a Finnish battlefield.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Soviets had balled it up and duplicated the code key. Hoover's men had busted a Soviet-friendly publishing house in New York and found the key amongst other bits of intelligence. And in amongst this intelligence, the decryption experts started to pick up a reference to a Soviet penetration agent inside SIS whose codename was Homer.

So you could say the last thing I needed was a drunk, loudmouthed maniac showing up on my doorstep. But that is exactly what happened. To Eileen Philby's horror, in July 1950, Guy Burgess moved into their basement. While Burgess made himself at home, Philby continued to review the Venona decrypts. He could see that a pattern was emerging.

A pattern that would lead those who cared to follow it to the identity of Agent Homer, which was something that he knew could blow the entire penetration operation that he and the other Cambridge spies had been running. Which brings us back to Donald McClain.

McLean was obviously Homer. And if I didn't flag it, someone else would. McLean, as listeners will recall, was the other man who was to defect with Guy Burgess in May of 1951. But the previous year, when the Venona decrypts were starting to unravel his cover, he was running the American desk at the UK's Foreign Office in London.

McLean, like Philby and Burgess, had been radicalized as a young undergraduate at Cambridge University. He was recruited into the Russian intelligence service soon after.

But in recent months, his own rampant alcoholism, brought on by not just the intensity of his spy work, but also the pressure of having to hide his bisexuality, had led to his having a nervous breakdown while posted in Cairo. I met with my Washington control. He told me that I had to save McClain, which I interpreted as get him out. But then he looked at me and made it clear that they wanted McClain to stay in his post.

He was too valuable an asset to lose. With the search for Homer ramping up, adding an unruly houseguest to his list of things to worry about was an unwelcome distraction for Philby. But there Burgess was. In the fall of 1950, he had been warned by his bosses in SIS that this was his last chance. And yet, as he stood on the threshold of the Philby residence, clearly drunk...

There were no signs that he was in any mood to straighten himself out.

And once again, Philby was powerless to resist the lure of Burgess's wild partying. I thought I could keep him under control, but I was wrong. And I completely underestimated how much he was already loathed in Washington. Burgess was indeed deeply disliked and mistrusted within the U.S. intelligence community. Chief amongst Burgess's detractors was FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover.

Rumors had circulated for some time that Hoover was himself gay. In a world where homophobia was so ingrained in the culture, Hoover was remorseless in his persecution of anyone who insinuated that he was homosexual, which made Guy Burgess's flamboyance in such a buttoned-up world completely unacceptable. But it was another encounter that was to seal not just the fate of Burgess,

But of all three of these so-called Cambridge spies... You mean the Libby Harvey incident? Yes, I think that was when the nail was driven hardest into the coffin of mine and Guy's careers. The Philbys were throwing one of their notorious parties at their home. It was a mix of FBI and CIA people that Philby had been carefully cultivating during his Washington tenure...

These were the people whose confidences Philby was sharing with the Soviets, so it was imperative that Philby's cover remained spotless. I'd been trying to get chummy with Bill Harvey. This, I might add, was no mean feat. Harvey's reputation for being something of a force to be reckoned with was well-earned.

He was the only American I knew capable of out-drinking us all. The threat of violence came off him like aftershave. He also carried a gun, which was quite rare in those days, especially in Washington circles. And added to this, he was as sharp as a pin. Bloody terrifying. Anyway, he and his wife had accepted an invitation to one of our soirees. So he and Libby roll up one evening, already half-cut as far as I could tell. Then, halfway through the evening...

Guy Burgess showed up blind drunk. Amongst the many things Guy had a reputation for was his talent for sketching. He was quite the draftsman. So Libby Harvey immediately makes a beeline for him and insists he draws her portrait. Another thing Guy was known for, he was appalling with women. Made no attempt to hide his contempt for the whole lot of them.

And on top of this, he absolutely loathed Americans. So, of course, he says, no, but Americans are a persistent lot. And soon she's at him again and she won't leave him alone. Eventually, he grabs a pad and paper and starts drawing. Refuses to let her take so much as a peek until it's done. And then when he's finished, he turns the pad around. In the picture, she's sprawled on her back, naked from the waist down, legs apart.

All the color drains from her face and she crashes out of the party sobbing. Just as they head out of the door, Bill Harvey turns and looks back at me and Guy with, well, murder in his eyes. That's the only way I can describe it. Burgess's stunt was far more than a social indiscretion and Philby knew it. Philby couldn't afford to risk any negative attention while the Homer situation was playing out.

I apologized unreservedly for Guy's conduct. I didn't try to explain it. I was unequivocal. Harvey listened with his head down, smoking. And then, when I'd finished, he looked up. He stubbed out his cigarette, and without a flicker of emotion, he told me to forget it. I took that to mean it was water under the bridge for both of us. But it wasn't. It was the opposite. He was going to destroy us.

Harvey's opportunity came just a few months later. I'd been tipped off that SIS were now on to McLean. Burgess, meanwhile, had continued to prod and provoke his American colleagues. When he managed to pick up three speeding tickets in a single day, the governor of Virginia complained that Burgess was abusing his diplomatic privileges. The British embassy, after consulting with London, sent him home.

Philby saw his opportunity. I told him he had to warn Maclean as soon as he touched down. Burgess did as he was told and sounded the alarm to Maclean and awaited further instructions. And suddenly it all kicked off. Officers from SIS, MI5 and the British Foreign Service applied to the UK's most senior diplomat, the Foreign Secretary, for permission to interrogate Maclean.

Philby, who was across so many lines of communication, quickly heard the news. I managed to get hold of my control and we arranged to meet. He told me in no uncertain terms that McClane 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. Which leads us back to where we started this episode. Burgess gives McClane his orders, shows up at his family home...

and the two of them drive down to Southampton before boarding a ferry to France and making their way to Moscow. Guy wasn't supposed to go with him, but he panics, I think. He knew it was only a matter of time before they came after him, so he defected too. When news reached Bill Harvey of Burgess and Maclean's disappearance...

His instincts immediately suggested to him that Philby was involved. And so he starts piecing the whole thing together. Harvey was no fool, and fueled by his out of contempt for the lot of us, he hit the jackpot. Now he's convinced, I am a Russian agent. Harvey compiled a memo, which he sent directly to the CIA's director, Walter Beadle Smith.

In the memo, Harvey meticulously joined together the dots of Philby's betrayal, with particular emphasis on the doomed Operation Valuable, and the fact that Philby had been the one to review the decrypts connected to Homer. And then, of course, there was his irrational friendship with Guy Burgess. To Harvey's mind, there was no doubt. Philby was the third man. If it wasn't for the Burgess connection...

i may have squeaked through who knows harvey's memo was sent to beadle smith on the 13th of june 1951 just over two weeks after burgess and mclean's disappearance beadle smith immediately revoked philby's diplomatic status and philby was summoned to london to face his superiors but not everyone was ready to consider philby a russian spy his 15-year charm offensive had paid dividends

and his close friends in SIS refused point blank to believe he was a traitor. Agents in MI5, however, were more willing to believe in his treachery. The furore over his friendship with Burgess was immense, and so was the embarrassment in British and American circles that penetration agents had so effectively compromised both SIS and CIA operations.

Philby's boss at SIS realized he had no choice but to terminate Philby's service. While he remained on their books, his cover in the Foreign Service ended immediately. I was asked to resign and I did. They severed my contract with a payoff of £4,000, which was quite a lot back then. But then I was brought to London to attend a sort of mock trial. It was set up to see if they had enough to prosecute me.

Some people at MI5, who always hated SIS anyway, had put together a dossier. It went all the way back to my time in Vienna when I met Lizzie. I mean, the whole thing was incredibly plausible, except for one crucial thing. They didn't have any actual evidence. MI5 hired a well-known cross-examiner, a man called Helenus Milmo, to interrogate Philby.

Apparently Milmo had this rapid-fire style that would overwhelm and disorientate the person on the receiving end that earned him the nickname Buster. But however good Milmo was at extracting confessions, he was no match for Philby. I'd had this wretched stammer as a child, which after all these years I'd nearly overcome. Well, what do you know? It decided to make a reappearance when Milmo started on me.

It was a masterstroke. Confronted with Philby's stammer, Milmo never managed to build up a head of steam. He had some pretty good stuff up his sleeve. He had breakdowns of increased radio traffic that matched exactly the times when I'd been filing reports to the Russians, that kind of thing. But I knew that to try and disagree or prove him wrong would be a defense that would provoke even more suspicion. So when presented with these coincidences, I just told him I had no idea how to explain them.

Milmo eventually threw in the towel. He advised the MI5 officers who'd briefed him that there was nothing on Philby that would stand up in a court of law. Without any incriminating evidence, MI5 had to suspend the case. Philby was isolated and unemployable. He had his severance money to live off.

But the real pain of his situation lay in the fact that the Russian service, who he had so loyally fed information to for so long, had also cut him off. As if that wasn't bad enough, Eileen decided to turn me in. Now fully aware of her husband's secret double life, Eileen was too hurt by the betrayals and the boozing to let Philby off the hook.

She wrote a letter to the Foreign Service confirming, unequivocally, that her husband, Kim Philby, was the third man. And yet no further action was taken. Eileen had no hard evidence, and her mental health issues could well have undermined her testimony. And, as numerous accounts confirm...

The affection and loyalty Philby inspired continued to protect him, especially amongst his SIS colleagues. The Philbys remained married and moved to a house in rural Sussex, where the frustrated Eileen began to have her accidents again. On one occasion, she crashed her car into a shop window. I had to get out, but I was trapped with nothing coming from Moscow, not a peep.

I had to sweat it out. But for how long? There were some who refused to give up their quest to expose Philby. J. Edgar Hoover was incensed that the man he was convinced was a Soviet agent should escape unpunished. By now, the period known as the Red Scare was well and truly underway in the U.S., with McCarthyism ramping up.

Anyone with Soviet affiliations was in the firing line. In October 1955, Hoover briefs an American paper to publish my name. This then gets picked up by the British press. And suddenly I'm all over the papers as the third man. This coincided with the Soviet authorities finally admitting officially that Burgess and McLean were now living in Russia.

But Hoover had underestimated how much the British hated this kind of American bullying. And we all felt that McCarthy was a thoroughly unpleasant sort of zealot. Dick Bruman White, an ex-SIS colleague of Philby's, was commissioned to write a report for the British Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan. Good old Dick. I don't know how much it was fueled by a knee-jerk reaction to Hoover's campaigning to have me locked up.

but he made it absolutely clear that the evidence pointed against me being a Russian agent. Armed with this evidence, Macmillan made a statement in the British Parliament declaring, unequivocally, that Philby was not the third man. But behind the scenes, Macmillan made my exoneration conditional on SIS striking me off their roster. As far as he was concerned, my spying days were over. On the morning of November 8th, 1955...

Kim Philby held a press conference at his mother Dora's apartment in the upmarket London district of Chelsea. Barely concealing his relief, Philby repeated the Foreign Secretary's assertion that he was not the third man. But it wasn't like I got off scot-free. I'd lost everything I'd worked for. My wife had gone insane and my family was about to implode.

The only thing that kept me going was the thought that when it all died down again, maybe then I could work my way back into the service. And amazingly, that opportunity did arrive. After a year in the wilderness, Philby's friends at SIS got him a job as a correspondent in Beirut, an area of growing interest to the intelligence service. Philby dutifully went out there, leaving Eileen and his children behind.

He quickly fell in love again, and when, in 1957, Eileen died in what some suspected was a suicide, he married for the third time. Slowly, he worked his way back into the ranks of British intelligence, and when he had secured himself a new post, the Soviets once again came calling, but it could never last.

In 1961, a KGB agent called Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the West. In his debriefing with SIS, he confirmed what so many had suspected, but none had yet been able to prove, that Philby was indeed the third man. The game was finally up, as they say.

My old friend Nick Elliott was dispatched to get a confession out of me. He showed up at my house in Beirut. We had a very civilized chat, and I told him, yes, I had been working for the Russian service. He then asked me to sign a confession in return for immunity from prosecution. I said I needed time, and I bought myself that time by feeding him the names of a bunch of people I said were other agents, none of whom actually were.

Elliot returned to London to confer with the higher-ups and, while he was faffing about, I put in motion a plan I'd been rehearsing since Burgess Maclean defected. On the 23rd of January, 1963, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter called the Dolmatova, bound for Odessa. On July 1st, Soviet officials confirmed that Harold Kim Philby had been granted political asylum.

I don't think SIS knew what to do with me in the end. Elliot felt personally betrayed, as did so many of them. But the only people who looked worse than me in this whole affair were the fools who'd been taken in. They didn't help me escape. No, but their endless prevaricating made it much, much more possible. Kim Philby did not receive the hero's welcome he expected when he finally arrived in Moscow. His greatest achievements were well behind him,

And his life soon dwindled into a twilight of heavy drinking and further complications in his love life. Eleanor, his third wife, joined him briefly, but soon gave up on the possibility of happiness in the Soviet Union. Philby married for a fourth time, and as Russia finally started to open up in the 1980s, received the occasional guest from his old days.

Chief among them, the author Graham Greene. After a while, I think I lost the capacity to know of any other way to live. I was an agent for the Russian service for the best part of 30 years. I'd been lying for a cause I believed in my whole adult life. Was it worth it? That's for others to judge. Did I regret it? No, I didn't. And I still don't. I believed in a new way of doing things. I still do.

I rejected God when I was a young boy, but that's not to say I never filled the void. How else do you think I could have done this if I didn't believe in it wholeheartedly? Harold Kim Philby died at 2 a.m. on the morning of May the 11th, 1988, in Moscow. His heart, which had been captured by a heady combination of Marxist ideology and so many women so often...

had finally given out on him. He was given a funeral befitting a national hero, shrouded in medals. The country he had betrayed his own for finally acknowledged the immense contribution he had made to what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. Philby's stature amongst Cold War super spies is unparalleled.

To remain at large for the best part of 30 years, spending at least 15 of them at the heart of British intelligence, was an incredible feat. He published a memoir in his lifetime, but many felt it was compromised by his KGB handlers who vetted the book. So I decided to write another one, but this time no one was going to get their hands on it. I was going to tell the truth.

Philby was writing this secret memoir that Spyscape has since acquired at the time of his death. With the book unfinished, he's still managed to take some of his secrets to his grave. If he had finished the book, we can only speculate as to what may have come out. But even in the sections we have, we sense a man still quite firm in his belief in a better world.

and still at peace with the massive betrayal he committed that sent so many to their death. I'm Rhianna Needs. You can see the Philby Papers and other treasures in the Spyscape collection at spiescape.com forward slash spy objects. Join us next week for the first of two parts on global disinformation campaigns, only on True Spies.

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The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Restrictions on foreign books and films were lifted, and historical records were declassified and released. But the West's economic prosperity never materialized as promised in Europe's East.

Many citizens of the new Russia became disillusioned by the economic crisis, rapid privatization, corruption, the first Chechen war, and premier Boris Yeltsin's very public drinking problem. In the same year, a new name joined the administration.

One, Vladimir Putin. And now we're in a completely different world. And what that's changed, I think, beyond the obvious technology, is a kind of theory about the relationship between information and democracy. True Spies, from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.