201. Kim Philby: Exiled in Moscow (Ep 6)

0:00for exclusive interviews bonus episodes ad-free listening early access to series first look at live show tickets a weekly newsletter and discounted books join the declassified club at the restth century. But who was he really working for all along? This is the dramatic conclusion of the Kim Philby story. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And Gordon, last time we left off with Kim having made this dramatic, really a dramatic showdown with his friend, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 in Beirut, this dramatic flight from Beirut, we, I think, teased a bit where he might have gone. Listeners may have been able to guess. But now Kim Philby is ensconced in Moscow.

1:07He is not particularly old, so he'll have much of his life in the Russian capital. And Philby will say later that he has come home in journeying to the Soviet Union. He'll wind up spending a third of his life there. And he's come to Moscow thinking that he'll be treated spending a third of his life there and he's he's come to Moscow thinking that he'll be treated as a top Soviet intelligence officer because of course he sees himself as a Soviet intelligence officer but what is life really like for Kim in Moscow but first a word from our sponsors HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation.

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4:18So, Kim's in Moscow. Now, he does have a few friends. Yeah. Who arrived in the Russian capital many years before him. Does he reach out to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean? I mean, you know, first thing you do when you arrive in a new town, you look up your old friends. They'd gone there in 1951. Kim Philby arrives in 1963. it's fascinating though because it's going to be very different with the two individuals burgess and mclean because philby will never see burgess again after their dinner at that chinese restaurant as burgess is about to flee back to london to warn mclean i mean this was a 51 this was a chinese restaurant in washington in washington dc by the time philby arrives in 1963, Burgess has been there 12 years.

5:06And doing really well, right? And in a Burgess-like way, has drunk himself into oblivion and is gravely ill. I mean, you can imagine for Guy Burgess, this guy who inhabits kind of clubland of London. He loves parties. He likes men. He likes going to the fancy gentleman's clubs of London, as we know, and he likes causing a scene. These are not things which go down very well, I think, in Cold War Moscow. It's a frowned upon in the Soviet Union. So for a while, he's banished to some industrial city by the Volga, hundreds of miles from Moscow, to keep a low profile. He's got no interest in learning Russian. He has problems finding boyfriends until they eventually give him one. At one point, he goes to a cocktail party

5:49at the Chinese embassy and urinates over the fireplace, a kind of marble fireplace, which had been sculpted in China, which again, classic Guy Burgess behavior. Is that why they sent him out to an industrial city on the border? I think that might have been even after he came back. But what's so interesting is Kim Philby arrives early 1963 off the freighter, which has brought him from Beirut. And at that point, Burgess is already in a very bad way, mentally and physically. And they do not meet. Now, there is a little bit of a mystery about why that could be the case. I mean, it could be that the KGB don't want Philby to see Burgess, you know, in this shocking way. Because it's not a great preview of where Kim himself could be headed.

6:36But supposedly, Burgess asks for Kim to come and see him. And the other reason may be that Philby himself does not want to see Burgess. This is interesting because it goes back to 1951, those last words just after the Chinese restaurant meeting where he goes, don't you go too. And Philby may well blame Burgess for running with McLean. And of course, as we remember, that's what pointed the finger at Philby and effectively leads to the end of his rise to the top of MI6 as he saw it. So that's the other theory is that Philby is resentful about it. Although the truth is Burgess himself may not have wanted to go back to the Soviet Union. It might have been that the KGB forced him. But if you're Philby, you can't really blame the KGB. Blame Burgess. And so Guy Burgess dies August 1963.

7:28You know, there were some rumors that maybe they'd been a deathbed meeting, but it doesn't seem like they met. I guess they didn't have much time to meet in the end. Just a few months. Now, Donald McLean, very different. Philby hadn't known him as well as Burgess. They'd kept their distance. We talked about Eleanor, who Kim Philby had met in Beirut, and then she divorced Sambra, become Kim Philby's next wife along the list. She comes out to Moscow, late 1963, which is interesting, I think, loyal to Kim. And she and Kim Philby start to hang out with Donald Mac mclean and mclean's wife melinda who'd also join mclean in moscow it's kind of interesting um mclean speaks russian works at a think tank

8:13he's more communist than the others the four of them play bridge and scrabble kind of interesting eleanor at first feels sorry for melinda mclean she can see the men joking about how when the revolution comes you know they're going to go visit paris and that rings that revolution never at first feel sorry for melinda mcclain she can see the men joking about how when the revolution comes you know they're gonna go visit paris and that revolution never that revolution never came never quite game eleanor tries to fit in but her and philby's relationship is a little bit tricky they're worried because i think they suspect rightly she's had some contact with cia and mi6 that maybe she's out there to to spy on him one day she goes for a walk with Philby and she says to him,

8:49Eleanor, what is more important in your life, me and the children or the Communist Party? And he answers without hesitation, the party, of course. She goes back to the US briefly to renew her passport. By the time she gets back to Moscow, what's happened? Philby is having an affair with melinda mclean donald mclean's wife i mean it's almost entirely predictable at this point yeah it's weird and predictable given his past behavior i mean again kim philby psychology you could spend days trying to work out what's going on behind that but so eleanor returns the kgb are suspicious of her they kind of question her about bottles of whiskey she's bought thinking maybe this is like a cia mi6 plot to poison philby with some of the whiskey but she realizes that you know philby's having an

9:36affair and uh she says you know i'm done basically and she goes back back to america he gives her his most treasured possession which it turns out is his westminster school scarf it's bizarre and uh she strangely enough i mean when you read her memoir she won't condemn him you know she says kim had the guts or the weakness to stand by a decision made 30 years ago whatever the cost to those who loved him most i mean slightly weird and then she dies of cancer you know a few years later 1968 i mean the women around philby most of them does not end well it is just it's really hard i think even now i mean we're this is the final episode of of the series to kind of truly understand why he did what he did.

10:30It's just, it's so, in some ways it's just so inhuman almost. Yeah. And like a machine. Yeah. To constantly value this relatively kind of abstract ideology. Over people. Over the actual people who are around him. Children, wives. I mean, it's remarkable. It is. It is. But here's the problem for him. He sacrificed all his relationships to the party, sees himself as a Soviet intelligence officer who has, in his words, come home. And of course, it is the classic problem of the defector, which is the KGB have first of all kind of wrung him dry about every detail he knows about MI6, CIA, and everything else, down to pension and pay and whatever else. But then, you know, he's done. I mean, this is the classic defector problem, isn't it? And he starts to feel like he's not useful, which then, you know, as anyone would if they don't actually have something to do.

11:31You feel you get idle, you get bored, you know, you turn more to drinking. And I mean, it just it is it's a classic, a very classic defector profile. The other kind of question hanging over even just his early days in Moscow is, well because he's not from Russia. Maybe he decides, well, I'm going to go back. I mean, re-defections are a thing in the Cold War. I mean, it's happened before. So the KGB has got to be wondering about this. Yeah, and I think there's an intrinsic wariness of him on the KGB side. I mean, he doesn't fit into their idea of a kind of working class hero because he's the cambridge man he's got the westminster scarf he's got the westminster star you know and he might talk about being a communist but you can see them kind of

12:34puzzling almost over philby and you know trying to work out well what you know what is he really up to they also wonder well did the Brits encourage him to go? You know, the kind of Nicholas Elliot confrontation in Beirut. They're sitting there going, that was a bit strange. Did, you know, maybe. Maybe the Brits doubled him back. Everyone is kind of so confused by the Nicholas Elliot confrontation in Beirut. But there's this view, could he be a plant? Could he have been either working for the British all along or be changed? I mean, remember, during the war, there'd been people who thought, the Second World War, when he's providing great intelligence to Moscow, who think he's a plant. You know, they don't kind of believe him.

13:18So there's always been this slight strain about maybe, maybe there's something suspicious about it. Maybe he's a double agent. And, you know, one analyst notes this on his file and the head of a security team for the KGB says you know maybe we need to be careful about him and so there is this layer of like people thinking is this a brilliant MI6 operation there will be for many years I think people who wonder that and I mean there are people in London who kind of hint at or propagate this story. And perhaps even if he wasn't a conscious double agent, that MI6 had somehow worked out he was a Soviet spy earlier and were feeding false information through him through the late 40s and into the 50s back to the Soviets. I mean,

14:02we now know it's absurd. Prime Minister Winston Churchill's private secretary in 1952, who tells one biographer of the chief of MI6, you know, there is one secret left in the Philby case and that I may not discuss. And, you know, people then start to speculate, well, maybe that secret is, you know, it was all a cunning wheeze by MI6. I mean, I guess it is, it's obviously a tremendous disaster for mi6 but a way to maybe reframe that disaster as a massive success is to hint that maybe that all along it has been a cunning plan and the result of all of that is that the kgb is wary of him and they bug his flat sure they read his letters you know they listen to his phone calls and i think you're right though the real risk is not that he's a double agent all along but that

14:49he might go back and you know there are i mean there are these also stories that there might have been security risks to him i mean one former cia officer cited by a British author says that there had been feasibility studies by the CIA from the 50s through the 70s of going after Burgess, McLean and Philby in Moscow and killing them. I find that a bit implausible. I mean, given what we know about how difficult it was for the CIA to operate in Moscow in that period and how few assets the agency had. The idea of A, actually trying to, I mean, certainly the CIA was doing a lot of roguish stuff in this period, but the idea that you would have a hit team in Moscow to kill Brits. I don't buy it. I don't buy it.

15:41Philby is trying to make himself useful. 1968, he publishes this memoir, My Silent War. Great title. It's a good title. Not the most reliable book, but a very good title. And it's score settling. There's big gaps in it. Interestingly enough, Graham Greene, his former MI6 colleague and the author, writes the introduction, compares his old friend to a Catholic who had helped Spain during the wars of religion who was kind of loyal to his faith rather than his country which is very graham green um you know which causes outrage at the time and people are like furious with graham green you know and and thinking like i can't believe you're defending philby because it's still in that that era but green is you know he's interested in the game of intelligence he's still in that era. But Green is interested in the game of intelligence.

16:26He's interested in the human side of it. And so I think Green can still separate the morality from the man to some extent. We talk about this a bit more in the bonus episode we did for club members with Tim Shipman, where we talk about Philby's impact on spy fiction. And in particular, the rendering in Graham Greene's The Human Factor, the really human rendering of the traitor in that novel, I think gives you some insight into how Graham Greene... I think Greene perhaps stops only slightly short of essentially, I guess,itting yeah morally what philby did but he gets he empathizes you can tell he empathizes with the position and i think writing the introduction to philby's memoir in 1968 is also a kind of public message basically going i'm still your

17:19friend which i think is interesting so philby's in a bad way and of course he does what philby does when he's in a bad way he just of course, he does what Philby does when he's in a bad way. He just starts drinking, you know, because he's not being used. I mean, there's even stories he might have tried to cut his wrists at one point. I mean, it's pretty bad. But then another traitor provides him with an escape raft. So George Blake had been another MI6 officer who had been arrested for spying for the Soviets. And he'd escaped prison, which is another wild story, which we'll do when we do the George Blake story, because he escapes Wormwood Scrubs prison. And then in the back of a kind of VW camper van gets driven across Europe.

17:57And eventually the Soviet Union. I've met the guy who drove him. Anyway, that's another story. But Blake has somehow popped up in moscow and the two become friends and in 1970 uh blake has got a wife there and a colleague of blake's wife called rufina is introduced to philby and she's 38 kind of feisty strong-willed redhead they double date going to a i mean this is kind of bizarre an american ice skating show two former mi6 traitors double dating and so philby pursues her he turns on the charm they go around to blake's dacha for the weekend you know you're a lucky bloke philby blake remarks to philby philby cooks uh her. And there's a kind of weird scene where he kind of goes into her bedroom at the Datcher late

18:50at night. He's clearly drunk and I think trying it on. He comes into Rafina's bedroom. He comes into Rafina, this woman's bedroom, you know, and sits at the end of the bed. And he says, I am an Englishman. And she says, yes, of course, you're a gentleman. I think kind of implying you're a gentleman. So maybe let's not do anything right now. It's like a kind of, and he, he, he then goes, I am an Englishman. And, and they have this weird drunken conversation, which she finds charming and romantic. And I think, I mean, each to their own. It doesn't sound particularly charming. No, I have to say it doesn't kind of. Does that line work for other Englishmen? You just sit down on the end of someone's bed and just pronounce your nationality.

19:30I'm an Englishman. I don't suggest anyone listening tries it. But if it has worked, please reach out to us. With your stories, that's a very different type of podcast. We're going down if we start doing those stories. She finds it endearing. They push the relationship on. And, you know know she's actually she reads dissident literature she's not a kgb person in any way but fascinatingly this becomes the most enduring relationship kim philby has and arguably the most successful stabilizes him he's still drinking but he's worried about losing her so he you know he tones it down enough that uh that he stabilizes and you know they do appear devoted to each other even though yeah i mean there is still a fair bit of drinking they live

20:18in a flat near pushkin square walls lined with books i think think 12,000 books, including Guy Burgess's library, which he donated on his death. Lots of Len Dayton, John le Carré, and Graham Greene. Do we have any sense of how Philby reacted, for example, to Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy, which is quite obviously about him? Because in one way, you could see him being exceptionally proud that he is the main character in what's going to become one of the best, one of the top espionage novels written in the 20th century. It's essentially about him. Do we know? No, we don't know. But he does read the Le Carreys. I mean, he doesn't have a relationship with John Le Carreys, but he certainly reads all these books.

21:17And it's part of, I think, as well, his continued link back home. So he can't quite let go. I mean, you know, his flat sounds bizarre. I mean, on the wall, there's a large photo of his father in Arab dress. So there's a bit of that. Plus two pics of Che Guevara. You know, kind of the communist thing. He sits there listening to the BBC. Good man. The World Service on the radio. Yet another Bin Laden comparison. Bin Laden used to listen to the World Service. Listen to the BBC World Service and an Arsenal supporter. So Kim Philby and Bin um uh his kids visit and come back and forth and he asked them to bring things like oxford coarse cut marmalade never had that what is that it's like it's marmalade

21:57but i guess coarse cut because you've got big bits of the peel in it rather than it being smooth it's good is that jam yeah it's a jam? Yeah. It's sort of jam. Orange jam. It's orange jam. Yeah, but we call it marmalade. Okay. He's living this kind of slightly drifting life. But what's interesting is having tried to get the KGB to use him for many years, eventually in the mid-70s, only in the mid-70s do they start to use him. So he's been there for over a decade. He's been there over a decade. there are a couple of kgb officers who who almost take him under their wing who were like who is this guy this guy called oleg kalugin who does that but also a guy who we've been met before in some of our podcasts mikhail lubimov smiley mike from our gordievsky

22:42series and smiley mike was uh is a specialist on the English. And he'd served in Britain as a KGB officer in the 60s. He's written his KGB dissertation on British people. And British people and how to spy on them. And Lubimov, who I've met many times, actually, and talked to him about Philby many times. I mean, he loves Philby. He has a kind of absolute kind of love for Philby. And I think it's partly because he takes him under his wing and he realises Philby could have some use to us. And I think, you know, he says Philby can advise us on how to rebuild operations in Britain, which have been knocked back after some expulsions in 1971. And they're struggling the kgb in britain i think in reality it's actually less about philby actually providing

23:31a lot of hard help and more about just making this guy feel like he's wanted in some way i mean it's almost sad smiley mike's kgb thesis was titled special traits of the british national character and their use in operational work yeah i once asked him for a copy and he said it's classified but i think it was basically how to talk to people in the pub in britain that's basically all it is it's a glorified conversational manual yeah i think that's what it is which is actually in what philby ends up doing so there's this thing where people say his most useful role from the mid-70s onwards which he did for a decade was running these seminars in a in a safe flat for young KGB officers who are being posted to

24:13Britain and I met one of them actually in Moscow many years ago and he kind of talked about it very fondly but basically you would role play being an English civil servant who you're trying to recruit or an MI5 officer who's questioning you about what you're up to. And then you'd have to role play whether you could get away with it or whether you could recruit the person. It actually would be quite useful. Yeah, it would be because, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you've got here someone who's a member of the British establishment. He probably understands it pretty well. Maybe he's a bit dated. So, yeah, the students would sit around in the class. That sofa around the coffee table with a simple spread for afternoon tea, a bottle of cognac.

25:07He would smoke cheap unfiltered Soviet cigarettes or galawazas when a delivery arrived. He would be a British counterintelligence agent. And, you know, it does seem like he offered some value to them that he could then role play and then to these officers superiors kind of grade the students yeah it's before you're posted to western europe or to the uk i mean that's that's that's valuable stuff but when it comes to his the way he's seen by the kgb and i think the mismatch between how he saw himself which was a kind of ranking officer in the Soviet intelligence service, and the reality that he faces in Moscow. The best example of that is the fact it takes 14 years, 14 years for him to be let in to the headquarters of the KGB after arriving.

26:02So he arrives in 1963. It is only 1977 that he's invited into KGB headquarters to give a lecture. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's kind of, that says a lot, I think. The KGB does not see him as an intelligence officer. They see him, rightly, as an asset. As a defector. Yeah, as a defector. He's a British trader. Yeah. And this lecture is fascinating that he gives to the KGB because he steps up to the podium and he tries a joke. It has taken me a long time to get here. My journey started in a London park more than 43 years ago. I have had occasion to drop in on quite a few other intelligence headquarters. I've held official passes to seven major intelligence headquarters four british sis mi6 soe from the war mi5 and

26:51gc and cs which is the code and cipher school gchq and three american cia fbi and nsa so i claim this is the eighth major intelligence organization which i've succeeded in penetrating and lubimov who's there says there was a terrible silence because everyone is thinking like you know what's he saying he's like he was a penetration agent of these places is he saying you know he's a penetration here sure sure. Sure. You know, surely, you know, he's not suggesting. And then Philby kind of adds a line of like, then I was surrounded by wolves, but this time it's comrades, you know, which is, I think, the punchline to the joke. So there with Philby kind of accepted in Moscow. Let's take a break. When we come back, we will look at the final chapter of Philby's life and the last great mystery.

27:46Who was he working for all along? Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. Welcome back. Filby's in Moscow, but he does manage to start traveling a bit, doesn't he? Yeah, he becomes a bit of a kind of communist tourist and gets taken to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, even to Cuba.

28:40Out to Cuba, goes by freighter as they think it's too risky to fly him over western airspace and when he takes this freighter he goes through the Straits of Dover, the English Channel, and on the deck he looks for his old prep school at Eastbourne, where he was a child but he and Rafina can't make it out, I mean, what a weird moment I think most of his time in Cuba is spent on tours of factories and listening to stories of the victory of socialism. Riveting stuff. My dream holiday. There's one particularly interesting trip, though, which is 1981. He goes to East Germany and he meets there Markus Wolf, who is the head of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service. So little known of him at the time in the West that he's up on stage in front of the Stasi introduced by Markus Wolf to talk to the Stasi in a similar way as he talked to the KGB staff in 77. And that's a tape which I discovered in the Stasi archives about 10 years ago.

29:47And it is amazing because it is Philby talking about his career, the breadth of his career, about incidents from being recruited right through to that Beirut confrontation, which leads to him to Moscow. Of course, we'll have that tape in a special exclusive bonus episode for club members who can listen more to Philby actually talking about his life, talking about the confrontation with Nicholas Elliott in Beirut. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating. It's interesting though, because in that tape, he gives the Stasi recruits essentially a message, which is if you are interrogated, never confess, never confess to anything, which I find to be so interesting because he sort of followed that advice.

30:35But you remember in that conversation with Nicholas Elliott, he kind of confesses. He does. Yeah. He doesn't doesn't take his own advice. I don't think he told the Stasi recruits about his confession, though, did he? No, I think in his in his account of it, I, you it, I held out, I bluffed, I did everything else. But the reality is we know he did kind of half confess. So, yeah, I agree. It's very interesting. Marcus Wolf, in his memoir, says he admired Philby as a man who supported the Soviet Union as a vehicle for anti-fascist ideas. Marcus Wolf writes this after the kind of end of the Cold War, and he says, you know, Philby's view of the Soviet Union had become more sober over time, and says he wasn't

31:12miserable in Moscow, but, you know, maybe he was more clear-eyed about Russia. But, you know, he would complain about the miserable economy and the gap between the rulers and the people. But there is one, one i found tantalizing detail in marcus volff's memoir about philby because philby tells marx volff when they're in east germany during this 1981 visit that mi6 in moscow had found ways of making several offers to philby to return to britain so clearly philby has told this to the starzy privately though that mi6 are contacting him and trying to get him back which i think is fascinating if that's true it would do you think it would suggest that when nicholas elliott confronts him in beirut

32:04that they don't actually want him to flee. Because we talked about this last time, this ongoing debate. I mean, it's still relevant today of whether the plan A or maybe the plan B coming out of that confrontation was for Phil B to go get him out of here. We don't want him in Britain. Does it change your view of that? Or is it just that enough time has gone by that it would be maybe less embarrassing for MI6 if he actually does return? It's sort of an open wound. It's almost now a propaganda coup to go, he's come back. I guess that's one possibility. And there is one other very interesting thread about this secret contacts, which might have taken place between him and mi6 during these years and that goes back to graham green the writer graham green

32:53you know worked with philby during the war as we talked about wrote the introduction to philby's memoir which may have been a message graham green eventually comes out to moscow to visit philby comes out 1986 they hadn't Philby. Comes out 1986. They hadn't seen each other in, you know, decades. So there's lots of mystery around this. And, you know, we talked before about, you know, had Greene suspected him of being a spy and written the third man about him. Greene had sent out a draft of the novel you talked about, The Human Factor, about, you know, which is kind of based on Philby, for Philby to comment on. And Philby had said, the only bit i don't like is the the suggestion that life in moscow is drab

33:29which we know is you know is true the same year that that book comes out green is asked what would he have done if he'd have known of philby's treason in the 40s during the war when they worked together and he said i think perhaps if in a drunken moment he had let slip a hint, I would have given him 24 hours to get clear and then reported it. Which of course is the rumor of what Elliot may have done in Beirut. So it's fascinating. Green goes out to meet him. Others don't. I mean, John le Carré's offered the chance when le Carré visits Moscow in the 80s to meet Kim Philby. And there's a message sent to Le Carre when he's on a kind of research visit. Philby's a great admirer of your works. Would you like to meet him?

34:14And Le Carre says, it was a horrific suggestion. I couldn't possibly have shook his hand. It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive. So there's a really interesting, I think, difference there between le carre and green about how they feel about philby would you have been le carre or green oh i'd have been green i think i would have i think curiosity would have got the better of me the journalist in me would be like come on the writer in you would you not i mean you know i'm thinking of the i you know i actually don't think these are comparable, but a rough analog would be Snowden today. Yeah. For example. I think. Eddie cools you up, says hi. David, you're in town. No, no, I wouldn't.

34:58I don't. I wouldn't want to see him. more look hooray in this moment of of this this guy turned philby turned the service inside out killed our agents yeah people died and i think green seems to have this kind of respect for the game yeah um i i don't think i'd be able to do it interesting i don't think i'd be able to do it i i think i'm more look hoorre. Although I understand Green as well. tell Rafina, his wife, that he realized that there was this bond between them. And the bond is they're both burdened by doubt. And I think this is really interesting because Green was a Catholic who'd committed to his faith partly because of a relationship, but then had lived a, let's say, complicated life.

36:02And I think clearly had had doubts and questions and struggled with his faith. And I think Philby, as a young man, had committed to communism. And I think what he's saying there is, we both had to live having made a commitment to an idea and then having to live with our own internal questioning of what it meant. Green is roundly criticized in the British press for having met with Philby, though, isn't he? His visit is described as being morally on par with having a holiday with Dr. Goebbels while the country was at war with Nazi Germany. That's the Daily Mail writing that. But then Green kind of doesn't care. He goes back three more times. He goes back multiple times. And there's a very good book by Robert Vecchia,

36:47The Writer and the Traitor, which looks at their relationship in a kind of double biography. But I think there is this question, which is, is it friendship or curiosity which is driving Green to go to Philby? Or is it something else? Because this other tantalizing question, which is, was Green actually doing something on the bidding of MI6? Because only later does it emerge that Graham Green has kept in touch with MI6 long after leaving MI6 during the war. He does the occasional job for them. He's on a kind of unofficial payroll until he dies. He's passing on all the letters and postcards he receives from kim philby to morris oldfield morris oldfield is like the counterintelligence officer who briefs philby on his way out to washington where we

37:38started this series in 49 and later as chief of mi6. And so the question is, is Green a back channel for MI6 to contact and keep contact? Why wouldn't it be? Yeah. I find it entirely plausible that, you know, it's a way of keeping tabs on Philby, but also passing messages and having a channel to say, if you want to get out,'s the marcus volf point mi6 has found a way to get hold of philby in moscow i mean this is a bit later but you could imagine one of the ways is through people going back and forth and you can absolutely believe that graham green was this channel or one of the channels of contacting philby just in case he wants to go back and i suppose it would be to our earlier point you could see how by the 80s when philby's been out for two decades he's been

38:35in moscow for two decades why it would be a kind of pr coup for the brits to get him back yeah because now you go i recant all my allegiance i made a mistake i'm sorry even if you don't say that just the mere act of coming back would be a psychological blow absolutely the soviets but by the time you get to green's visits you know philby is already you know his health is failing badly you know he's approaching the end and 11th of may 1988 philby dies for two hours mourners pass by the open casket the special kgb hall flowers medals around the casket george blake is there some of his friends from the uk i mean actually some of his children come over for it then they hammer the coffin shut and he's

39:26buried in a cemetery in moscow which is normally reserved for kgb generals and i visited there stood outside stood and paid my respects to kim at his at his gravestone kind of black gravestone with with very little writing just basically saying kim philby in a picture of him in his old age um but yeah it's it's it's quite a place to be laid to rest the place he thinks of as home he also told people that he was a kgb general right i mean he's buried there but it's not true is that he wasn't but that's the line. The Philby lore is that he was a KGB general, but no. No. And the reactions, I think, to his death are fascinating. So his old school friend, Tim Milne, who'd been at MI6 with him, been at school with him, is asked by his daughter, you know, I suppose you have mixed feelings.

40:19And Milne replies, no, for me, he died many years ago. I think that's, you know, for some people, it's like, I don't even want to think about him. Now, Miles Copeland, a friend from the CIA, is a little bit different from Milne. He says, I differ from my British colleagues who hated him. How could I hate him for being a double agent when we were doing the same thing to the other side? Very Graham Greene-esque in that sense. I am truly sorry the old bastard is dead. He was one of the best intelligence officers this century. The way he kept one step ahead of the hounds was masterful. I wish we had some like him operating for us. That's an interesting one. That is the intelligence professional response

41:01rather than the friends going, he good he was good he was he was as good as you get at playing the game what about nicholas elliott so nicholas elliott i love this he suggests that they write an obituary for philby which mysteriously indicates that he should be thanked for his service which many may not have fully appreciated in other words like elliot is like maybe we should make out he was a triple agent all along by like dropping these hints in an official obituary and i think you know it's a last attempt by nicholas elliot to kind of play with the heads of the kgb and maybe cover the fact that actually he was the one who got played by philby i think there's an element of that he's still thinking about the game but also i think of his own betrayal i mean but the kgb even to the end

41:49i i guess there there's a faction inside of it or a theory or a rumor that maybe philby had fooled them all along yeah maybe he really had been a triple agent. Yeah, because his former KGB controller, Uri Modin, who was the guy who helps organize the Burgess and McLean Escape 51, says he was never quite sure about Philby. He says, you know, in his memoir, I was reading it, my Cambridge friends, and he says, In the end, I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves, he says of the KGB. I mean, that is bizarre. Do you understand that line? Because I actually don't think it's true. I mean, Philby made a mockery of MI6, turned MI6 inside out, stole secrets from the Americans and passed them to the Russians. Compromised dozens of operations and agents for the Russians, for the Soviets.

42:51So how can they not? How can they think they've been fooled? of that exceptionally paranoid mentality that runs deep in Russian intelligence. That it was really, I mean, this kind of have stamps and Kim Philby statues and websites and books. And I mean, this is fascinating is that there's an exhibition in 2017 at the SVR about Philby. Rufina, his last wife, is still there along with the head of the SVR. And she only passes away in 2021. And it's interesting because even in that exhibition, they suddenly kind of shift the Philby story as well to portray him as primarily an anti-fascist. Because of course, you know know this is the narrative in modern day russia is it's not about communism it's about anti-fascism and so they they the emphasis slightly shifts on who

44:12philby was as being which is you know has some truth as being primarily an anti-fascist which i guess gets us as we close out this series you know to to what we make of Philby, this bizarre character and what drove him and how we see him. What was the core motivation for him? He seems like a truly ideological agent. I tend to just take him at his word. He talks constantly about his political ideals, motivating everything. I mean, the mentality, the mental model that he had of himself as a Soviet intelligence officer, not as a British trader. Although I understand that his relationship with his home country is complex, right? But I tend to just take him at his word that he's obviously didn't do this for money.

45:11There's a whole bunch, I'm sure there's ego and all these other psychological aspects that are wrapped up into it. But it seems like the nub, the core of it was that he was a zealot. He was a communist zealot and political ideologue. One of his KGB students, Michael Bogdanov, says the word to understand him is integrity. Now, that sounds quite challenging. But what he means, you know, we think of him as the master of deception. But he says integrity in the sense of he remained the same as he always was, which was an englishman so he he remains an englishman you know eating his marmalade you know doing the cricket stores at the end but not a member of the establishment he'd grown up with but also a communist which he'd

45:57been since he was a student at cambridge and he basically remains true to those things being an englishman and a communist to the end of his days. You know, his core path is consistent. He had his path and he stuck to it. So what was his favorite song in his later years? I love this fact. It was My Way by Frank Sinatra. Regrets I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption. Also, the first song played at Donald Trump's first inauguration. Trump and Philby. Trump and Philby. They might get on. They might get on. So I think, you know, because that's the, I think that's the positive view from McDonough, which is like this was a guy who basically stayed true to his core principles all the way through.

46:54The other view of him is he was someone who loved deceit and treachery and betraying people, of which I think there is also an element, isn't there? Yeah, those are not mutually exclusive positions. I think I'm always, I'm a little suspect of people who, and maybe Green does this a little bit too, where there's this kind of admiration for someone who just sticks to their ideals and has them. Because if you carry that all the way through, you'd say, well, you know, Adolf Hitler did a lot of bad stuff, but man, he really, you know, he had an ideology and he stuck to it. To me, you can't just evaluate. And again, it's coming at it from perhaps a moral or ethical judgment. You have to evaluate the ideology as well that the person has dedicated themselves to. And in this case, you have to confront the fact that Philby, and in particular Philby post Second World War, has decided to throw his lot in with an ideology that has resulted in that is

48:08murderous that has resulted in millions of people being killed yeah you know he is he's he's an ideologue i think he is also you know as we've said psychologically he has this weird fascination with deceit and deception and does seem to kind of have an addiction to it but yeah you can't to me you can't separate him from the ideology that he has decided to to throw his lot in with no i think that's absolutely right and i think in a way one of the almost tragedies of philby's life is that he doesn't last a couple more years and see the fall of the berlin wall and the end of the soviet union you know 89 to 91 that period where it all comes crashing down because you'd almost want for him to have seen the failure of the thing he had dedicated his life to and then see his reaction

48:56right and he never quite gets to you know he doesn't he doesn't make it there so i i agree i think it isn't this thing of like well are you a traitor right you know was he loyal to his ideas you have to have a moral judgment about what those ideas were as well and you know i think he has some doubts at some point yeah sure i think he must do you spoke to smiley mike though yeah about philby right yeah and and i found it interesting because smiley mike lubimov friend of philby you to me, like, Gordievsky's a traitor, whereas Philby's a hero. And I was like, well, what do you mean? He was like, well, Gordievsky changed sides. Whereas Philby was always, it's that point about consistency. He was always a Soviet penetration agent. He didn't betray MI6 because he never really worked for them my favorite philby quote is actually one that he

49:46gives when he's confronted in moscow by a journalist uh who says you know you know didn't you betray your country and philby says to betray you must first belong i never belonged i followed exactly the same line the whole of my adult life to To me, I think that unlocks a lot of Philby. Because what he's saying is, it again goes to the kind of upbringing, personality, his father, the establishment, the early life. It looks like he was part of the British establishment, but he never felt he was part of it. And he was never therefore loyal to it. So in his own mind, he never betrayed it because he never belonged to it. I mean, we think of him as emblematic of that, but he never did. In the first series we did on Philby, I did express some sympathy for him, which I'm going to qualify now.

50:42Because I think you can understand in the 30s being an anti-fascist and being drawn to this. But by the time I think you're right, you get to the Stalin period, the later period, the failure to adapt to that and change it, I don't think works for me. I'm afraid any sympathy I have disappears, not least the way he treated the women around him, the way he treated his friends. And I mean, intelligence can be a hard game, but there are a lot of people who died as a result of what Philby did. What do you think explains the continued fascination with him? I mean, I think there's fascination with him in the Soviet Union, Russia. There's fascination with him in the States. In particular, though, there's fascination with him in the UK. The

51:33Philby story is history at this point. I mean, we're talking about things that happened more than a half century ago in some cases, but why is it so fascinating to us today? Yeah. I mean, I kind of ponder that why you know why do we keep coming back to philby um you know philip knightley who's this brilliant journalist who meets him in moscow in the late 80s just before he dies you know says that philby for britain forced us to examine ourselves and kind of attitudes towards patriotism treachery class politics conviction so i think there is an element in which he opens up kind of conversations about so many other things because of the his the trajectory of his life but then in turn i think he fuels a kind of slightly masochistic brit obsession with traitors, you know, which is fueled by fiction.

52:27Yeah. And John le Carré and that world. You know, I think many individuals exert a fascination over the public, but I think rarely has one individual held a fascination for so many years for a country that they betrayed. You know what I mean? It's a very British thing, I think, to kind of become obsessed with your own traitors. You get the spies you deserve as a country. And maybe you also get the traitors you deserve. And I think Philby is maybe the traitor we deserve because he tells us so much about ourselves in Britain and holds up a mirror to us. Well, that fascination has even made its way into mi6 yeah and the way mi6 trains new recruits yeah i was told that new recruits for mi6 this is quite a

53:14few years ago was shown the film of philby in his mother's flat in 1955 denying that he was the third man. And they would sit in a room and they would be shown this video of their greatest traitor lying. Now, whether it was to teach them what a liar looked like or whether it was to teach them about the history and what happens when a traitor tears your service apart as he did? That's what they were shown. And someone told hope that listeners have enjoyed this incredible journey of, regardless of what you think about the man, an incredibly interesting and continually interesting character, even decades after his death. Just a reminder, of course, if you have listened to this entire series and not yet joined the club, shame on you, first of all.

54:26But second of all, we have an incredible compilation of bonus content that is attached to the series. A couple of deep dives into the impact and legacy of Philby in the UK and in the US, conversations about Philby's literary impact, a conversation with a real life CIA mole hunter. So a lot of great stuff for club members. So do, if you have not, do go and join the club at therestisclassified.com. We should also say that we have a really fascinating and wild series that we are launching next on Watergate. And it may be the case that many people don't know that Watergate is an exceptional spy story with some incredibly colorful characters at the center of it and some good old fashioned breaking and entering.

55:16We're going to reveal whether the CIA was actually the deep state was behind Watergate, because that is something which, you know, it still echoes today. I mean, recently, J.D. Vance, the current vice president of the United States, was talking about Watergate, says if it happened today, it'd be a 12-hour news story. But he was comparing the deep state taking down Nixon to what's happened to Donald Trump. So that's another thing we're going to be examining in that series for Watergate. So it's going to be a great listen. Do join us for that. Do join the club.