Kim Philby defects to Moscow

Kim Philby was a senior British intelligence officer who had been spying for the Soviet Union. He fled to Moscow in 1963, and he was part of a group known as the Cambridge Five.

Context

Philby was recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s while at Cambridge and worked for MI6 from 1940. After the war he rose to head its anti-Soviet section and served as liaison with the CIA and FBI in Washington. The other members of the Cambridge Five were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross.

Suspicion fell on him after Maclean and Burgess fled to Moscow in 1951. He was forced out of MI6 in 1951, cleared in a 1955 parliamentary statement, and worked as a journalist in Beirut. In January 1963, after a former colleague confronted him with evidence, he disappeared from Beirut and later surfaced in the Soviet Union, where he lived until his death in 1988.

The damage is hard to quantify, but Philby is believed to have betrayed Allied operations, among them failed attempts to land agents in Albania. His case led to a long period of mistrust between British and American intelligence services, and to hunts for further moles. He wrote a memoir, My Silent War, published in 1968, and was honoured by the KGB with a commemorative stamp after his death.