Banner-waving XR zealots let off smoke flares, pour black paint outside Home Office British tennis fans are kicked out for chanting 'You're just a s*** Andy Murray' during Cameron Norrie's Farmer, 71, who appeared on BBC documentary This Farming Life is killed by one of his own cows. Five minutes later, Im watching the shadow of a tall, leafless tree falling against the snow on the path in front of my grandfathers tombstone, wondering who it was whod been here in the past few hours and placed a bunch of brightly coloured flowers at the foot of his grave. If we were really lucky, sometimes and this was still the 1980s thered be a distant ringing, and from a compartment near the gear stick, our escort would pull out a telephone attached to a spiral cord, which hed talk into in a low voice, repeating the same two words, horosho and da, again and again before hanging up. In Philbys own eyes he was working for the shape of things to come from which his country would benefit., Kim went to great efforts upon his return to England to cover the traces of his Communist background joining the Anglo-German fellowship in 1934, and editing its pro-Hitler magazine. But again, it was justifiable in his mind. Philby, though, began seeing Melinda on the side, confessing as much to his wife and saying that he was just trying to make [Melindas] life happier as she had been miserable for the last 15 years. She was an object of both pity and fascination, and to get away from it all, she moved from their house on the Kent-Surrey border to Switzerland, with her mother. While working as a senior member of British intelligence, he spied on behalf of the Soviet KGB and NKVD from the early 1930s until 1963, when he defected to Moscow. Melinda fitted the bill. Halfway there, they switched cars and drove to a small airport in the Soviet zone of Austria. We got together in our cabin to discuss our plans. Published by Charlotte Philby on 12th June 2018. She was a horsey product of the. According to a recent piece in the Daily Telegraph: For years Philby had sabotaged Allied missions behind the Iron Curtain and had calculatedly sent dozens of agents to their deaths. Most famously, he was almost certainly responsible for the tip-off which led to the deaths of the first British-sponsored Albanians who parachuted in to remove Enver Hoxhas Communist regime. Charlotte Philby, daughter of John Philby, H.A.R. Today, Moscows main strip, Tverskaya Ryad which I remember from childhood holidays as a drab grey stretch clotted with queues of people who looked like they didnt know what they were waiting for (though it was usually oranges or ice cream) is barely recognisable: a knot of designer stores and mobile-phone shops, interspersed with garish billboards hanging between the buildings above the busy main road. Edith and Kim: The brilliant new historical spy novel based on the true story of the woman behind the Cambridge spies in Cold War espionage. Burgess predeceased him by 20 years, carried off by angina, an abused liver and hardening of the arteries. It was seeing those photos as a six-year-old child which helped first alert me to the fact that there was something a bit different about grandpa Kimsky. While I was researching this article, Bennett also the author of An Englishman Abroad, in which he imagines Guy Burgesss final years in Moscow: lonely, pathetic and wholly unfulfilled responded to a shorter opinion piece I wrote for this paper last July in which I defended my grandfathers decision not to apologise publicly for his actions. Did you feel that as you uncovered her story?I feel a huge amount of sympathy for her situation, and admiration, really. Later she became a journalist at the Independent. The colourful characters of spymaster Gertrude Bell (the first female officer in the British Army), the legendary "Lawrence of Arabia," and the astute traitor St. John Philby (father of the notorious KGB double-spy Kim Philby) are all so dynamic that their heroics are hard to believe, but nevertheless true and soundly researched by a perceptive . Kim sacrificed everything he had: he risked his life and the lives of others, he betrayed his colleagues and duped his family and friends (even spying on his own father at one stage, as will be explained shortly) because he genuinely believed from the point when he joined the movement and set his sights against the seemingly irrepressible rise of Fascism that Communism was a cause worth holding dear above all else. Melinda, it turned out, had driven to Lausanne, where tickets were waiting and luggage had been left in a station locker. The spy novelist, whose latest book tells the story of her grandfather Kim Philby and the Soviet agent Edith Tudor-Hart, talks about the perils of writing about family, and why female spies get overlooked. Rebuilding it meant forging a unique friendship with the very woman he left her for. Journalists look after their own and Philby masqueraded as a devil-may-care drunken newspaperman and so was treated more indulgently by those in his profession.. November 16, 2017. 1941Transferred to SIS Iberian sub-section. Philby spied on his poor wife Aileen, the mother of his children His passage up to the highest levels of MI6 was so swift and easy that from time to time his Soviet controllers worried he must. History / World. In his diary for the London Review of Books, Bennett wrote: Philby does seem to have been responsible for the betrayal and presumed torture and death of a network of agents in a way thats never been proved of Blunt. And he kept his word to the end." An Indian Civil Service officer turned Arabist and explorer, he spent 20 years travelling across the desert on camelback charting Saudis unexplored Empty Quarter, crossing paths with Lawrence of Arabia, and eventually marrying a slave-girl given to him by his friend King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, to whom he spent many years as personal advisor. Did your father, John, talk about his father?We never had a family meeting where he said: Right, Im going to explain to you who your grandfather was. That was not at all the kind of person he was. "I tried everything to save him; after all, he was killing himself. And all along he was handing information straight back into the hands of the Russians. There have been endless attempts to understand how this gregarious, public-school educated English chap and his fellow Cambridge spies could have been persuaded to betray their country, and dupe their family and their friends. There, a tall man in a blue suit and red bow-tie held out his hand and said: I am Donald Maclean. With him in the room was Guy Burgess. She emphasised the strength and goodness of their fathers moral and political beliefs as a committed communist who wanted peaceful co-existence between East and West. Just five years ago, my mum and I were refused service in a shop in Arizona on account of the name on our credit cards. Were you always aware that your family had this extraordinary history? While a student at the University of Cambridge, Philby became a communist and in 1933 a Soviet agent. In fact, he had arrived in Moscow days earlier, and can be seen on film standing just back from his fathers coffin. Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview. ", His habit was fuelled by his sorrow over what he saw around him, she added. I am a private person and a political person. I am learning more about my family everyday.. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow, avoiding capture, Kim was the chief suspect for having given them the heads-up. It was a few years after this, in 1933, that Kim went to Vienna. After all, they won the war.'". Image: Barney Beech, The courtyard outside Kim's flat. He married Litzi Friedman, a fellow activist and an Austrian Jew, to help her escape persecution. Image: Beech Beech. Today, as Kims widow greets me at the door, offering me a pair of woollen slippers, the atmosphere is quiet and calm. There are so many ways that Kims choices have continued to occupy my mind since my dad died in 2009, but I do feel that this book draws a line under it. Some could never quite come to terms that he was a traitor. The shiny black 44 rumbles slowly through the graveyard. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. How? After reading it briefly, my dad had simply shrugged and tossed the note in the bin. The first reports that Russia ranks 143rd in a list of the worlds freest economies, just one spot higher than countries with repressed economies like Vietnam, Ecuador, Belarus and Ukraine, while the next tells how oligarch Roman Abramovich, whose wealth is valued at 7 billion, has just snapped up 35 notable artworks to decorate his 560ft private yacht. Part of the Family and A Double Life are available now. The KGB's only object in the world is to destroy me and the agency. Fergie is horrified that [Donald] might have done something wrong at the office and the FO will be very angry when he returns. Im reminded of a brief phone conversation I had earlier this morning with one of Kims old KGB comrades, whom Id been in contact with during the course of my research for this article, who told me that a gang of five or six of Kims former colleagues still meet up every month and raise a toast in his honour. 1912Harold Adrian Russell Kim Philby is born on 1 January in Amballa, India, the son of Dora and St John. "It was winter and we were going out for a walk and I found one of my boots had disappeared. Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. Rufina Pukhova, his Russian-Polish wife, said Philby struggled to control his drinking by downing only two glasses of cognac a night and then handing her the bottle to hide. 1934Marries Communist Jew Litzi Friedman. Takes charge of British intelligence in Spain and Portugal. No doubt your grandfather would have disapproved of the sharp contrasts in present-day Russia, he said. Seconds later, were hurtling at break-neck speed out of the cemetery, along the motorway, the driver making various calls en route, each consisting of just a few short sentences, before turning into a different burial ground up the road, manned with armed guards. As well as being my grandfather whom I remember from childhood trips to Russia as a funny old man with a beaming smile, who dressed almost exclusively in white vests and braces Kim Philby, to this day, remains one of the most significant double agents in modern history. A large amount of the letters in the book are lifted verbatim from those. Your email address will not be published. The kitchen where he would ritualistically make his daily breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast (another English habit he never broke), and spent hours cooking every evening, is now rich with the smell of the savoury pancakes Rufa is preparing for our five-hour feast. In 1955, Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, issued a statement confirming that there was no evidence that Kim Philby was a Soviet agent. In 1949 Kim Philby became SIS representative in Washington, as top British Secret Service officer working in liaison with the CIA and FBI. Kim Philby was born on January 1, 1912 in Ambala, Punjab, British India [now Haryana, India]. He passed over 900 British documents to the KGB. When they had not returned on the Sunday night, her mother was frantic. With his brilliant mind and First from Cambridge, Maclean could bask in being the superior intellect to an under-educated, attractive woman who was both affectionate and popular, where he was withdrawn, giving nothing of himself away. The last time I arrived at this flat, aged six, it was just a few days after Kims death, and my parents and I were met by a sea of swollen eyes. Maclean accused Philby of being a double agent working for the British and they stopped speaking. And sadness. This is the first time Ive ever stood at the foot of my grandfathers grave, but I know it instantly. It seemed a fitting finale for such a notable spy. Her fourth novel, Edith and Kim, tells the linked stories of her grandfather and Edith Tudor-Hart, a Jewish photojournalist born in Vienna, who studied at the Bauhaus, married an Englishman, worked as a Soviet agent in London and introduced Kim to his Russian handler. How easy did you find it to capture Kims voice?I spent so long with his letters and they gave me such an insight into the expressions he used, the way he spoke, how he flipped between being tender and reflective and witty and scathing, and his very English obsession with the weather. As previously noted, this has been taken as a sign along with his heavy drinking that in the end, Kim was left a broken man, disillusioned and dejected, having arrived in Moscow expecting to be given important assignments and a high-ranking role in the KGB, only to be left with very little to do, and plied with booze to keep him compliant. What counted though against Blunt, and Burgess too, was that they werent journo-friendly. When her brother-in-law, Alan Maclean, asked her whether she would join Donald if she knew for sure that he was behind the Iron Curtain, she gave a firm No. The central post office, where Kim would come every morning to pick up his mail and a stack of British and American newspapers, stands halfway up on the left. For another, hed made his bed. Kims case was not helped by the fact that several of his Soviet controllers including Mar, the man who recruited him had later been executed as enemies of the people. Because hed told her from the very start. 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