KIM PHILBY, THE BRITISH-SOVIET INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union.

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912-11 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. 

In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.

Born in British India, Philby was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934. After leaving Cambridge, Philby worked as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of France. 

In 1940, he began working for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). By the end of the Second World War he had become a high-ranking member.

In 1949, Philby was appointed first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington and served as chief British liaison with American intelligence agencies. During his career as an intelligence officer, he passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviet Union, including the Albanian Subversion, a scheme to overthrow the pro-Soviet government of Communist Albania.

Philby was suspected of tipping off two other spies under suspicion of Soviet espionage, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, both of whom subsequently fled to Moscow in May 1951. Under suspicion himself, Philby resigned from MI6 in July 1951 but was publicly exonerated by then-Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955. He resumed his career as both a journalist and a spy for MI6 in Beirut, but was forced to defect to Moscow after finally being unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1963. Philby lived in Moscow until his death in 1988.

Kim Philby was born in Ambala, Punjab, British India, to author and explorer St John Philby and his wife, Dora Johnston. A member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) at the time of Philby's birth, St John later became a civil servant in Mesopotamia and advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia.

Nicknamed Kim after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, Philby attended Aldro preparatory school, an all-boys school located in Shackleford, Surrey.

While working to aid German refugees in Vienna, Philby met Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann), a young Austrian communist of Hungarian Jewish origins. Philby admired the strength of her political convictions.

It is possible that it was a Viennese-born friend of Friedmann's in London, Edith Tudor Hart–herself, at this time, a Soviet agent-who first approached Philby about the possibility of working for Soviet intelligence.

In early 1934 Arnold Deutsch, another Soviet agent, was sent to University College London under the cover of a research appointment, but in reality had been assigned to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities.

More information: History Hit

I am really two people.
I am a private person and a political person.
Of course, if there is a conflict,
the political person comes first.

Kim Philby

DAVID JOHN MOORE CORNWELL AKA JOHN LE CARRÉ

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí.

 

They like Literature and they have been talking about John le Carré, the English author of espionage novels. Le Carré died two days ago and they have wanted to pay homage to him talking about his works.

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931-12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels. 

During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works.

Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. His books include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008), and Our Kind of Traitor (2010), all of which have been adapted for film or television.

More information: BBC

David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England.

Cornwell's schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School. He grew unhappy with the typically harsh English public school régime of the time.

From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950, he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West.

In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents. During his studies, he was a member of a dining society known as The Goblin Club.

More information: The Conversation

He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines, and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as John Bingham), and whilst being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961).

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn; he was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as John le Carré (le Carré is French for the square) -a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.

In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).

He left the service to work as a full-time novelist. Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as the upper-class traitor, codenamed Gerald by the KGB, the mole hunted by George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), are mystery fiction. Each features a retired spy, George Smiley, investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume, a murder at a boy's public school. 

Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political.

Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.

Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama.

More information: Scholar Commons

The novels emphasise the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of east–west moral equivalence. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible.

The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an antidote to James Bond, a character le Carré called an international gangster rather than a spy and whom he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature. 

In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.

In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy, saying I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".

He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance -all of that we called anti-communism prevailing during that time.

Download The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Once you've lived the inside-out
world of espionage, you never shed it.
It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

John le Carré