The Third Man
The havoc he wreaked stretched far and wide
The coded telegram from London to Moscow was short and direct. "We have recruited the son of an Anglo agent, adviser to Ibn-Saud, Philby." The reference was to one Harold A. R. Philby, a recent Cambridge graduate the Soviets had enlisted to spy on his pro-fascist father, an adviser to Saudi Arabia. But in "Kim" Philby, who signed up for the job in 1934, the Soviets got a prize far bigger than they had ever imagined. Over a spying career that lasted 30 years, Philby recruited other Soviet agents from the British establishment and gave away thousands of state secrets. In the process, he caused dozens of deaths. "Philby was truly evil, truly sinister," says Bruce Thompson, a history lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz. "He was a traitor without any scruples."
Philby was indeed the most ruthless and methodical of the members of the Cambridge Spy Ring--five young men at Cambridge University whom the Soviets tasked with penetrating the British intelligence services. Philby was particularly well positioned: He was in charge of Soviet counterintelligence, a liaison to the CIA in Washington, and even a onetime top candidate to become the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Only the paranoia of Joseph Stalin, who feared the Cambridge Five were triple agents, prevented Philby from doing more damage.
All of the Cambridge Five--the others were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross--were communists; they believed that the Soviet Union was a stronger bulwark against fascism than Depression-era Britain. But the five were also sexually rebellious, a characteristic the Soviets adroitly used in their recruitment. Burgess and Blunt were gay; Maclean was a confused bisexual; Cairncross and Philby were promiscuous heterosexuals. "They were all rebels against the conservative conventional sexual mores," says Christopher Andrew, author of The Sword and the Shield, a book about Soviet espionage. "[The Soviets] told them that fascism and sexual repression are different sides of the same coin."
Though egotism and youthful rebellion helped push him toward spying, Philby's commitment to communism was genuine. In his autobiography, he argues he did not betray his country so much as he stayed loyal to his ideals. Graham Greene, the English novelist and Philby's friend, said, "He was serving a cause, not himself." Unlike most spies, the Cambridge Five took little Soviet money.
Wooing secrets. Philby's success was driven by his duplicity, cleverness, and charisma. He used his considerable charm to woo women--including four wives--and to win the trust of his superiors and the secrets of his counterparts at the CIA. He was not a great intellectual, but he performed coolly under pressure and could analyze information from many perspectives.
During World War II, all of the Cambridge Five penetrated either the British Foreign Office or the intelligence services, giving the Soviets--then allies--secrets that the British and Americans were withholding. Cairncross, for example, gave Moscow information about a weakness in German tanks that helped the Soviets prevail in the pivotal Battle of Kursk. Spying for an ally who was fighting a common enemy may have been morally ambiguous, but the spy ring's Cold War espionage on behalf of Stalin's totalitarian state was not.
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