Espionage, Double-Dealing and Mystery: Kim Philby in Turkey

Year 2020, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 2 - 10, 20.01.2020

William Hale

Abstract

The double agent, the ‘mole in the circus’ who pretends to be working for the intelligence service of his or her country, while secretly working for its enemies, is a central character in spy novels and their cinematic and television off-shoots. In the British case, this theme is not pure fiction. Between 1939 and the early 1950s Britain’s Special Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) was penetrated by a subsequently notorious group of double agents, known as the ‘Cambridge Five’. As students or later, they were recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, only to gain crucial postings in its British equivalent, or in the diplomatic corps, during the second world war. As such, they succeeded in sabotaging a large part of post-war Britain’s attempted resistance to Stalin’s dictatorship, and were not unmasked until the 1950s and ‘sixties.
Chief among the ‘Five’, Kim1 Philby was the son of the noted Arabist H. St. John Philby. Converted to communism while a student at Trinity College Cambridge, he had been recruited by Soviet espionage in 1934.2 There is a whole library of books on his subsequent career,3 which can be briefly recounted. In 1940 Philby joined MI6, being first involved in preparing clandestine attacks on enemy targets, and counter-espionage. By the end of the second world war, he was the head of Section 9 of MI6, dealing with anti-Soviet operations, with the scandalous result that the section which was supposed to prevent Soviet espionage was itself headed by a Soviet agent.

Keywords

Kim Philby, Turkey, Britain, Espionage

References

• Strictly speaking, a nickname, drawn from the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel: (Philby’s real forenames were Harold Adrian Russell). Edward Harrison, The Young Kim Philby: Soviet Spy and British Intelligence Officer (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2012). Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (London, Bloomsbury, 2014). Tim Milne, Kim Philby: the Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy (London, Biteback Publishing, 2014). E. H. Cookridge, The Third Man: the Truth about Kim Philby, Double Agent (London, Arthur Barker Limited, 1968). Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: the Long Road to Moscow (Harmonndsworth, Penguin Books, 1978). Bruce Page, David Leitch and Philip Knightly, Philby: the Spy who Betrayed a Generation (London, Andre Deutsch, 1968). Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: the Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990). Ismail Akhmedov, In and Out of Stalin’s GRU: a Tatar’s Escape from Red Army Intelligence (London, Arms and Armour Press, 1984).