Philby’s Wife Says British Knew He Was Double Agent

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31584, 23 January 1968, Page 11

Philby’s Wife Says British Knew He Was Double Agent

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) NEW YORK, Jan. 22. British intelligence had known for seven years before Harold “Kim” Philby defected that he was a double agent working for the Soviet Union, his estranged American wife disclosed today. But it was only when' a high-level Soviet intelligence officer, who switched his allegiance to the West, presented “evidence conclusively incriminating him as a Russian agent” that the British decided to act and precipitated Philby’s defection, according to Eleanor Philby. In an excerpt from her new

book, “The Spy I Married,” published in the February issue of the “Ladies’ Home Journal,” Mrs Philby describes how she reported this to her husband when she joined him in Moscow. “This seemed to interest him intensely,” she writes. “If the British had known about his Russian connections all along, then he was the one who had been fooled. He thought he was spying on them, but they were keeping an eye on him trying to use him against the Russians without his knowing it. If this were true, most of what he passed on to Soviet intelligence would be valueless.” But, he says, he recovered from his dismay and told her quietly, but with more than a touch of pride: “I’ve been

working for the Russians for 30 years, not just for seven.” Mrs Philby, who met her husband while married to an American correspondent stationed in the Middle East, said she had no idea Philby was a Russian spy. She knew him only as a British journalist “connected with M. 1.6— British intelligence. She left Philby in May of 1965 after he became involved with Melinda Mac Lean, wife of a fellow British defector, Donald Mac Lean. Mrs Philby describes her husband as a charming, attentive and sentimental husband but said he frequently “drank himself into insensibility,” both before and after his defection. When she asked him whether he considered her

and his children or the Communist Party more important in his life, he answered without a moment’s hesitation: “The party, of course.” But Mrs Philby recalls also how he taught her daughter to recite the names of all the British monarchs and how at the final parting he gave her his old Westminster School scarf, “which he had worn constantly and which I knew he loved.”