Master spy Philby dead

Press, 13 May 1988, Page 8

Master spy Philby dead

NZPA-Reuter London The British master spy, Harold (Kim) Philby, whose 30 years of treachery as a Soviet double agent haunted Western intelligence at the height of the Cold War, has died in the Soviet Union.

A Foreign Office spokesman said word of his death at the age of 76 had come from the Soviet Embassy in London but no details were given. Philby fled to Moscow in 1963 after years of leading British anti-Ssoviet espionage operations and liaising with United States intelligence — all the time betraying secrets. His exposure as one of the most successful agents of the Soviet K.G.B. caused a scandal in Britain and for years soured relations with America’s Central Intelligence Agency. A diplomat and journalist, he used his upper class background and good social and political connections in the British establishment to trade in treason. The secrets he passed to Moscow probably sent hundreds of British agents to their deaths. “The Times” of London quoted one former intelligence agent who knew Philby as saying: “I will have to open a bottle of champagne.” Philby was the “Third Man” in a ring of former Cambridge University graduates recruited to Soviet intelligence in the early 19305. When his accomplices, the Foreign Office diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow in 1951 he was just a step away from becoming “C” — the head of intelligence operations, but the defection threw suspicion on Philby.

He said in an interview with the British journalist, Philip Knightley, that it was “that bloody man Burgess” who robbed him of his greatest prize by defecting. , After the Burgess-Maclean Affair, he

worked as a journalist and finally fled to Moscow from Beirut as the evidence piled up against him. In the Soviet Union he was hailed as a hero and made a K.G.B. general. His value to the Soviet secret service was clearly immense and he said earlier this year that he was still employed by the K.G.B. He listened to cricket commentaries on British radio and yearned only for a few delicacies from home such as marmalade and strawberry jam. He never tried to return.

Philby lived with his Russian wife, Rufa, in Moscow and enjoyed the privileges of a Dacha, or country house. Unlike Burgess, he remained active in the K.G.B. and never sought the company of Westerners.

“I want to be buried in the Soviet Union, in this country which I have considered to be my own ever since the 19305,” he told Knightley in a rare interview. Maclean’s remains were buried in a churchyard in a southern English village in 1983. Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual who drank heavily after his defection to Mocow and never came to terms with Soviet life, died 20 years ago of cancer.

Philby, Burgess and Maclean, as well as “Fourth Man” Anthony Blunt, who was publicly exposed as a spy in the late 19705, were all members of a Cambridge University group. Philby’s cause of death is not known. He goes to his grave carrying one last secret — who tipped him off in Beirut that he was about to be unmasked?

British newspapers speculated that it could have been Blunt, the effete Cambridge don who recruited spiess from among his students. Blunt rose to become the Queen’s official art historian but died in disgrace, stripped of his knighthood, in 1983. j®.