Episode Transcript
Welcome back, everybody.
Today's story is going to be the double Agent Kim Philmy.
Before we get to Kim Philby, what I wanted this to promote a little bit is my news book Dog Psychology, which you can get at Amazon, on kindle and paperback.
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All right, let's go to the Enigmatic betrayal the Double life of Kim Philby.
The reason I brought this podcast up is because there's a great show on Prime called Spies Among Friends, and it was a great story about Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby.
Some of it is not accurate, which is what they tell you ahead of time anyway, but it was still a great spy show.
It I think it's six episodes, but an hour apiece.
So Harold Philby, known to the world as Kim, was born on January first, nineteen twelve and am Bala, India under the shadow of the British Raj.
His father, the renowned explorer Harry Saint John Philby, instilled in young Kim a fascination with Asia, but it was the turbulent inter wars years that forged his path.
Was one of history's most notorious double agents.
Philby was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Philby emerges a brilliant but restless intellect.
He was drawn to left his causes amid the rise of fascism in Europe.
In nineteen thirty three, a formative trip to Vienna exposed Philby to the brutal suppression of socialists during the Australian Civil War.
The Austrian Civil War, he married a woman by the name of Litzi Friedman, an Austrian communist firebrand twenty years is younger, in a hasty union that facilitated his escape.
But that wasn't it.
This clandestant marriage, rarely discussed in biographies, marked the inception of his covert existence.
You see back in London, Philby was recruited by Soviet agent Arnold Deutsch in a dimly lit rendezvous orchestrated by his wife Friedman herself.
By the nineteen thirties, phil had infiltrated the British establishment, suggesting fellow Cambridge graduates for Soviet recruitment does birthing the infamous Cambridge five, spiring his audacious foray into the Spanish civil wars of freelance journalists for the time consumed a darker mandate, which was to assassinate General Franco.
Lacking the resolve for direct action, Philby instead survived the Republican shell explosion in nineteen thirty seven that obliterated his car and fellow reporters, but it earned him an unlikely medal from Franco.
In an entrede of fascist in his circles.
The near death exp episode, coupled with a fleeting affair with pro Hitler aristocrat Francis Dobel, revealed his chameleon like contradictions and character.
Philby's assent in six during World War Two was meteoric and ironic.
In nineteen forty four, he was appointed head of Section nine, the Anti Communist Division, a position from which he sabotaged operations in Albania.
He dispatched British agents to certain doom, betraying them to Soviet handlers without remorse a lists or non narrow escape.
In nineteen forty five, when he neutralized the threat of defector Konstantine Volkoff, who held most secrets that could have unmasked the ring, but by ensuring Volkov's swift rendition to Moscow, suspicions mounted.
In nineteen fifty one, after colleagues Guy Burgess and Donald McLain defected, prompted by Philby's cryptic telegram urging Burgess to move his convertible.
Cleared by a British inquiry and astonishing lapse and vigilance, Philby resumed duties in Beyroute.
Were there he married an American by the name of Eleanor Brewer amid another affair.
Yet in nineteen sixty three, cornered by mounting evidence, he fled to Moscow, leaving behind a trail of shattered lives, including five children from his bigamous union with Eileen Firs.
In the Soviet Union, Philby indulged in heavy drinking and further entanglements, notably an affair with Melinda McLain that's right, the wife of his former comrade, and his handlers grew where Yelena Mortshkinskaya, a Soviet intelligence chief, long suspected of him being a triple agent loyal to Britain due to his uncanny successes.
Philby died eventually as a disillusion figure in drab Moscow flat in nineteen eighty eight.
His legacy is a testament to ideological fervor's corrosive toll.
And that's the story of Kim Philby, at least part of it.
It's a big story.
There's a lot of books out there that cover much more than we covered today.
I just wanted to give you a brief story for your week to enjoy, and that's it for now.