For another, hed made his bed. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. 1988Dies 11 May at the age of 76. Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview. He died in 1983 at the age of 69, recording beforehand that I do not at all regret having done what seemed and still seems to me my duty. Maclean and Burgess escape to Russia. However, Pukhova said the fear that she would leave had helped her husband temper his intake in later years. Anthony Blunt referred to her as the grandmother of the Cambridge spies. It had been a long time coming. She liked it that he was a man with strong beliefs, and agreed to stand by him. "I tried everything to save him; after all, he was killing himself. According to a recent piece in the Daily Telegraph: For years Philby had sabotaged Allied missions behind the Iron Curtain and had calculatedly sent dozens of agents to their deaths. Most famously, he was almost certainly responsible for the tip-off which led to the deaths of the first British-sponsored Albanians who parachuted in to remove Enver Hoxhas Communist regime. Regardless of what I think of her ideology, I greatly admire the fact that she was able to hold these various parts of her life being a photographer, being a single mother alongside being a revolutionary, feeling that she could change the world. She has three children and lives in London. But as the author Graham Greene my grandfathers close friend and a fellow British intelligence officer, who worked under him at MI6 wrote in the introduction to Kims autobiography, My Silent War: The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. Melinda fitted the bill. Here, surrounded by an extensive library, he would sit for hours. 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The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Kims case was not helped by the fact that several of his Soviet controllers including Mar, the man who recruited him had later been executed as enemies of the people. And here he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. Part of the Family and A Double Life are available now. Personal life. It had been a long time coming. Theirs had always been a stormy marriage, punctuated by bad behaviour on both sides and terrible rows. When her brother-in-law, Alan Maclean, asked her whether she would join Donald if she knew for sure that he was behind the Iron Curtain, she gave a firm No. Given a heros burial in Moscows Kuntsevo Cemetery. Philby spied on his poor wife Aileen, the mother of his children His passage up to the highest levels of MI6 was so swift and easy that from time to time his Soviet controllers worried he must. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow, avoiding capture, Kim was the chief suspect for having given them the heads-up. But we visited Kim in Moscow and those holidays form some of my earliest memories, so it wasnt like he was a secret. Area of responsibility extended to include North African and Italian espionage. Many of the street names have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was seeing those photos as a six-year-old child which helped first alert me to the fact that there was something a bit different about grandpa Kimsky. As Kim told my mother when she asked him if he felt any remorse, he believed he was a soldier, fighting a bloody war in the bloodiest century in history. "His story does not really go away, because there is. Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott. And sadness. Slowly but surely, he was turning himself into one of the most cunning and treacherous double agents of all time. ", His habit was fuelled by his sorrow over what he saw around him, she added. And he kept his word to the end." 1958Marries Eleanor Brewer, an American. Kim Philby on holiday with his last wife Rufina Pukhova, 1970s. It was a few years after this, in 1933, that Kim went to Vienna. It seemed a fitting finale for such a notable spy. The Soviet authorities buried him with honors when he died in 1988. She flirted with other men and had affairs. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. Then she drove off with the children. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The Philby case has always fascinated me. By the time she left Russia, Maclean was in his final decline, in and out of hospital with cancer from his lifetime of smoking. Image: Barney Beech, Kim's graveside, at Kuntsovo Cemetry. Now, in an attempt to impose some order on my own understanding of my grandfather, to clarify the kaleidoscopic image of him which has formed in my mind, I have returned for the first time as an adult to the country where, in political exile, he lived out the last 25 years of his life. Kim was won over by the Communist cause while a student at Cambridge University, and upon graduation in 1933, travelled to Vienna to serve the international Communist organisation Comintern which was illegal in Austria with 100 in his pocket given to him by his father, St John, who was also a Cambridge graduate. As for Melinda the central figure in the circle of loyalty and secrecy, desertion and reconciliation, love and solitariness that was the human drama of Donald Macleans life she lived well into her 90s before dying in New York in 2010, silent to the end about her years with one of Britains most infamous traitors. The Philby talent for putting on an act has been inherited by Charlotte, in a sense: she worked in theatre as a child, training with Anna Scher, whose radical Islington theatre group has spotted such talent as Kathy Burke and Phil Daniels. I am a private person and a political person. 1949Made SIS representative in Washington. Prince and Princess of Wales pay tribute to Auschwitz survivor Zigi Shipper, who dedicated his life to No rest for Anne! The boys told a child they met on a beach that the photos he had taken could not be forwarded to them as we are going away and we dont know where we are going. . On the eve of his 99th birthday, I spent, At Kim's flat with his partner, Rufina. Whatever you believe, Kim felt history would prove him right: Ill be remembered as a good man, he told my mum just two years before his death, Discussing the reasons for this in the introduction to Boroviks book, The Philby Files, the journalist and biographer Phillip Knightley who interviewed my grandfather at length during his final years in Moscow writes: Could the British intelligence service really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow? Like your own Holy Writ, it is open to many different (and often conflicting) interpretations, according to the tastes and prejudices of the reader., In the accompanying letter, he adds: The difficulty is that [Lenin] was always writing at white-heat on burning questions of the day (or even hour); and naturally his strategy and tactics changed to meet changing circumstances My Russian edition has 55 large volumes, so there is ample room for selective quotation and even spurious interpolation. He was able to order new books from Bowes & Bowes bookshop in Cambridge, who checked with MI5 whether they should be supplying him. Primary Sources. In the intervening years, there have been endless attempts to understand how this gregarious, public-school educated English chap and his fellow Cambridge spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross could have been persuaded to betray their country, and dupe their family and their friends. They even had a dacha a country cottage 20 miles from Moscow where the children could swim, fish, bicycle and forage for mushrooms. The view from one of the windows is notably different, too. She flew to New York to see her daughter Annie, and it was there that several letters arrived from Philby. At one stage, in the programme for his play Single Spies, the writer Alan Bennett printed a claim that my dad John had turned up late to his own fathers funeral, straight from the airport, and stood swaying behind a gravestone clutching bags of booze. In 1963, having been exposed in Britain as the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring, Kim fled to Moscow, never again to set foot from behind the Iron Curtain. H. A. R. (Kim) Philby, the double agent whose betrayal of his country and his social class indelibly marked British politics, has died in Moscow, officials in London said yesterday. Im reminded of a brief phone conversation I had earlier this morning with one of Kims old KGB comrades, whom Id been in contact with during the course of my research for this article, who told me that a gang of five or six of Kims former colleagues still meet up every month and raise a toast in his honour. No doubt your grandfather would have disapproved of the sharp contrasts in present-day Russia, he said. I feel as if I have been through some form of therapy, Ive purged these questions in a way. In the programme for his play Single Spies, the writer Alan Bennett printed a claim that my dad had turned up late to his own fathers funeral, straight from the airport, and stood swaying behind a gravestone clutching bags of booze. (4 children) Litzi Friedmann (24 February 1934 - 1946) (divorced . There are so many ways that Kims choices have continued to occupy my mind since my dad died in 2009, but I do feel that this book draws a line under it. Charlotte Philby, daughter of John Philby, H.A.R. 1951Tips off fellow Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean that a warrant has been issued for his arrest. Elliott was born in London, the son of Claude Aurelius Elliott, a don at Cambridge and Headmaster at Eton, where Nicholas was sent after Durnford School, a prep school on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset.. After leaving Trinity College, Cambridge, Elliott was offered a post in 1938 as Honorary Attache at the Hague by Sir Nevile Bland.His career in secret intelligence came by chance . Everything has seen better days. The comments below have not been moderated. I think Ive spent so long having other people project their versions of my grandfather and my family on to me that writing about it is a way of trying to reclaim the story. Melinda translated Russian stories into English for the weekly English paper, Moscow News. John Philby, who has died aged 65, was the eldest son of the Russian spy Kim Philby, unmasked in 1963 as a double agent and the notorious Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s. He got himself a job teaching English in a school. Two years later, a Sunday Times correspondent was in Moscow and about to pack his bags after an unsuccessful attempt to interview the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, when, out of the blue, he was invited to a room in his hotel. Hed been worried about leaving her and their children to carry on without him, but shed given him the all-clear to go. Ive recorded a podcast with the BBC that will be announced later this year, and my husband and I have bought an old pub that we want to turn into a creative space to make available to charities and people who wouldnt otherwise have access to that, so thats an ongoing project. Maclean was unsure how to act, feeling a mixture of guilt and love, not knowing where he stood with the children he had abandoned and not been able to contact. They're at it again! 1941Transferred to SIS Iberian sub-section. He became more optimistic once the family was deemed fully rehabilitated and they moved to Moscow in 1955. Whatever you believe, Kim felt history would prove him right: Ill be remembered as a good man, he told my mum just two years before his death. 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