But they were quasi-spy novels so I ended up talking about them in relation to his story anyway. In this article for The Independent Magazine, I returned to Moscow to discover the truth about my grandfather, the infamous Third Man. Its my third day in Russia. As well as being my grandfather whom I remember from childhood trips to Russia as a funny old man with a beaming smile, who dressed almost exclusively in white vests and braces Kim Philby, to this day, remains one of the most significant double agents in modern history. There are things I know for certain about my grandfather. 4.1 out of 5 stars. ", Pukhova, now 78, said she was irritated by stories about Philby's drink problem, but admitted he wasn't always able to stick to his two-glass rule. But more generally womens roles in espionage have been sidelined, and I wonder if thats because a lot of this history has been recorded by men. When I happened upon the story of Edith Tudor-Hart, I knew that she was the person I had to write about. Princess Anne is the 'perfect' example of a spare thanks to her 'sense of duty', Charles's first royal RSVP! Two hours later, wind-battered and almost frozen solid, I finally arrive at the gates of the busy cemetery, where, hoping the guard might be able to point me in the right direction, I scrawl down my grandfathers name and the word Communist on an old tissue, and flash my driving licence. She hoped Donald would now find a way of getting in touch with her. Jeremy Hunt is mocked over toe-curling 'inflation explainer' video by ordering How much will YOUR broadband go up in price? 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. "Once, a big group of us were on a trip on the Volga: Kim and I and, of course, his KGB escort, and the escort's daughter. Kim Philby on holiday with his last wife Rufina Pukhova, 1970s. Kim Philby with partner Melinda Maclean (who later returned to her husband and fellow spy, Donald Maclean) walk in the woods outside Moscow in the 1960's, photographed by his son John, Donald Maclean pictured in 1937 whilst on a skiing holiday - he fled to Moscow to escape arrest in Britain as the spy who, for 15 years, had passed state secrets to the Soviet Union, Melinda Maclean and her sons in their last European home in Geneva 1953 -she was slight with curly, dark hair, 'an under-educated, attractive woman who was both affectionate and popular'. Philby, though, began seeing Melinda on the side, confessing as much to his wife and saying that he was just trying to make [Melindas] life happier as she had been miserable for the last 15 years. He was my grandfather, and then as I grew older it became apparent that he was someone else, too. She and her late father, the spy's eldest son, John, both had to live with continuing speculation about the motivation for Philby's treachery. He got himself a job teaching English in a school. 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 . The committee is serving as the unwitting instrument of the KGB." Kim Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a double agent before defecting to Soviet Union in 1963. Heads to Vienna to serve the movement there. 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. Journalists look after their own and Philby masqueraded as a devil-may-care drunken newspaperman and so was treated more indulgently by those in his profession.. Philby had defected to the Soviet Union from Beirut in 1963, and was treated with respect, but felt isolated. 1965Awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the Soviet Unions highest military honours. The pair returned to England in May and, by this point already an appointed Soviet agent, Kim found work as a foreign correspondent. He liked the fact that you could only buy seasonal goods in Moscow, but asked family members to bring out the non-perishables he loved and couldnt get there marmalade, Marmite and Worcestershire sauce. Melinda Maclean. While a student at the University of Cambridge, Philby became a communist and in 1933 a Soviet agent. Edith and Kim by Charlotte Philby is published by HarperCollins (14.99). I love those images of him as a real person; for me, thats where the clues as to who he really was can be found. The controversial civil rights leader was gunned down in front of his wife and children while making a speech in New York. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. To the very end, as I find out when I set foot into his flat, Kim surrounded himself with things pertaining to British culture and life on the other side of the Iron Curtain: from PG Wodehouse novels to the Indian spices he used for his legendary curries. Donald Maclean pictured in 1937 while on a skiing holiday - in the Soviet Union he and Guy Burgess described themselves as political refugee, not spies, Donald Maclean with his daughter Mimsie near their country home in England - in the Soviet Union he assumed a new identity, chosing to be Mark Petrovich Frazer (after the Cambridge anthropologist Sir James Frazer), Donald Maclean, aged four, can be seen on the right of this picture on the right of this picture. This is the first time Ive ever stood at the foot of my grandfathers grave, but I know it instantly. Did you feel that as you uncovered her story?I feel a huge amount of sympathy for her situation, and admiration, really. Maclean and Burgess escape to Russia. And all along he was handing information straight back into the hands of the Russians. Being one of North Korea's elite, for the nation he was the highest profile defection since No Kum-sok (above . Your email address will not be published. 1933Leaves Cambridge a convinced Communist. Inside, the atrium leading to the main sorting office and collection point is now dotted with stalls selling electronic goods, pricey mobile-phone accessories and flowers at 3 a stem. 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. Banner-waving XR zealots let off smoke flares, pour black paint outside Home Office British tennis fans are kicked out for chanting 'You're just a s*** Andy Murray' during Cameron Norrie's Farmer, 71, who appeared on BBC documentary This Farming Life is killed by one of his own cows. She also helped find homes for Kindertransport children and during the Second World War helped set up the British Restaurants for people who had been bombed in the Blitz. 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. He wasnt one to care what others thought: Never be boring, and dont be afraid of offending people was one of the last things he told me before he died. He got drunk and roamed Kuybyshev looking for action, on one occasion having his teeth knocked out in a brawl. Meets Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. The Second Woman: Best new fiction, Mail on Sunday. 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. References. She put the two boys into the International School in Geneva and finally explained to them what had happened to their father, reporting to her sister that their worst fear seems to be that I might vanish too. He was tall and fair; she was slight with curly, dark hair. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. 1958Marries Eleanor Brewer, an American. The shiny black 44 rumbles slowly through the graveyard. 1925Attends Westminster School in London. The whole plan is being masterminded by Kim Philby in Moscow. Perhaps. Putting real historical characters into a novel is a minefield, especially those who existed within living memory. Viktor Suvorov . Macmillan was, of course, Prime Minister by 1962, when the Soviet double agent George Blake was caught, and Kim could no longer hide the truth. that Philby, with his Communist views in Vienna and his Austrian Communist wife, had been recruited for SIS and had sailed through its vetting procedures?. 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. And perhaps he felt that he certainly resented having to be escorted pretty much wherever he went for his first years in Moscow, as Rufa attests. Just beyond the crossroads which dominates Pushkin Square the spot where its said dissidents would meet, acknowledging each other by removing their hats is the former site of the Hotel Minsk (like much of the city, now under a lengthy reconstruction process), where Kim first met the journalist Murray Sayle in 1967. Getty Images In the USSR, Philby essentially became an honorary pensioner: he passed on to Soviet intelligence everything he. The basic facts, after all, are well-documented. She was incredibly brave, incredibly loyal; she was completely faithful to the things she loved and believed in, and she had a firm belief that she had to do the right thing. Melinda translated Russian stories into English for the weekly English paper, Moscow News. It was, in fact, those journeys to Kims flat which form some of my strongest early memories: flying down the third lane of the motorway in an unmarked car. But it wasnt true. Hed been worried about leaving her and their children to carry on without him, but shed given him the all-clear to go. Primary Sources. Writing Edith and Kim alongside home schooling and everything else has been a big thing and I feel now is a good time to pause and reflect. He worked as a journalist until 1940, when Guy . It is an old-fashioned home, not like the homes of new Russia, where everything is modern and imported. She cannot imagine what Kim would have made of this new world, where a minority have benefited so enormously while many outside the capital, the vast majority live in abject poverty with little support from the state. How? For another, hed made his bed. 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. In fact, he had arrived in Moscow days earlier, and can be seen on film standing just back from his fathers coffin. Kim leapt up and shouted, 'Whoever is rude to my wife is rude to me!' We searched every corner until Kim suddenly struck himself on the head with his hand, went to a cupboard and brought back the boot. It's Mr (coffee) Bean! 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. That was my dad leaving to go to Kims funeral [in 1988] and we were hounded by paparazzi. 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? Melinda, now officially Natasha Frazer, hated Kuybyshev, which she found very primitive, and for a while Donald was depressed and disillusioned by the reality of Soviet Russia. Life in Moscow. They took the train to Zurich, where they changed trains to Schwarzach in Austria. There, a porter recalled taking their luggage to a waiting car with Salzburg number plates which drove off towards Vienna. But out of a smaller window, in front of the door, the view of Moscow is interrupted by a throbbing neon Samsung advert. 1934Marries Communist Jew Litzi Friedman. Kim was appointed head of a newly formed anti-Soviet section, and as the top Secret Intelligence Service representative, worked for several years in liaison with the CIA and FBI all along handing information straight back into the hands of the Russians. Melinda returned to Donald, but two years later moved to her own apartment. Why do you think she has been overlooked?Partly because her files were only released to the National Archive in 2015. He always knew what he was risking his family, his friends, his reputation and he made his choices accordingly. She flirted with other men and had affairs. In time, details emerged of their lives after they defected. He achieved the deception by employing his occasional stutter, so as to buy himself time to think before telling another bare-faced lie. But neither was entirely impervious. "He once even said that it was the easiest way to bring life to an end. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. Theirs had always been a stormy marriage, punctuated by bad behaviour on both sides and terrible rows. . Burgess did not cope well. For one thing, like all the men in the Philby family, he was bloody-minded. And if a soldier is fighting for a cause he believes in, which he believes is worth sacrificing single human lives for, but then in the end his side loses the war, does that mean that he was wrong to have stood up and fought in the first place? "I tried everything to save him; after all, he was killing himself. At the sight of our car, the men leap from their posts, saluting and buzzing the electric gates; one jumps into the front seat and calls out instructions as we roll off again. Over the years he did everything that was asked of him: he gave everything he had to the cause, and yet still Moscow was deeply suspicious of a man who has been described as their finest and most loyal servant. Kim sacrificed everything he had: he risked his life and the lives of others, he betrayed his colleagues and duped his family and friends (even spying on his own father at one stage, as will be explained shortly) because he genuinely believed from the point when he joined the movement and set his sights against the seemingly irrepressible rise of Fascism that Communism was a cause worth holding dear above all else. By the time she left Russia, Maclean was in his final decline, in and out of hospital with cancer from his lifetime of smoking. His cover story was that he was a political migr, a trade union leader persecuted in England for his political views. After five years of silence, communications were re-established with family and friends. "If he continued drinking, he got inebriated quickly and changed in front of your eyes," she said. Prince Harry drops 45 points and Meghan Markle 36 points in just over a month in US public opinion poll Sadiq Khan faces furious backlash over plans for biggest transport and council tax rises in a decade as James Martin warns This Morning viewers why they should NEVER store their eggs in the fridge. The gramophone, in front of which Kim would take a seat to listen to the World Service at 7pm every evening with a cup of coffee, makes a tremendous groan as it comes to life, but its still very much in working nick. In Philbys own eyes he was working for the shape of things to come from which his country would benefit., Kim went to great efforts upon his return to England to cover the traces of his Communist background joining the Anglo-German fellowship in 1934, and editing its pro-Hitler magazine. 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