Kim Philby’s Lies Devastated Everyone Who Loved Him D
Living a double life made Kim Philby a paranoid wreck. But it was his wife Ailene who suffered the worst. And in 1948, she went through her most disturbing episode yet. Kim Philby was a man of the British Empire. Born in India in the British Raj. His father was the famed explorer St. John Philby.
Kim touched many corners of the empire in his early years. From his birthplace in India to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula to the prestigious schools of England. But while he grew up in the midst of the empire, he would turn his back on it before long. After graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, Vilby became a devoted activist.
He started working with groups that provided relief to victims of fascism in Germany. And the experience would change him forever. While helping refugees in Vienna, Kim Philby fell in love. Her name was Litzy Freriedman and she was unlike anyone he had met before. From the moment he laid eyes on her, Philby suddenly found himself on the path that would end decades later with him a hollow alcoholic wreck in an apartment in Moscow.
Not long after graduating, a mysterious figure appeared in London. Arnold Deutsch, an Austrian academic, arrived from Vienna to study at University College London. What the university did not know was that Deutsch had a secret agenda. He was a Soviet agent there to recruit England’s brightest young minds like Kim Philbees. In June 1934, Kim’s wife, Lity Freriedman, told Philby that she had arranged a meeting with a man of decisive importance.
Philby pressed her further, but she never said anything more than that. Soon after, he went to London’s Regent’s Park, where he met a man who called himself Otto. Philby wouldn’t learn this was Deutsch until years later. Such a clandestine affair might have unsettled many men, but Philby couldn’t help but be intrigued.
Recalling the meeting years later, Otto clearly impressed the young Philby. He seemed cultured and intelligent. Deouts spoke at length of how much he hated London and how much he adored Paris. He was looking for idealistic Brits to work for the Soviets and he found his man in Kim Philby.
Not only did Philby agree to become a Soviet agent, he also suggested some of his colleagues for recruitment. The men who would become the infamous Cambridge 5 spy ring. It was done. Kim Philby was a Soviet agent. So what did he do? He went on with his life. He became a journalist working at various English papers.
At this point, Moscow had little use for him, but the world was about to be thrown on its head, and Philby’s day would come. Philby and Litty Freriedman fell in love as two young idealists, but their spark fizzled as everyday life settled in. They separated not long after Philby became a Soviet agent and divorced years later.
But for the meantime, Philby had bigger fish to fry. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War finally provided Philby an opportunity to be of use to the Soviets. He traveled to Seville and covered the conflict for the times. While working from Spain, Philby would secretly send intel to his Soviet handlers in Paris by writing loosely coded letters to Madame Miselle Deon, a fake girlfriend.
Eventually, Phil’s handler gave him a disturbing and nearly impossible mission. neutralized the Spanish general Francisco Franco. Such an event would have rocked Europe and altered the course of history. But after meeting with Philby in London, his handler reported back to the NKVD with a damning verdict.
Philby was devoted and ready to sacrifice himself for the Soviet cause, but an elite assassin he was not. He lacked, among other things, the physical courage to take out the General Lissimo. The Soviets shelved the plan and Franco would live on. Of course, Philby was still working as a journalist in the middle of a war zone, and Danger had a way of finding him regardless.
Near the end of 1937, a Republican shell landed directly in front of his car and exploded on impact. There were four journalists inside, and only Philby survived. It was a horrifying ordeal, but in a bizarre twist of fate, it turned out to be exactly what he needed. Having survived an attack from the hated Republicans, Philby suddenly found himself rubbing elbows with Franco’s fascist elite.
The secret communist had never had better intel to offer. But as always, something terrible was waiting just around the corner. The thing is, the Russians weren’t the only people with double agents. In 1938, one of Phil’s comrades, a Soviet intelligence officer named Walter Kravitzki, defected to France.
He became infamous for publishing an account of life in Stalin’s Secret Service. But that wasn’t all he knew. He knew that Moscow had infiltrated the ranks of many Western institutions. Kravitzky also happened to know that a certain British journalist covering the conflict in Spain was a Soviet agent.
With Walter Kravitzky spilling secrets to British intelligence, Kim Philby seemed doomed. But his time wasn’t up just yet. Before Kravitzky could actually implicate Philby in anything, he turned up dead in a hotel in Washington, DC. Philby was safe, but for how long? It’s honestly a miracle Philby managed to keep his treachery hidden for so long.
Soon after Kitzky defected, Philby’s own handler, the sinister Alexander Olof, aka the Swede, defected as well. Olof had worked with Philby directly and easily could have named him. But he understood the chilling consequences if that were to come to pass. The outbreak of World War II finally provided Philby the chance to become the Soviet spy he’d spent years trying to be.
He’d made enough of a name for himself as a journalist that he landed a job working for MI6, Britain’s top intelligence agency. Finally, 6 years after meeting Otto in London, the Soviets faith in Philby paid off. They had their mole. Philby moved in with a lady named Ailen Furs around the time he joined MI6.
Furs didn’t know her husband was living a lie, and his secret life would eventually tear her own apart. The Russians had been keeping their distance from Philby for the previous few years. But once Philby was working for the British special operations executive, SOE, they suddenly saw value in him. They sent their resident spy in London to reconnect with him after years of silence and Philby became a double agent in earnest.
He spent his days training British operatives, all the while feeding information to his Soviet handlers. And he did his job well. As World War II neared its conclusion, British intelligence became increasingly aware that the Russians could quickly go from ally to adversary. Once the threat of the Axis powers had faded, the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism was likely going to rear its head once again.
In 1944, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service reactivated Section 9. The department had one goal, fighting communism. And guess who the SIS chose to lead the unit. It’s nearly unbelievable. Kim Philby joined the Soviet cause in 1934 when he was pretty much a nobody. 10 years later, he found himself leading the SIS’s anti-communism department.
But he had one thing working against him. Some in the agency found him to be incredibly suspicious. Remember how years ago a defector claimed a British journalist in Spain was a double agent? Remember how his wife was a communist? There were plenty of warning signs and the SIS ignored them all. But that doesn’t mean Philby was out of the woods.
In August 1945, Philby received an assignment that must have sent a chill down his spine. A Soviet agent named Constantine Vulov was defecting to Britain. He claimed to have the name of three other agents working in Britain, one of whom worked for the SIS. The Brits desperately wanted those names, so they put one of their best men on it, Kim Philby himself.
Phil’s superiors told him to travel to Istanbul to deal with Vulov personally. If only they’d known what they were doing. The Vulov assignments put Philby in an impossible position. He was in charge of getting the names of Soviet agents out of Vulov while totally aware that one of those names was Kim Philby.
He only had one option. He had to neutralize Vulov while somehow making it look like he had nothing to do with it. It looked like it was going to be the most dangerous mission of his entire life. But then a bizarre twist of fate came his way. By the time Philby arrived in Istanbul, Vulov was already gone.
whisked off to Moscow, never to be seen again. By all accounts, British intelligence seemed to think that Kim Philby was doing an outstanding job for them. In 1946, he earned the prestigious Order of the British Empire. I can only imagine what was going through his head when the medal was pinned to his chest.
If he felt smug or triumphant or proud, he didn’t have much time to celebrate. Eventually, the SIS relocated Philby and his family to the United States. The new job offered the Philbies a chance to get a fresh start and a chance for Philby to provide new intel to the Russians. What he didn’t know, however, was that his transfer to the US marked the beginning of the end.
Philby and the other Soviet agents in British intelligence lived on a razor’s edge. Sooner or later, someone was bound to slip up. A careless mistake by a Russian clerk revealed crucial information to the Brits. A Soviet agent in the British embassy who went by the code name Homer met a handler in New York City twice a week.
When Philby heard about the leak, he knew it was only a matter of time before his secrets came out. Philby knew exactly who the Soviet agent was, Don Mlean. That was a problem. As a British agent, he should have passed that info along and had Mlean apprehended. As a Soviet agent, he had to protect McClean at all costs.
To make matters worse, Western intelligence apprehended several Soviet spies around this time, putting him even more at risk. The walls were closing in on Philby. It seemed like things couldn’t get any more dire. So, of course, they did. As everything was falling apart, a man named Guy Burgess arrived in Washington.
He’d been friends with Philby since their college days. They had both joined the Soviets together and they both worked for British intelligence. The problem was Burgess was an incourageable drunkard and completely unstable. He could easily ruin everything Philby had worked for. And in a way, that’s just what he did. Guy Burgess quickly made a name for himself in Washington for all the wrong reasons.
His abrasive personality put off almost everyone he met and his constant drinking got him in trouble with the law on numerous occasions. His presence caused a serious problem for Philby. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. He stayed at the Philby household while he was there. Not only did this infuriate his fragile wife Ailene, but it sent Kim down a dark path.
Maybe the stress of the situation was finally starting to set in, but Philby and Burgess drank away their days as they tried to figure out what to do. You can imagine why Philby wanted to forget his troubles. Burgess was a complete wild card and he could compromise their position at any second.
Then there was still man to think of as the Brits were closing in on him fast. Finally, Philby came up with a desperate plan. He’d send Burgess back to England where he would warn McClean. Fortunately, he didn’t need to come up with a good excuse to get rid of Burgess. The man got three speeding tickets in one day, and the British embassy sent him back to England out of embarrassment.
That’s part of the plan went well, but the rest was a total disaster. The SIS was closing in on the clean, and Burgess hadn’t yet gotten him out of England. A desperate Philby sent Burgess a barely coded telegram telling him to move his convertible before it was too late. And there was nothing more he could do.
Crisis averted, right? Nope. Not by a long shot. The plan was for MLAN to flee and for Burgess to stay in England. But Phil’s telegram must have spooked him. Now, two British diplomats, one of whom was strongly expected of being a Soviet agent, had vanished and turned up in Moscow. The other diplomat happened to be very close to Kim Philby, a high-ranking member of British intelligence.
Let me tell you that does not look good. Philby had a lot of questions to answer and his superiors called him back to London. By now, surely British intelligence caught on and realized he was the traitor, right? Of course not. Philby vehemently denied all accusations that he was in cahoots with Burgess and McClean, though he still resigned his position.
Philby lived to spy another day, but his troubles were far from over. Phil’s once extravagant life went down the drain after Burgess and McClean fled to Moscow. Out of work, he and his family found themselves struggling to make ends meet, which made him turn to the bottle more and more. Ailen’s mental illness only worsened, and she developed a serious drinking problem as well.
Their marriage fell apart, and they separated. If you thought this was rock bottom for Kim Philby, you’d be dead wrong. His wife left him. He struggled to find work. And to twist a knife, the Soviets, for whom he’d sacrificed everything, cast him aside. He was of no use to them as a sporadically employed freelance journalist.
But it wasn’t the end for Kim Philby. Not yet. Believe it or not, after all that, the British government eventually announced that Philby was completely innocent of all suspicion. They concluded he hadn’t acted with Burgess and Mlean and publicly exonerated him. Even crazier, he actually started working for them again.
They sent him to Beirut, where he would find a whole new world of intrigue waiting for him. In Beirut, Philby embarked on yet another wild affair. this time with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of an American journalist. Eventually, Eleanor left her husband and moved in with Philby. They married and set themselves up in Beiruts.
But just like his last marriage, it would end in tragedy. After so many close calls, Phil’s double life finally caught up with him in 1961. A Soviet defector revealed what so many had suspected for so long. Philby had been working with the Russians the whole time. British intelligence sent word to Nicholas Elliot, an MI6 officer in Beirut and a close friend of Phil’s.
Elliot had believed in Phil’s innocence the entire time, and it was up to him to get Philby to confess. By the time his secrets came to light, Philby was already a shell of a man. He fell into a deep depression and drank almost every day. His wife recalled coming home one night to find him hopelessly drunk and incoherent with grief on the terrace of the flat.
A fox had apparently fallen from the balcony and Philby was inconsolable. When Nicholas Elliot arrived to confront Philby, he found the man in a similarly pathetic state. Elliot finally confronted Philby and found him with bloody bandages all around his head, unable to stand. Philby had stumbled and fallen into a radiator, cracking his skull.
Philby mumbled that he was half expecting to see his friend. As if he had known the end was nigh. Elliot did not mince words. He spat, “I once looked up to you, Kim. My god, how I despise you now. I hope you have enough decency left to understand why.” It was finally time for Kim Philby to pay the piper. Philby admitted to everything, but when Elliot asked him to sign a written confession, he begged Elliot to delay the official interrogation, and they scheduled a meeting in late January.
When the time came, Philby didn’t show up. Days earlier, he had vanished without a trace. Months later, he finally surfaced again in Moscow. Remarkably, Eleanor Philby didn’t abandon her husband after his disgrace. She visited him in Moscow and actually made plans to move there with him permanently, but they couldn’t salvage their marriage by this point.
They divorced soon after her second visit to Russia. In the end, it was for the best. Kim Philby spent almost his entire life in service of the Soviet Union, but he faced a harsh reality when he finally found himself living there. He thought he was a colonel in the KGB thanks to his years as a spy.
However, when he arrived, that wasn’t quite true. Instead, the Soviets treated him with suspicion and hostility in case he was secretly acting as a British spy. The lack of accolades waiting for him in Moscow wasn’t the thing that pained Philby the most. As his final wife, Rafina Puga, wrote, “Filby saw how much the people of the USSR suffered, and it devastated him.
For years, he thought he was fighting the good fight. Yet he couldn’t claim life in the Soviet Union was better than back in Britain. Kim Philby lived out the rest of his days in the Soviet Union as a depressed alcoholic wreck. He filled his days working with the KGB, ensuring that the propaganda they disseminated into England sounded properly and believably English.
By the end of his life in 1988, he had finally earned the Soviets trust, and they treated him like a national hero. Phil’s double life eventually destroyed him. But his wife Ailen ended up suffering the darkest fate of all. She had suffered from psychological episodes since she was young. And having a paranoid, hard-drinking husband like Philby certainly didn’t help matters.
She had been coping with a mental illness for a time, but after a while, it finally became too much for her to bear. In 1948, Ailen suffered her most disturbing episode yet. Ailen purposely injured herself, staged it to look like an accident, and injected herself with her own urine to cause grotesque skin disfigurations.
Philby sent her to a clinic to recover, but things didn’t get any better when she returned. She scolded herself on a charcoal stove soon after. Ailen needed support, and Kim was not the man to provide it for her. Though she eventually left him, it was too late to save Ailen Philby. Her health never truly recovered and she succumbed to illness just a few years later. She was only 46 years old.
Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us. If you enjoyed this video, check out the videos on screen for more amazing history content. Hey.
