A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby at the age of eighteen: the secret Cambridge communist.

Philby as a boy of about eight years old.

The young Philby: ‘He was the sort of man who won worshippers.’

St John Philby, noted Arab scholar, explorer, writer, troublemaker and demanding father.

Elliott, the Eton schoolboy, born to rule, who hid his shyness behind a barrage of jokes.

Claude Elliott, father of Nicholas, celebrated mountaineer and provost of Eton, accompanies a young Queen Elizabeth II on a tour of the school.

Basil Fisher (left) and Nicholas Elliott: their close friendship came to a tragic end when Fisher was shot down in the Battle of Britain.

The Cambridge spies

Donald Maclean: a talented linguist destined for the Foreign Office.

Guy Burgess: witty, flamboyant, highly intelligent and pure trouble.

Anthony Blunt with Cambridge friends: a brilliant art historian and a Soviet spy.

Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge: the unlikely crucible of communist revolution.

Alice ‘Litzi’ Kohlman, Philby’s first love and first wife, an activist in the Viennese communist underground.

Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian photographer married to an Englishman, arranged Philby’s rendezvous with the Soviet intelligence service.

Street violence erupts in Vienna in 1933, as the extreme right-wing government goes to war with the left.

Nicholas Elliott, as a new recruit to MI6. ‘A convivial camaraderie prevailed, rather like a club.’

James Jesus Angleton, an apprentice intelligence officer in wartime London. An American from Idaho, he was ‘more English than the English’ and an honorary member of the club.

Philby (second from left), The Times war correspondent, at a lunch with Lord Gort (to Philby’s left), commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, 1939.

Arnold Deutsch, alias ‘Otto’, Philby’s charismatic recruiter and spy-master.

Klop Ustinov, Russian-born German journalist, secret agent for Britain and father of the actor Peter Ustinov.

Theodore Maly, Philby’s NKVD controller, later murdered in Stalin’s purges.

Alexander Foote, Britishborn radio operator for the Soviet spy network ‘Rote Kapelle’.

Yuri Modin, the subtle and ingenious handler of the Cambridge spy network.

Igor Gouzenko, masked, awaiting interviews with the press after his defection in 1945.

Dick White, a former schoolmaster, was the chief of MI5 counterintelligence in 1951.

C: Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6.

Felix Cowgill, chief of Section V, the MI6 counter-intelligence unit based in St Albans.

Guy Liddell: MI5 head of counter-intelligence and diarist.

Victor Rothschild, MI5 head of counter-sabotage and friend of Kim Philby.

Valentine Vivian, known as Vee-Vee, the Deputy Chief of MI6 who vouched for Philby: ‘I knew his people.’

Sarah Algeria Marjorie Maxse, organisation officer for the Conservative Party and recruiter for MI6. Philby found her ‘intensely likeable’.

Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley, the Sunday Express war correspondent who steered Philby into MI6.

Elizabeth Holberton, Nicholas Elliott’s MI6 secretary, confidante and finally wife.

The Elliotts on their wedding day, outside the Park Hotel, Istanbul, 10 April 1943.

Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren. The Vermehrens’ defection, organised by Elliott, plunged the German intelligence service into crisis.

Guy Burgess, Philby’s problematic lodger: frequently drunk, faintly malodorous and always supremely entertaining.

Kim Philby (left) was appointed the MI6 station chief in Washington in September 1949. Above, the RMS Caronia, the luxury Cunard liner nicknamed the ‘Green Goddess’ on which he sailed to New York. ‘Philby was a great charmer. He came to us with an enormous reputation,’ said one CIA colleague.

James Angleton, poet, orchidenthusiast, CIA chief of counterintelligence and America’s most powerful mole-hunter.

Bill Harvey of CIA counter-intelligence, the former FBI agent and Philby’s most dangerous opponent in the US.

Harvey’s Oyster Salon, the smart Washington restaurant where Philby and Angleton lunched together: ‘Philby picked him clean.’

Enver Hoxha, Albania’s hardline communist ruler.

David de Crespigny Smiley, an aristocratic British Army officer with a legendary taste for derring-do, seen here with Yemeni resistance fighters.

En route to the Albanian coast for the start of ‘Operation Valuable’, one of the most catastrophic secret operations of the Cold War.

The ‘pixies’ prepare for action: three of the four men in this photograph were killed within hours of landing on the Karaburun peninsula.

The Stormie Seas, a forty-three-ton schooner disguised as a pleasure boat, carrying enough munitions to start a small war.

Two typically irreverent cartoons drawn by Guy Burgess in Moscow: Lenin with a chip on his shoulder and a ferocious Stalin declaring: ‘I’m very human!’

The ‘wanted’ poster issued for Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, after the two men fled from Britain in May 1951.