Kim Philby

Western specialists consider Kim Philby (1912—1988) the most famous of Soviet spies. A British aristocrat and a Cambridge graduate, he tied his fate to Soviet intelligence in 1934, joining the SIS — the British intelligence service — at its request. The career that this Soviet spy built within this agency is remarkable: in 1944, he headed a department dealing with countering Soviet intelligence on British territory, and from 1949 to 1951, he led the liaison mission between the SIS and the CIA in Washington. Ultimately, according to one veteran of American intelligence, «all the extremely extensive efforts of Western intelligence from 1944 to 1951 were in vain. It would have been better if we hadn’t done anything at all.» Philby was even among the candidates for the position of head of the SIS.

In the study by intelligence historian Nikolai Dolgopolov, known to readers from the book in the series «ZhZL» «Abel — Fisher», a number of little-known pages of the life of the most legendary spy after his escape in 1963 from Beirut to Moscow are revealed, and a detailed account is given of the entire «Cambridge Five», of which Kim Philby was a part. For this publication, the Foreign Intelligence Service provided a series of unique declassified documents that had not been published before.