Kim Philby
Kim Philby, real name Harold Adrian Russell Philby (1912-88). British diplomat and spy, associated with the Russian agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. In 1933 Philby, a communist, became a Russian agent. He was recruited into British intelligence by Burgess in 1940. From 1949 to 1951 Philby was a high-ranking British diplomat in Washington and passed important information to the Soviet Union. In 1951 he helped Burgess and Maclean to escape to the Soviet Union. Philby came under suspicion himself but was cleared in 1955. In 1963 he fled to the Soviet Union and admitted his activities in My Secret War (1968). A fourth member of the ring, Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was unmasked in 1979 and stripped of his knighthood. In 1991 John Cairncross admitted that he was the rumoured ‘fifth man’ in the ring.
