AI Summary
5 min readThe Spy Who Came to Dinner: Kim Philby in Washington
In the fall of 1949, a 37-year-old British intelligence officer named Kim Philby sailed to New York to take up the most important posting of his career: head of MI6 station in Washington, liaison to the newly formed CIA. He was a rising star, tipped by some to eventually run the entire British Secret Service. What his American and British colleagues did not know was that Philby had been a Soviet agent since 1934, recruited as a Cambridge undergraduate, and that his new job would give him access to nearly everything the West was planning at the dawn of the Cold War.
The Making of a Mole
Philby was born in 1912 in India's Punjab, named after the Kipling character who blends in anywhere and becomes part of "the great game" of spies. His father was St. John Philby—explorer, Arabist, adviser to the founder of Saudi Arabia, a man who crossed the Empty Quarter by camel and spent most of his son's childhood thousands of miles away. Young Kim was quiet at Westminster School, bookish, with few friends and a bad stammer. As his oldest friend put it, he was "a rebel looking for a cause."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:19) **Philby’s Origins and Radicalization** - The episode begins with Philby’s birth in India, his childhood stammer, and his search for a cause at Cambridge.
- 2 (02:35) **The Cambridge Spy Ring and Early MI6 Career** - Philby helps form the spy ring, works as a journalist in Spain, and infiltrates MI6 during WWII.
- 3 (04:26) **Promotion to Washington: The Peak of His Influence** - Philby is named MI6 head of station in Washington, a job he accepts in 30 minutes without consulting Moscow.
- 4 (12:40) **Arrival in Washington and the CIA-FBI Landscape** - Philby travels to the US, meets the FBI, and assesses the embryonic CIA.
- 5 (17:12) **The Philby-Angleton Friendship** - Philby builds a deep, trusting relationship with CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.
- 6 (28:33) **Betraying Covert Operations in Eastern Europe** - Philby uses his access to sabotage joint US-UK paramilitary operations against the Soviet bloc.
- 7 (41:40) **Guy Burgess Arrives: A Disruptive Force** - Philby’s old Cambridge friend and fellow spy Guy Burgess is posted to Washington and moves into his basement.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The greatest traitor MI6 has ever seen - a Soviet mole at the heart of the British Secret Service. Kim Philby is now heading to Washington but can he keep his cool as the net begins to close around him?
Listen as David and Gordon begin the final instalment in their journey into the extraordinarily treacherous life of Kim Philby.
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