Kim philby autobiography ranger
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Only posthumously did he receive from the Soviets the public praise and appreciation which had escaped him in life. But there was a lot of deadwood.
Kim Philby was history's most successful spy. Philby is often slighting about the abilities and intelligence of those around him, although there are some that he respects. However, by the time that Philby got to Istanbul, Volkov had mysteriously disappeared.
Philby hints that he tipped off his "Russian friends," who put a bullet in Volkov's skull, but he doesn't admit it.
a superbly cynical combination of truth, half-truth, falsehood and propaganda
Ben Macintyre, The Times...teeming with real-life tales of intrigue and espionage
Imperial War Museum
A carefully crafted memoir of a carefully crafted life is a chilling portrayal of a man whose greatest loyalty was to his craft
The Revisionist
About Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell 'Kim' Philby was born in Ambala, India, in 1912, where his father was a high-ranking civil service officer.
After graduating from Westminster School in 1928, Philby went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became one of the 'Cambridge Spies'. The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson.
He also expresses his respect for some of his superiors, people whom he was betraying. But every now and then a real find presents itself, and such was the case with this book, bought in the Brighton branch of Oxfam Books for £6.99:
This is the British hardback first edition of My Silent War, Cambridge spy Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby's autobiography, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1968 under a dustjacket designed by Michael Jarvis.
It's elegantly written, and interesting in respect of the inner workings of British Intelligence during and after the war, but it's not especially revealing as regards how and when Philby was recruited by the Russians – he became a Communist supporter at Cambridge – or how he interacted with his Soviet handlers. After a stint in Turkey, Philby was assigned to Washington DC to work in the heart of American intelligence.
He did all this while serving as a secret Soviet intelligence officer, a mole, loyal to the Soviet Union, whose trafficking of information risked the safety of his family and friends in the interest of a country he had never visited.
The difficulty of this book is that Philby is still playing the "mole game"; he discloses nothing that is not already known and he misdirects attention simply to stay in practice.
In 1972, he married a Russian woman, Rufina Ivanova Pukhova, who was 20 years his junior, with whom he lived until his death at age 76 in 1988. This was one of several fronts operated by the German Willi Münzenberg, a leading Soviet agent in the West. The FBI had made a thorough hash of the investigation, but Philby knew it was a matter of time before Donald MacLean was identified as Homer.
MacLean was identified in April 1951, and he defected to Moscow with Guy Burgess a month later in May 1951. ISBN 9780316910156.
Kim was nicknamed after the protagonist in Rudyard Kipling's novel, Kim, about a young Irish-Indian boy who spies for the British in India during the nineteenth century. Münzenberg in turn passed Philby to the Comintern underground in Vienna, Austria.