He was neither tall nor handsome but Kim Philby’s charm and exquisite manners meant women adored him, never suspecting his capacity for deception or where his true loyalty lay. As the first extract in our serialisation of a brilliant new book about the traitor reveals, it wasn’t just his country this Cold War spy cheated on . . .
Love and deception were the hallmarks of Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious (and most successful) Cold War traitor. He loved communism, the flawed cause to which he dedicated his life, and for decades as a British intelligence officer deceived his MI6 masters, living a double life as he passed secrets by the barrel-load to Moscow, where his true loyalties lay.
Similarly, in his private life, he loved and was loved by numerous women, only to betray them one by one with his astonishing facility for deceit.
At first glance he was an unlikely Lothario. Not a big man, just 5ft 9in tall, pale-skinned and lean, he stuttered and seemed hesitant, reserved even. But he instinctively oozed charm, his voice deep and melodious and his manners exceptional.
Women adored him. They flocked around him at parties, hovering expectantly, unable to take their eyes off him. ‘His very being carried a sexual suggestiveness,’ according to one man who witnessed him in action.
‘He had a way of making women fall for him,’ a friend recalled. There was an air of vulnerability about him, a hint of loneliness, that they found irresistible. One female admirer likened him to ‘a manly teddy bear’, while another was smitten by what she saw as ‘his touch of animal roughness’.
Love and deception were the hallmarks of Kim Philby (pictured), Britain’s most notorious (and most successful) Cold War traitor
He came across to them as a man you could trust and confide in — which made his serial betrayals all the more wounding.
But colleagues saw something different. MI5 spycatcher Peter Wright said of Philby’s attitude to women that he lived ‘from bed to bed’.
Another MI6 agent, David Cornwell (alias author John le Carré) believed Philby treated women as his secret audience: ‘He used them like he used society: he performed, danced, fantasised with them, begged their approbation. Then, when they came too close, he punished them or pushed them away.’
Philby was a 25-year-old reporter for The Times and had just returned from covering the Spanish Civil War when he met rebellious Aileen Furse in London in 1937. She was a horsey product of the Home Counties, at that time prone to tantrums and self-harm.
He liked her spirit and engaging laugh, her slim, attractive figure. In 1940 they began living together.
This was despite him already having a wife, an Austrian named Litzi Friedmann, a Left-wing activist he had met in Vienna and married so she could get a British passport and escape the Nazis. Once she was safe in the UK, they drifted apart and she played no further part in his life.
Philby was a 25-year-old reporter for The Times and had just returned from covering the Spanish Civil War when he met rebellious Aileen Furse (pictured) in London in 1937
Philby had been very Left-wing in his Cambridge University days, but he kept from Aileen the fact that he was secretly working for the Soviet Union, having been recruited back in 1934 when he had returned from Austria with Litzi.
By now, on orders from his masters in Moscow, he was moving into the underbelly of the British state by following his old Cambridge friend Guy Burgess into MI6. His secret life as a double agent began in earnest.
The scale of his betrayal was staggering as night after night he removed highly sensitive, invaluably revealing documents from Whitehall to hand over to his Soviet minders. Because of him, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of British agents in Eastern Europe were imprisoned, tortured and shot.
He also helped recruit a network of like-minded subversives, a whole nest of spies at the heart of the British Establishment.
His ultimate triumph was to get himself made head of Section IX, a new department whose specific job was to counter Soviet spies like him — a masterstroke.
At home, his life seemed happy enough with the arrival of children: Josephine in 1941, John in 1942, Tommy in 1943 and — after he and Litzi divorced and he and Aileen finally married — Miranda in 1946.
The following year they all moved to Turkey, where Philby was made MI6’s head of station, and later to Washington for his big new job liaising between British and U.S. intelligence.
But cracks were appearing in the marriage. Philby was wonderful with the children, sensitive to their needs, fun to be with. But increasingly he was cold towards his wife and she was frustrated with him.
She suspected he was having affairs, which, given his libido and his attractiveness to women, was a reasonable suspicion. She was often sick with unspecified illnesses, leaving her vulnerable, exhausted and in urgent need of attention and affection.
She reverted to her teenage habit of self-harming. He told friends she was ‘insane’ and had tried to kill him; and that for his own safety and sanity he was sleeping in a tent in the garden.
He loved communism, the flawed cause to which he dedicated his life, and for decades as a British intelligence officer deceived his MI6 masters, living a double life as he passed secrets by the barrel-load to Moscow, where his true loyalties lay (stock image)
Their problems were exacerbated when suspicion fell on him in the great spy hunt that broke out after the defection to Moscow of Foreign Office officials Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Was he the ‘Third Man’ who had tipped them off to flee the country?
The boss of MI5, Dick White, thought so but had no proof and Philby was publicly exonerated by the Government. The Americans, though, refused to trust him and he lost his job in Washington. His stellar career came to a shuddering halt and the family returned to the UK under a cloud.
With a wife and family to support, he struggled for some years to find a new job. Then the Observer newspaper and Economist magazine hired him as their correspondent in Beirut; and it was to that hotbed of spying and intrigue he went in 1956, leaving his family behind.
By now, Aileen was becoming obsessively suspicious. She thought she had married a mild, gently dissenting, Left-inclined free thinker, but maybe the talent for cold-blooded mendacity that occasionally revealed itself had equipped him to be, simply, a traitor. To her, it seemed increasingly likely.
Friends remembered her asking them: ‘To whom should a wife’s allegiance belong — her country or her husband?’
Then, at a dinner party one night, she shrieked at him: ‘I know you’re the Third Man!’ She even made a call to the Foreign Office with the accusation but it was ignored, put down to her unstable state of mind. There was even sympathy among his colleagues for what poor Philby was having to endure from her.
She, though, increasingly blamed him for her illness. She was convinced he was trying to push her towards suicide because she knew too much about his secret past.
Over in Beirut, Philby — back to his old ways and again spying on behalf of both MI6 and the Russian secret service — dismissed his wife as incompetent, idle and profligate. Aileen felt more isolated and miserable than ever. She appeared deranged, drinking heavily and in and out of hospital.
In the run-up to Christmas 1957, Philby received a telegram from home to tell him that Aileen, at 47, had died from ‘congestive heart failure, myocardial degeneration, respiratory infection and pulmonary tuberculosis’.
Those most familiar with Aileen’s difficulties saw other causes. Some suspected Philby might have killed her, while some at MI6 believed the KGB had murdered her to prevent her from providing evidence of her husband’s guilt.
What is undeniable is that in Beirut there was no pretence at grief. Philby burst into an embassy party to announce: ‘Great news! Aileen has died!’ He then invited friends for a drink to celebrate. He explained how ill she had been and that her dying was best for everyone. What a merciful escape he had had. He was now free to marry ‘a wonderful American girl’.
That ‘girl’ was Eleanor Brewer, a 44-year-old married woman and mother of one, with whom Philby had been carrying on almost from the moment he arrived in Beirut. He had met her through her husband, Sam Brewer, an eminent American journalist who had known Philby on and off for 20 years.
Philby (pictured) had been very Left-wing in his Cambridge University days, but he kept from Aileen the fact that he was secretly working for the Soviet Union, having been recruited back in 1934 when he had returned from Austria with Litzi
The two had drunk a great deal of bourbon together and traded top-grade diplomatic tittle-tattle. When Eleanor and Philby fell into bed, it was thus a double betrayal.
There was little that was conventionally glamorous about Eleanor, but she had a great smile and sense of humour. A friend described her as ‘very wry and slightly sarcastic —smart-ass kind of funny’.
Thinking Philby a bit lost and alone in Beirut, she took him under her wing and within days they were meeting regularly à deux, often while Sam was out of town.
They shopped, they went to the beach, they picnicked, they drank. Before long Philby was
