The Private Life of Kim Philby

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Masterspy Kim Philby's secret life is far stronger than any spy fiction. Recruited by the Soviet KGB at Cambridge in the 1930s, he made his way into the British Secret Intelligence Service where he became head of its anti-Soviet section, then liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and FBI—revealing everything he learned to his Moscow bosses. He was in the running to become chief of the British service, but following the defection of two of his fellow spies in 1951, Philby found himself under a persistent cloud of suspicion and he eventually fled himself in 1963. Before he died in Moscow in 1988, Philby had become a symbol in the West of Soviet-inspired treachery—an Englishman from a privileged background who had betrayed the entire free world. With interviews by Hayden Peake and an introduction by Michael Lubimov, Rufina Philby's memoir of her notorious husband provides a portrait of the masterspy that reveals how much he had previously managed to conceal.