Program Information

As a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, Kim Philby was infused with an intellectual, emotional and life-long commitment to communism. That made him a willing recruit into the ranks of the Soviet espionage service.

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: As a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, Kim Philby was infused with an intellectual, emotional and life-long commitment to communism. That made him a willing recruit into the ranks of the Soviet espionage service.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Philby and his friends, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were true believers. Philby’s career was perhaps the most exotic. At the instruction of his Soviet handlers, after his University years, he began to tack in a rightward direction in conversation, beliefs and political connections. This was to disguise and make possible his recruitment into British intelligence. His stint as a pro-Franco journalist covering the Spanish Civil War led through Burgess to his enrollment in the ranks of first MI5 then the sabotage and subversion division of MI6.

In that role Philby was able to protect Soviet operatives and insure the capture and death of British and American agents. From 1941 to 1946 he was in charge of recruitment of insurgents and spies in and out of German spheres of influence. He recruited double agents for the Soviets and made sure his allied recruits were either sent on useless missions or made sure the Soviets knew they were on the way to do work vital to the west. Through a combination of courage, poise, nerve and pure exhilaration in the danger of the hunt, he survived to do enormous damage to the Allied intelligence effort. He was personally responsible for deaths of hundreds and in the words of scholar Bruce Thompson, “he did it with relish. Philby was truly evil, truly sinister. He was a traitor without any scruples.”

In the early 1950s Philby was liaison to the CIA in Washington and there his cover began to unravel when Burgess and MacLean defected to Russia. As the spotlight turned on Philby he denied everything, was vigorously defended by the British. He kept up the ruse for another dozen years, but with MI6 closing in he defected to Moscow in 1963. A disciple of Marx to the last, he died in 1988 just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and those things for which he had worked all his life.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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