In an interview with the journalist Phillip Knightley in Moscow in 1988, he was adamant: "I don't like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it." Bad he may have felt, but he never faltered. Philby would have hotly denied the charge of mockery. This is surely right, but only to a point. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves ever managed to pierce the armour of mystery that clad him … in the end I suspect that Philby made a mockery of everyone, particularly ourselves." Modin wrote of him: "He never revealed his true self.
Others revel in the possession of information that they decline to share, and the private sense of superiority that this brings."Įven his Russian handler, the suave and sophisticated Yuri Modin, who ran the Cambridge spy network, found Philby to be an enigma.
"Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce. "Philby enjoyed deception," Macintyre writes. He hugged his secret to him and, one presumes, fed his ego on it. Yet what kind of power is it that the double agent enjoys? Of the people Philby moved among – wives, lovers, children, friends, fond colleagues – not a single one was taken into his confidence. As more than one of his dupes ruefully observed, he fooled them all. Not only did he condemn many people, perhaps hundreds, to cruel and ignominious deaths, he also clandestinely manipulated some of the leading figures in western security services for decades, charming out of them all manner of the most sensitive information and passing it on to the KGB. T he man with a secret is the man with power, Aristotle observes, and no life could illustrate the truth of the maxim more emphatically than that of Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby, pupil of Westminster School and Cambridge graduate, clubman, cricket enthusiast, bon viveur and tireless party-thrower, ace undercover agent and, as Ben Macintyre would have it, great betrayer.
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