The most infamous spy in Britain’s history has revealed some of the secrets of his double life as a communist agent in a previously unseen video.
Kim Philby was a real life James Bond and a top MI6 officer, rising high in the secret service but secretly he was a double agent spilling information to his Soviet masters, the Mirror reports.
Finally in 1963 the traitorous spy defected to Russia when he was on the cusp of being discovered.
Now newly discovered archive footage shows the double agent giving a lecture to the Stasi (the East German secret police) in 1981. It is reportedly the first time the shadowy KGB infiltrator has been seen describing his notorious career.
In the speech, Philby talks about his progression through to MI6 ranks whilst passing top secret information to Moscow, and how remarkably easy it was for him to smuggle out confidential documents.
In the hour long footage, discovered in Berlin by the BBC, Philby delivers a expert guide on betrayal to a select audience of East German agents, opening up the lecture with, ‘Dear comrades’.
Philby goes onto to describe his ’30 years in the enemy camp’ after he was drawn to communism while studying at Cambridge.
He was eventually recruited by Russian spy masters after he returned from his work helping the victims of the Nazis in Austria.
The Russian agent then spent years trying to worm his way into the establishment and was finally he was given a job at MI6, where he says it was incredibly easy to leak confidential documents.
He did this by making friends with the archivists looking after the files and took them out for drinks. This gave him access to files which had nothing to do with his current job.
He said:
If there had been proper discipline in the handling of papers in SIS that would have been quite impossible… But there was, in fact, no discipline.
Every evening I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports that I had written myself, full of files and actual documents from the archive.
I used to hand them to my Soviet contact in the evening. The next morning I would get the files back, the contents having been photographed and early the next morning I would put them back in their place.
That I did regularly year in year out.
Ironically Philby was eventually made second in command in a new MI6 section devoted to wheedling out Soviet spies. However his secret mission was to take out his boss Felix Cowgill.
So he set about he successfully removed Felix telling the audience, “you oughtn’t to listen to this. It’s a very, very dirty story, but after all our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time.”
Philby ends his talk by describing his escape to Moscow where he basically slipped away while his MI6 handler was busy skiing. Is it just me or do we sound like really crappy spies?
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.