On 8 November 1955, former British intelligence officer and Soviet double agent Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby held a press conference in his mother's London apartment. The subject was his relationship with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the British intelligence officers whose high-profile defection to the USSR in 1951 caused a scandal at the heart of the British state. Philby's decision to hold a press conference was prompted by foreign secretary Harold Macmillan's statement in the House of Commons that there was no evidence to corroborate accusations that Philby was the so-called "third man" who tipped off Burgess and Maclean causing them to flee the country.
Staring down the barrel of the camera while brazenly lying to a room full of probing journalists, Philby displayed the talent and affinity for deception that allowed him to operate for years at the heart of Britain's intelligence community as a Soviet spy. Indeed, at the time of his resignation, Philby had been on track to become 'C', the name given to the spymaster at the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS. The true scale of Philby's betrayal would not become known until 1963, when Philby confessed before escaping to the Soviet Union from Beirut. While under suspicion of being the "third man", he is now known to have in fact been one of the so-called Cambridge Five, a Communist spy ring that operated within British intelligence for much of the 20th Century. Philby's final 1963 confrontation with his British colleagues in Beirut has recently been dramatised in the ITV series A Spy Among Friends, starring Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce.
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