Kim Philby
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Kim Philby was the British MI6 officer, its deputy director, secretly recruited by the KGB in college and run as a mole for decades. He was recruited while still at university and then directed to join MI6, rising inside it to the deputy directorship while working for Moscow throughout.

In John Kiriakou's telling, the cruelest twist is that Philby was counterintelligence chief James Angleton's best man and the godfather of his child, his koumbaros, even as Angleton, obsessed with moles, suspected everyone but him. The closeness ran both ways: the two men were best man at each other's weddings, and Angleton was godfather to Philby's daughter. When suspicion finally fell on Philby, he was removed and sent to Beirut; tipped off by another mole, he excused himself from a Christmas party at the British ambassador's residence, climbed out the bathroom window, and fled to the Soviet embassy. Six days later he surfaced at a Moscow press conference and later lectured new KGB officers.

The damage to Angleton

The betrayal did not end with Philby's escape. Once Angleton had been burned by his closest friend, he assumed that anyone might be a double agent, and, in Kiriakou's summary, ruined countless lives by accusing people of being KGB moles.

Ranking the penetration

Asked by a viewer where Jeffrey Epstein would rank as an intelligence asset, better placed than the Cambridge ring or Aldrich Ames, and more damaging than Philby?, Kiriakou put the Cambridge officers first, on the ground that they were literally at the top of MI6. Ames he rates as extraordinarily well placed and lastingly damaging: head of CIA counterintelligence for the Soviet branch, later the Russia branch, with twelve CIA assets executed because of his treachery. Epstein, in that comparison, was damaging but not of the same order. "Those guys were damaging at historic levels."

On motive, Kiriakou's general answer is not ideological. Counterintelligence training, he says, holds that ninety-five per cent of the time a person accepting a pitch is doing it for money. Philby is the exception he uses to make the rule visible. Calling him "perhaps the most damaging mole in British spying history," Kiriakou grants him something he refuses Aldrich Ames: Philby "was driven by a passionate belief in communism" and "felt genuine contempt for British imperialism." Ames, by contrast, "did it purely for his, quote, greed and folly, as simple as that. Talk about the banality of evil." The comparison is not offered as a defence of Philby but as a measure of how little there was behind the American case.

See also

- James Jesus Angleton
- Aldrich Ames
- Double-Agent Capture
- Operation Paperclip
