Kim Philby, the third man
Beirut, Lebanon, 1963
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as "Kim", was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934, fresh out of Cambridge. He joined the British secret service, MI6, in 1940 and rose to the top ranks: he headed the section in charge of countering Soviet espionage and, in 1949, went to Washington as the service's representative to the CIA and the FBI. In May 1951, when the diplomat Donald Maclean was about to be interrogated, Philby got a warning to him, and Maclean fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess, who lived in Philby's house. Suspicion that he was the "third man" forced him out of MI6 in July of that year.
Questioned several times, he never confessed. On November 7, 1955, Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons that there was no reason to conclude that he had betrayed his country. In August 1956, Philby went to Beirut as Middle East correspondent for the weeklies The Observer and The Economist, and journalism once again served as cover for work for MI6. In 1961, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the United States and confirmed the suspicions. In late 1962 and in January 1963, the MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, a friend of his for years, confronted him in Beirut; Philby admitted the espionage but put off signing a written confession.
Sources
In the game
Resealed
Beirut, Tuesday, January 22, 1963, 11 pm. In the bar of a seaside hotel, foreign correspondents drink gin and watch the lights of the harbor. A lit-up Soviet freighter waits for the tide.
On the night of January 23, 1963, Philby failed to show up at a dinner at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, first secretary of the British embassy, where his wife was expecting him, and vanished from Beirut. The Soviet freighter Dolmatova, bound for Odessa, had left the port that morning in such a hurry that it left cargo scattered on the quay, and Philby later said he escaped aboard it. The escape was only officially confirmed on July 1, and on July 30 Moscow announced that it had granted him asylum and Soviet citizenship. He published his memoirs in 1968 and died in Moscow on May 11, 1988, with the honors of a KGB general.
