Kim Philby video: British double agent reveals how he passed information to the KGB
Archive footage has been found by the BBC which shows Philby giving a lecture to East Germany’s secret police.
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Your support makes all the difference.Footage has emerged of Kim Philby, the notorious British double agent, boasting about his betrayal to members of the Stasi.
In a recording of a 1981 speech uncovered by the BBC, Philby described the ease of securing British intelligence and relaying it to the KGB.
“Every evening I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports which I had written myself, full of files taken out of the actual documents, out of the actual archives. I was to hand them to my Soviet contact in the evening.”
“The next morning I would get the file back, the contents having been photographed, and take them back early in the morning and put the files back in their place.”
“That I did regularly, year in year out.”
Philby maintained that he was able to evade the attention of his peers because of his background.
“Because I had been born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of influential standing, I knew they would never get too tough with me.”
“They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they’d been proved wrong afterwards I could have made a tremendous scandal.”
In one of his most infamous acts, Philby removed his own boss after being instructed to do so by his KGB-handler.
"It was a very dirty story - but after all our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time but we do it for a cause that is not dirty in any way.”
"I have to admit that was the most blatant intrigue against a man I rather liked and I admired but the instructions stood and nothing I could do would alter them."
Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 when evidence of his treachery emerged.
He was able to escape because the MI6 agent sent to look over him in Beirut decided to go skiing after hearing that fresh snow had fallen on the Lebanese mountains.
'The Philby Tape' will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Monday 4 April at 8pm.
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