![]() ![]() Once in Beirut, he resumed his career as a Soviet spy. ![]() In 1955 the foreign secretary Harold Macmillan told the Commons that he had "no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'third man', if indeed there was one." Soon after, "Sonny" landed a job as the Observer's Middle East correspondent. Philby's position seemed hopelessly compromised, but the establishment exonerated him. In 1951, his two co-agents, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, rumbled by the Americans, fled to the USSR. Philby, codenamed "Sonny" by the Soviets, was the archetype of treachery. As Macintyre wisely acknowledges, Philby has inspired a voluminous bibliography that sometimes approaches literature, for instance in the novels of John le Carré. For more than 50 years, the career of Harold Adrian Russell Philby – "Kim" to friends and family – has been the dark mirror in which we have read the bleakest episodes of Britain's postwar history. ![]()
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