Latest / The Shadow Dossier / The Shadow Dossier — The Third Man's Final Run to Moscow

Transcript

The Shadow Dossier — The Third Man's Final Run to Moscow · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  The Shadow Dossier. Act I, a confession disguised
• 0:06
  as a conversation. This dossier has already examined
• 0:13
  how the Cambridge Five Spy Ring was gradually
• 0:16
  unmasked over the 1950s and 1960s. This file
• 0:21
  narrows in on one specific night. January 1963,
• 0:26
  in Beirut, Lebanon, when Kim Philby, the last
• 0:31
  and most senior of the five still operating in
• 0:34
  any official capacity, learned that the British
• 0:36
  were finally formally closing in on him and made
• 0:40
  his final decision. Philby had spent years under
• 0:46
  a cloud of suspicion without ever being formally
• 0:49
  charged. Two of his fellow Cambridge spies Guy
• 0:54
  Burgess and Donald McLean, had defected to Moscow
• 0:57
  in 1951, and Philby's own close association with
• 1:01
  both men had cost him his career within British
• 1:04
  intelligence. Though not, remarkably, his freedom
• 1:07
  or his reputation among many former colleagues
• 1:10
  who continued to believe, or wanted to believe,
• 1:13
  in his innocence. By 1963, Philby was working
• 1:26
  as a journalist in Baruch, a cover that also
• 1:29
  allowed him to maintain informal, unofficial
• 1:32
  contact with British intelligence. It was in
• 1:35
  this context that an old friend and former colleague,
• 1:39
  Nicholas Elliot, arrived in Baruch with instructions
• 1:42
  to confront Philby directly. with new, substantial
• 1:47
  evidence of his guilt, evidence that had finally
• 1:50
  accumulated to a point British intelligence considered
• 1:53
  conclusive. The Elliot Philby meetings that followed,
• 1:59
  conducted over several days in a Baruch apartment,
• 2:02
  have become one of the most analyzed confrontations
• 2:05
  in Cold War intelligence history, largely because
• 2:09
  of what happened and didn't happen as a result
• 2:12
  of them. Philby... according to later accounts
• 2:15
  and a partial confession he reportedly gave elliot
• 2:19
  did not fully deny his decades of work for soviet
• 2:22
  intelligence offering instead a partial carefully
• 2:26
  hedged admission one that acknowledged some activity
• 2:29
  while working to minimize its full extent act
• 2:36
  three the decision not to arrest him Genuinely
• 2:44
  remarkable, and still debated by historians today,
• 2:48
  is what British intelligence chose to do next.
• 2:52
  Essentially nothing, at least not immediately.
• 2:55
  Rather than detaining Philby on the spot or arranging
• 2:59
  his immediate arrest, Elliot left Beirut, and
• 3:02
  Philby was, for reasons that remain a subject
• 3:05
  of real historical dispute, given time and space
• 3:09
  that allowed him, weeks later, to disappear.
• 3:15
  Some historians and former intelligence officers
• 3:18
  have argued this represented a genuine institutional
• 3:21
  failure, a reluctance within British intelligence,
• 3:25
  embarrassed by an insider's betrayal from within
• 3:28
  its own elite social class, to handle the situation
• 3:31
  with the urgency it clearly required. Others
• 3:35
  have argued something closer to a quiet, unofficial
• 3:39
  preference. That British intelligence, having
• 3:41
  extracted a partial confession, judged a messy
• 3:45
  public trial less useful and less discreet than
• 3:49
  simply letting Philby go, effectively trading
• 3:53
  a prosecution for his permanent, career -ending
• 3:55
  exile. On the night of January 23, 1963, Philby
• 4:09
  left a dinner party in Beirut and did not return
• 4:12
  home. He boarded a Soviet freighter, the Dalmatova,
• 4:16
  that had been waiting in Beirut's harbor and
• 4:19
  made his way to Moscow via a Soviet -arranged
• 4:22
  route, formally surfacing in the Soviet Union
• 4:26
  several months later, in July 1963, when the
• 4:30
  Soviet government publicly confirmed he had been
• 4:33
  granted citizenship. His disappearance and eventual
• 4:39
  reemergence in Moscow represented a significant
• 4:43
  embarrassment for British intelligence, made
• 4:45
  considerably worse by the earlier, extended period
• 4:49
  during which senior officials had publicly and
• 4:52
  repeatedly defended Phil Bayh against suspicion,
• 4:55
  going so far as to clear him formally in a 1955
• 4:59
  parliamentary statement. Of the very accusations
• 5:03
  that later proved entirely accurate. Act V. Life
• 5:11
  as the fourth man in Moscow. Philby spent the
• 5:17
  remaining 25 years of his life in the Soviet
• 5:20
  Union. A defection that, unlike the somewhat
• 5:24
  celebrated arrivals of Burgess and McLean a decade
• 5:27
  earlier, came with its own complicated undertones.
• 5:32
  Soviet intelligence, according to later accounts
• 5:35
  from Philby's own writings and from Soviet -era
• 5:38
  colleagues, remained genuinely uncertain for
• 5:41
  years about how fully to trust a defector whose
• 5:44
  decades of usefulness had depended entirely on
• 5:47
  his ability to convincingly deceive people, a
• 5:51
  skill that, from a certain angle, made him a
• 5:55
  permanently uncertain asset even after he had
• 5:58
  switched sides for good. Philby was given honors,
• 6:04
  a KGB pension, and a public role as a symbol
• 6:08
  of Soviet intelligence triumph over the West,
• 6:11
  while reportedly also struggling, according to
• 6:15
  those who knew him in Moscow. With alcoholism
• 6:18
  and a sense of displacement from the country
• 6:21
  and social world, he had spent decades secretly
• 6:24
  betraying. He died in Moscow in 1988. just three
• 6:28
  years before the Soviet Union, whose intelligence
• 6:31
  service he had served for over five decades,
• 6:34
  ceased to exist entirely. What the Baruch confrontation
• 6:40
  and its aftermath ultimately reveal is less about
• 6:43
  Phil Bai's espionage itself, which this dossier's
• 6:47
  earlier file on the Cambridge Five has already
• 6:49
  covered, and more about the particular... Uncomfortable
• 6:53
  calculus in intelligence service sometimes makes
• 6:56
  when catching a traitor publicly would cost the
• 6:59
  institution more in embarrassment and exposed
• 7:03
  failure than simply letting him disappear quietly
• 7:07
  into the one country that would still have him.
• 7:12
  This concludes declassified file number 0038
• 7:17
  of the shadow dossier. The third man's final
• 7:20
  run to Moscow. What dangerous secrets await in
• 7:27
  our next file? If you want early access to upcoming
• 7:33
  files and censored intel briefings and bonus
• 7:36
  dossiers, join our Patreon network at patreon
• 7:40
  .com. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or
• 7:49
  ss .com. and YouTube so you never miss an official
• 7:54
  declassification. This is the Shadow Dossier.
• 8:00
  Thank you for listening.