Therefore, Philby married her so that she could flee to Britain for safety. The woman was on a proscription list and would have been arrested if she stayed in Germany. A short but violent civil war erupted in Vienna over these issues.ĭuring the chaos of World War II, Philby fell in love with a Jewish Socialist activist. Within weeks of his arrival, Austria’s chancellor Dollfuss began a crackdown on socialists and trade unions. In the early 1930s, a young man named Philby went to Vienna. Philby eventually devoted himself to the Socialist cause while living in Vienna, Austria in 1934 when a revolution was brewing and tensions were high between right-wing and left-wing groups. He did purchase some of Marx’s books but it is not known whether he read them or studied them at all. However, there’s no evidence of him preaching Communist ideas or reading Karl Marx’s works in any detail. When he went to Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, he saw Nazi thugs beating up Jewish citizens.īy this point, he was personally committed to the Socialist cause. But his political views shifted to the left, taking him in a different direction than most of his classmates. He, like many other first-year students, came from a wealthy family and had academic ambitions.

Kim Philby was no outlier when he attended Cambridge University. Big Idea #1: Kim Philby’s nascent Socialist inclinations were formed at Cambridge and in revolutionary Vienna.

In this article, you’ll learn about the worst spy in history how to charm people into believing your innocence and what handlers teach new recruits. Indeed, his story inspired John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and many other works of fiction. Philby is a classic example of a double agent. He was a charming traitor who never wavered in his allegiance to Moscow, even as he rose through the ranks of British intelligence and caused thousands of deaths with his treacherous actions. In many ways, Kim Philby’s story reminds us that we should be careful about being taken in by such romance. It is hard not to romanticize the British espionage operations of the twentieth century. 1-Page Summary of A Spy Among Friends Overview

A spy among friends by ben macintyre