Moscow to close its embassy in Canberra. The Petrovs’ defection
compromised several Soviet intelligence operations. In the 1940s and
early 1950s, Australia had been a relatively easy target, and the So-
viet services had been able to operate there against American, British,
and Australian targets.PHILBY, KIM (1912–1988).Probably the most famous Cold War
spy, Harold Adrian Philby was born in India and given the nickname
“Kim” from Kipling’s novel of the Indian boy who spied for the
British. Philby was converted to left-wing socialism while at Cam-
bridge, and during a visit to Vienna in 1934 he saw the Austrian gov-
ernment’s repression of a socialist workers’ revolt. Philby left Vienna
with a communist wife, whom he saved from prosecution and possi-
ble execution, and a lifetime commitment to communism.
Philby came to the attention of Soviet intelligence through several
spotters in Cambridge and London, the most important of whom re-
portedly was Edith Tudor-Hart, and was recruited and run in Lon-
don by a series of Soviet intelligence service illegals. He was given
the code name “Synyok” (Russian for “Little Son”). Soviet intelli-
gence played a “long game” with Philby, instructing him to break
contacts with his left-wing friends and migrate to conservative politi-
cians and journalists. As a correspondent in Spain during the Span-
ish Civil War, he was wounded and later decorated by Spanish dic-
tator Francisco Franco. With the beginning of World War II, he
entered the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Philby was by
all accounts an effective member of both the British and Soviet secret
service. In one of the great ironies of intelligence history, he received
the Soviet Order of the Red Banner and the British Order of the
British Empire for service during World War II.
Over the next decade, Philby became the most important mole in
the Cold War. Rising quickly within British intelligence, he gave
Moscow all the secrets of British counterintelligenceoperations
against the Soviet Union. In 1946 he betrayed Konstantin Volkov, a
Soviet intelligence officer who sought to defect to Britain with the
names of Soviet moles serving inside the British government. Both
Volkov and his wife were drugged and transported back to Moscow,
where they were shot. Philby betrayed as well American and British
efforts to drop agents behind the Iron Curtain, ensuring that more194 •PHILBY, KIM (1912–1988)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 194