Historical Dictionary of United States Intelligence

of the United States and that Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev

was bluffing when he threatened nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban

Missile Crisis. Moreover, Penkovsky’s information gave the Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) a good idea of the time it would take to

make Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba operational. Intelligence experts

consider Penkovsky’s information to have been so critical during the

crisis that they have dubbed him “the spy who saved the world.”

Penkovsky also revealed that Moscow could not put pressure on Berlin

during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962, while the Cuban

Missile Crisis was under way. He was tried on charges of espionage

and was convicted. Soviet authorities executed him in May 1963.

PHILBY, HAROLD (KIM) (1912–1988).The privileged son of a

British diplomat, Harold “Kim” Philby became one of the most fa-

mous spies of the 20th century when he defected to the Soviet Union

in 1963, after a career in British intelligence. Astudent at Cambridge

in the 1930s, Philby was drawn to Marxist ideas and was an associ-

ate of what came to be known as “The Cambridge Spies”—Guy

Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. Burgess, Maclean,

and Philby were apparently recruited in the 1930s to be Soviet spies,

possibly by Blunt. In the 1940s they began working for Britain’s Se-

cret Intelligence Service (SIS), quickly rising in the ranks, and in the

early 1950s, Philby became the liaison officer in Washington with the

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of In-

vestigation (FBI). In 1951, Philby fell under suspicion and was re-

called to London. There he successfully resisted interrogation. When

the SIS refused to reinstate him, he went to the Lebanon as a free-

lance intelligence agent, under coveras a journalist.

In 1963, defector Anatoly Golitsynnamed Philby as a Soviet

agent, and a fellow SIS officer went to Beirut to persuade him to con-

fess to his work for the KGB. Instead, Philby boarded a Soviet

freighter and fled to Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life.

PHOENIX (OPERATION). The Phoenix operation was a counterinsur-

gency project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

and the army during the Vietnam Warto identify and root out the se-

cret communist guerrilla infrastructure in South Vietnam. The opera-

tion called for the Americans to provide training, advice, weapons, and

PHOENIX (OPERATION)• 153

05-398 (2) Dictionary.qxd 10/20/05 6:27 AM Page 153