196. Kim Philby: A KGB Spy in Washington (Ep 1)

15:14Gordon:It doesn't open until 1961. So the CIA, and kind of a sign of I think how embryonic it is, is kind of scattered around this shabby collection of buildings in Washington DC. I mean, they're so bad that they smell of wet paper, they're damp, the heating doesn't work because they've just been shoved into these kind of temporary accommodations. It's all new. It's all new. I mean, it's not even really a coherent organization yet.

15:40David:Yeah. And it's interesting because I think the Brits see themselves almost as like big brothers, and the teachers to the new kids, the CIA, about how to play this spy game. Because the Brits have been doing it for decades, including against the Russians. And so there's this interesting dynamic. And Philby is going to meet with a lot of top FBI and CIA officials. Official records show he visits CIA headquarters 113 times. So that gives you, you know, in a couple of years. So he's in and out of there almost every day. Alan Dulles, future director, will become one of the best. He will become one of his good friends, got lunches with him.

16:18David:He's got a pass which allows him to wander around at will CIA and FBI headquarters. And he makes a point of going to Dulles's office at the end of the afternoon for a kind of gossip and a chat. So that then we can just go for a drink afterwards.

16:34Gordon:Come on and talk more. Maybe this is Dulles's office where he had the ante room off of it, where he supposedly had sex with the Queen of Greece. I don't think that's the same office, but it could be. Could be a different office. Could be a different office.

16:44David:Yeah. But Philby was a great charmer. James McCarger, one of the CIA officers at the time, says, you know, he came to us with an enormous reputation. He was known as a young Turk, and the American bureaucracy admired that kind of thing. He's got a big house, 4100 Nebraska Avenue, lots of late night parties. We're going to come back to that. Lots of booze, pitchers of martini, bottles of whiskey. McCarger says, you know, the parties were long and very, very wet. We really were all afloat on a sea of drink. So he is kind of socializing as well with the American spies and trying to get the gossip from them.

17:23David:Although interestingly enough, he'd been warned by his predecessor that Hoover and the FBI also bugged his house. But so there's a kind of, it's like, have a drink, but also be aware you're being bugged. But these relationships are going to be really important for Philby's story. But actually, I think in some ways for the story of the whole of the Cold War, because some of these relationships

17:43Gordon:he builds are going to have massive repercussions. One of the most important relationships that he will build in Washington is with a very interesting and shadowy figure who's going to be absolutely critical to the creation and formation of the modern CIA, and that is James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, where to even start with this guy? I mean, at some point, and I think we've talked about this from, I mean, really the early days of the show, that we will do an Angleton series because he is himself an extraordinary character. But he's this kind of brooding, wiry guy who's got thick glasses. He grows orchids.

18:26Gordon:He ties his own fly fishing flies and lures. He studies poetry. um he is he's kind of cadaverous i think in in his looks and again serious anglophile because he'd actually been educated i think at malvern yeah in england um and at yale of course he'd known philby during the war in london and i think in rome as well where angleton had been stationed so he's he's kind of in some ways i think looks up to philby and looks up to the brits as as the Big Brother.

19:00David:Yeah, he'd worked on the double cross system with Philby and others in London during the war where there were German agents coming in and turning them back against the Nazis. And it will teach him the ways of counterintelligence, also deception and what can be done. And it will also make him think of Philby as something of a mentor. So when Philby comes back to Washington, and actually there's some evidence that Angleton might have pushed for Philby to get that appointment because he was so keen on his friends coming to Washington. The friendship inevitably deepens. You know, they drink martinis, they eat lobster at Harvey's restaurant, best in town, every week.

19:39David:Although I noticed that I was reading about Harvey's, ladies had to enter by a separate entrance and were not allowed in the main dining room at Harvey's during the time. And this is old school. They're going to dine all the time and lunch. Philby goes to Angleton's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and he notes that Angleton seems to eat an enormous amount and yet be this really thin guy. And Filby, like I think a lot of Brits who goes to America, realises he's going to need to go on a diet. Does that happen to Brits who go to the States? Yeah, it does. I've done it. When I've gone over there, you're like, quite quickly, guy, I can't continue my previous eating habits here.

20:14David:So the two men, friends, talk about intelligence, treat it as a gossip. One of the interesting facts, though, is, so they're gossiping together as friends, but then Angleton goes back to his office and writes everything up as notes. That makes sense. Yeah. So he keeps notes on his conversations with Philby. Philby, of course, is doing the same, but the difference is Philby's notes are also going to Moscow as well as to MI6.

20:37Gordon:So there's three governments that are learning a lot from these lunches. I found a very interesting phrase when I was researching London Station, which was deep chat. And the concept is basically, you're not working each other to recruit, but you might be sharing things that are slightly beyond your brief in kind of a mutually beneficial way. And it's deep chat. It's a kind of slightly liaison plus kind of conversation where money's not changing hands or anything like that.

21:11David:You're trading information inside gossip about people, about what's going on, about who's up and who's down. That's what Philby was doing and was good at. And Angleton is going to become a great friend and protector of Philby, even though there are warning signs in this period. So one day, Ted Colick, who's a visiting Israeli official, and Angleton deals with the Israelis a lot, bumps into Philby in the CIA headquarters. And afterwards, Ted Colick, this Israeli, goes to Angleton. He says, what is Philby doing walking around CIA headquarters? And Angleton goes, well, Kim's a very good friend of ours.

21:43David:And Colick goes, well, I was at his wedding in 1934 in Austria to a communist. And he goes, maybe you shouldn't trust him. But Angleton kind of ignores it because this guy's his friend and he trusts him.

21:59Gordon:This was, just to remind listeners, this was the root of your sympathies for the young Philby throughout our prior series, which was that he had a sort of youthful - Dalliance. Dalliance.

22:10David:Romantic dalliance with Litzy Friedman, which draws him in through this wonderful romance, admittedly into being a communist agent who then betrays his country and his friends and secrets.

22:20Gordon:But yes, everyone at Cambridge in the early 30s was basically a communist, right? Now that is actually true. I mean, not quite literally all of them,

22:29David:but that's one of the problems. Just like today. Not like today. Actually, maybe. But I think part of the problem was, because so many people have been communists in the early 30s, Exactly. Driven by anti-fascism and the depression, all these other things going around. The fact that someone had been a communist in the early 30s doesn't quite count against them in the way you'd think. Because it kind of goes, everyone went through a phase. Everyone goes through that kind of communist phase in the 30s. So it doesn't quite land some of these warnings in a way that I think looking back, we're like, oh, that's a sign.

23:02Gordon:Well, because it's pre-Stalin's terror.

23:05David:Yeah.

23:05Gordon:There isn't much information in the 30s on what's going on inside the Soviet Union. Cold War hasn't started. And so it's much more socially acceptable to be a communist. And I think that is exactly the defense that Philby will fall back on over and over again. And so, you know, it's sort of youthful indiscretion, youthful dalliance that's done. And I have to suspect that when this Israeli comes up to Angleton and says, well, you can't trust him because he married a communist. Angleton could fall back on the exact same thing and say, everybody at Cambridge was a communist in the early 1930s. And that should make me mistrust him any more than anybody else.

23:44Gordon:And of course, Angleton is going to pay an incredibly heavy price for trusting Kim Philby. And in fact, we'll be looking in much more detail at the impact of Philby's betrayal on Angleton in the CIA in our very special club offering for members that we're doing alongside the series. And you can, of course, go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com to hear that. But this dramatic impact that Philby will have on the CIA comes out of people like Angleton essentially saying, he's good. We can trust him.

24:16David:And so there are individuals that Philby betrays, but there are also secrets and operations. And after the break, we'll look at one of those.

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27:13Gordon:Well, welcome back. Kim Philby is installed as head of station in Washington. And it's interesting, isn't it, that he's going to reflect later on that it was more useful to his Soviet handlers to have him in Washington than it had been even when he was running Soviet counterintelligence inside MI6.

27:32David:That's right. And that's because he can see everything that the US and UK are doing as the Cold War starts. And the US and UK in this time are going to decide on carrying out some pretty aggressive covert operations against the Eastern Bloc. So the Iron Curtain has come down through Eastern Europe with all of these countries now occupied, controlled by the Soviet Union. And the plan from Britain and the US is to try and undermine that, not just to spy on them, but actually to run operations putting people behind the lines into the Iron Curtain countries, into the Eastern Bloc, and do things a bit similar to what Special Operations SOE did for Britain in World War II in occupied Nazi Europe, which is do things like sabotage, building up local networks, propaganda.

28:27David:They're trying to kind of use those World War II methods in this early Cold War period. So both countries are kind of thinking, this is how we can undermine the Soviet grip on these countries. And Philby's relationship here will be with a particularly interesting officer. On kind of the intelligence gathering side, it's with Angleton. But on the covert action side, it's a guy called Frank Wisner, the whiz.

28:52Gordon:The Wiz. And Wisner, the Wiz, runs what was then called the Office for Policy Coordination, which I think has one of these great anodyne bureaucratic names that's actually, this is the covert action arm. These are the people who are actually doing some of the most exciting stuff in government. They're actually not coordinating policy, as the name suggests. And again, it's this fascinating era where both CIA and MI6 are kind of finding themselves in the early years of the Cold War. And they are going to start planning, both CIA and MI6 are going to start planning operations independently, but very quickly realize that it's more helpful, more useful, more efficient to do it together in many cases.

29:41David:And the operations they're looking at are to try and effectively destabilize communist regimes in an arc from the Baltic states in the north right down through Ukraine, what's now Ukraine, then still part of the Soviet Union, and then down to Albania in the south of Europe. And they want to drop agents behind enemy lines. And each side is thinking of doing this, whether by parachute or by boat. And of course, if you're going to both do it, it makes sense to coordinate.

30:11Gordon:I had a conversation with a former CIA chief of station in London and just about the job. And this person told me that essentially a massive part of it today, I think, as in Philby's day, is deconfliction. It's helping to understand where the two services might bump into each other, where they might be running the same operations, targeting the same people, and making sure that everyone plays in the sandbox well together, because there's such a convergence of geopolitical interest that it makes no sense to have the two services bumping into each other.

30:47David:You don't want your agents literally bumping into each other or having case officers

30:51Gordon:going and trying to recruit the same networks. So Philby's job is kind of school marm of the sandbox in a way of making sure that the two services play nicely.

31:01David:Yeah, that's right. And two Americans and two Brits who are going to oversee these covert operations, navigate disputes. For instance, which exiles do you back? The British tend to like the monarchists and the Americans, the Republicans amongst the exiles. What a surprise. And the Americans have the money, but the Brits think, well, we've got more experience, particularly in Europe. We've got the brains, the background, but also something else of value. Because one day, Frank Wisner, the Wiz, turns to Philby and says, whenever we want to subvert any place, we find that the The British own an island within easy reach.

31:36Gordon:And this came up constantly in the series we did back in August on the Five Eyes, where the geographic spread matters. The footprint matters for signals intelligence and in this case, for actually planning and staging paramilitary operations.

31:53David:And so when it comes to the operations against Albania, the British island was Malta. And by the time Philby arrives in 49, both agencies, CIA and MI6, have started sending agents into Albania. And for MI6, it's Operation Valuable. Didn't turn out that way. For CIA, BG Fiend. The CIA, as is always the case, better names.

32:15Gordon:Better code names. Yeah, I'm going to give you that.

32:17David:So, you know, to give you one example of what they were doing, moonless night, 3rd of October 1949, a boat called the Stormy Seas lies 200 yards off a cove on the Albanian coast. A group of men climb into a rubber dinghy, row ashore to a remote ravine at the bottom of cliffs. A goat track leads up the scrub covered mountain. A British Marine brings a second group up from the dinghy to the shore. He finds the first group still waiting because they're unsure of what to do. But then he eventually says they just mooched off up into Albania. and their objective is to kind of get a local feel for what the mood is of the population as to whether they can topple the Albanian government which is communist.

32:59David:So these two groups of Albanian exiles who've been sent in by the Brits split into two but within hours one group's ambushed and three of its four members are killed the others made contact with villagers and the villagers tell them that soldiers had been in the area for several days as if they were waiting. Meanwhile, at a radio station in Corfu, the MI6 team running the operation begin to panic because there's no contact. These and other drops by MI6, by boat of agents into Albania, keep going wrong. But it's interesting because one MI6 officer recalls that the culture at the times was to meet every setback with the cry, not to worry, bash on regardless, just keep going.

33:42Gordon:I guess also seen from MI6, Albanian exile agents are not, you probably consider them to be pretty expendable resources, unfortunately.

33:53David:And that's what happens. Because sitting in a secure office in the Pentagon monitoring these drops, one American angrily says, there must be a leak. Something's going wrong with these operations. And meanwhile, he's saying this to his counterpart, who's the newly arrived liaison from MI6, who is Kim Philby. There must be a leak, Kim Philby. And when the Americans, so that was a British operation with the boat drop. The American operations also start to go wrong in Talbania. And Wisner, Frank Wisner, turns to Philby and actually apologizes to Philby and says, we'll get it right next time.

34:28Gordon:And you're like, oh, I mean, it's, I mean, Philby is in a very interesting structural position and it's quite valuable to the KGB. And I think it's valuable for Philby to be able to obfuscate where the leaks are coming from because he kind of sits at this scene as we've discussed he's the he's passing information between the cia and mi6 and so if the americans are wondering why something went wrong and point fingers at the brits philby is in in some ways in charge of who on the british side is getting information so he can expand what we'd call like the bigot list you know the list of people who are cleared for information he can point and say well you know there's 30 people over an mi6 who might have been responsible for this, and then vice versa.

35:12Gordon:So he's right in the center and he can exploit the information asymmetries that the headquarters of either agency really don't see.

35:22David:And lots of operations like Albania are going wrong at this time. Agents are getting captured in the Baltic states when they're being dropped in, in Ukraine when they're being dropped in. And at one point, there's like a massive argument between the MI6 controller for these operations, who've come over to Washington and Frank Wisner about who's to blame. And they're each shouting each other, going like, one of our signs is penetrated, and it must be yours. It couldn't be ours. And the person taking the note of the argument is Philby. And he's getting the information from this. Angleton is also supposedly giving him over drinks some of the drop zone coordinates for some of these operations and briefing him about others.

36:04David:and he's handing it all over to his Soviet controllers. Now, he's meeting them sporadically at this point. It's interesting. One of the things we've got as part of our bonus offering around this for our club members is Philby himself talking about his time as a spy in an audio and video recording, which I unearthed from the Stasi archive. And he talks a little bit here about how he is meeting the Soviet handlers. He makes it out as being quite easy. but actually I think it was quite tricky at times and the relationship wasn't easy, but he was meeting Soviet deep cover officers, particularly in towns around Maryland, and able to give them these details pretty quickly.

36:45But I guess what Philby doesn't say

36:48Gordon:is that his success in Washington was probably achieved despite rather than because of the KGB. because the KGB's Washington resident Torah at this point is kind of in dire straits. It's not a very well-organized, high-functioning intelligence gathering organization.

37:11David:Yeah. And it's messy. Philby doesn't have very good relationships with them. Here he is at this great position. But as we saw during the war, they're not necessarily making the most of him or handling him very well. But he's betraying the Albanian operations. He's betraying East European operations, the result is disaster and they're all going wrong. Big question.

37:31Gordon:But is Philby to blame for all of it? Or is he just one factor among many?

37:36David:It's an important question because I think it makes for a good story to blame everything on Philby. And I think there's a tendency somewhere to go, well, it's all because of Philby, the reason that these operations go wrong. Actually, it's more complicated than that. I was afraid you were going to say that, Gordon. But it's tempting to blame everything on Philby. And it makes it a very kind of personal story. But actually, the truth is different. Because the first failures now, Bain-Era, before he arrives in Washington, he didn't know all the details of the Baltic operations, which get compromised.

38:08David:Some of the problems will continue after he leaves Washington. And I think the truth is that these were actually pretty poorly conceived and executed intelligence operations. I mean, they didn't really have a good understanding of what the mood was on the ground, what the reception would be for these exile groups. And crucially, these exile groups are really badly penetrated by the communists. They're gossipy, they're leaky. So, you know, the communist side know who's coming and what's coming, even to some extent, without Philby having to tell them all the detail.

38:39Gordon:But we do know that in the case of the Albanian operations, for example, that Philby passed that information to his Soviet handlers. We can see that now in the record that in some of these cases, he might have been one input among several, but probably a pretty important corroborating source. If you have exile sources of the KGB who are reporting on these Albanian exile groups, and then all of a sudden your star agent in Washington is saying exactly the same thing.

39:05David:Yeah. So, I mean, he does betray them. And in all, out of more than 1 ,500 agents that they drop into Albania, only a third make it out alive. I mean, the rest are captured, killed, or simply give up. So it's a pretty terrible toll. And Filby, interestingly, later would show no remorse for the fact so many were killed. He's going to write, the agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on sabotage, murder and assassination. They were quite as ready as I was to contemplate bloodshed in the service of a political ideal. They knew the risks they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated.

39:46David:To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.

39:52Gordon:It's pretty cold, isn't it? It is. But he doesn't see himself as a mole. He sees himself as a Soviet intelligence officer who has penetrated the British establishment. And he's always loyal and working for the Soviet cause. Right, exactly. The value he's supplying back to the Soviets is enormous. But his life in DC is about to get a lot more complicated because he has a particularly disruptive friend. We've all got those friends. Who's going to come to town.

40:21David:We do. We've all got those friends. But Philby's is particularly disruptive. Summer of 1950, Philby receives a letter from his old Cambridge friend, Guy Burgess, currently working for the Foreign Office. Burgess, of course, has been another of the Cambridge friends that Philby had suggested be recruited by the Soviets. And Burgess writes in his letter, I have a shock for you. I've just been posted to Washington. Can I stay at your house? I mean, we should probably remind people about the madness that is Guy Burgess. I mean, brilliant, smart, funny, sociable. Hadn't he slept with members of the Hitler youth to get secrets?

41:01David:Yeah. Have I mistaken about that? I think there's something along those lines. I think there's not many people he hadn't slept with, it feels like, in the 30s and 40s. I think the problem is, there was a kind of lovable rogue element to Burgess when he's young, But by this stage, he's getting a bit older. It's less charming. It's less charming. He's increasingly, I think, dissolute and dangerous. And he's leading this trail of destruction wherever he goes, from Tangiers to Dublin, with just stories of kind of drunkenness, young men, rants against Americans, which is a theme, and occasional boasts about being a spy.

41:39Gordon:I mean, it's great. And I mean, I find this also kind of humorous that despite the insane drunkenness, and I figured the homosexuality, which at that point in time was illegal, the foreign office are posting him to Washington as sort of a way for other people to keep an eye on him. As a test.

42:02David:As a test.

42:03Gordon:Maybe you can kind of have a normal-ish posting for a couple of years and rise above this kind of wild ride that you've been on.

42:12David:So Philby is shown a letter by a colleague at the embassy, which comes from the head of the security at the Foreign Office in London, informing them about Burgess and his arrival. And it gives a summary of his past peccadillos and says that worse might be in store. And what does he mean worse, this kind of foreign office guy says to Philby? Goat? I mean, I just like the way that's there. Like, what could be worse than what we've already heard he's got up to? And Philby's like, I'll keep an eye on him while he's here. Yeah, I'll keep an eye on him. I mean, and this is the problem for Philby. And this is going to be, as we'll see, the problem for Philby, is that you would normally never have two undercover Soviet agents, both in touch with each other or living with each other or staying with each other.

42:59David:One of them living in the other's basement. Yeah. But the problem is Burgess, it's already known they're friends because Burgess actually got Philby into MI6 at the start of the war. It was his kind of introduction which helped him do it. So it's well established that they're friends. Burgess has been out to Turkey to see him. So there is a plausibility that Burgess would come and stay with Philby and that Philby could kind of keep an eye on, which is the message from the Foreign Office.

43:28Gordon:But as sometimes happens when great university friends come to town, Philby's wife, Aileen, is like, I hate Guy Burgess and I don't want him in our house.

43:42David:Yeah. I think it's worth going back to Aileen here. Philby marries her in 1946, although they'd met at the start of the war. They've got children and they've been together, but they only get actually married in 46 at the end of the war. But she has been suffering, as we talked about in the first series on Philby, from quite severe mental health problems, including Munchausen's, where she does forms of self-harm and pyromania to get attention. And the fact her husband is keeping secrets from her, vanishing and having various affairs, certainly does not help with her mental health. So she's already quite fragile in Washington.

44:19David:and then you hear that Guy Burgess is coming to stay. She's just given birth to their fifth child who's not been very well, so she's got a lot on her plate. She's drinking heavily and she tells a friend, I know him, Guy Burgess, only too well. He will never leave our house. And you can see her thinking, he's coming to stay while he looks for a place. He's never going to leave.

44:42Gordon:So hold on, just to recap the concoction we have here. Mental health problems at home, five children. massive bouts of drunkenness, extramarital affairs, espionage, and Guy Burgess. Yeah.

44:59David:And now Guy Burgess is going to be in your basement. That's terrible. Guy Burgess moves into the Philby's basement, which inevitably becomes filthy, with his rubbish strewn around one of the Philby's kids' train set, which was also set up in the basement. It's funny because the Philby kids will remember Uncle Guy, as he's called, as generous but a slightly alarming figure smelling of alcohol and tobacco and Burgess is immediately up to his old tricks so he turns up for the restaurant where James Jesus Angleton is at from the CIA and Burgess is wearing this kind of stained dirty naval jacket and I think he's trying to sell naval jackets as a kind of sideline so he's drunk he hasn't shaved he goes on a rant he asks for cash from Angleton and then he walks off I mean you know he's just he is trouble and And he leaves classified documents on his desk overnight at the embassy.

45:52David:He's pursuing young men, but he's also acting as Philby's courier with the Soviets. So he's going up to New York and often drops things off or passes on messages to the Soviets. And he buys this kind of 12-cylinder 1941 white Lincoln convertible car, which he's also going to race around in.

46:09Gordon:And then, as listeners probably expect, it gets even worse. because Burgess is going to be linked in the eyes of official Washington and some very important spy catchers with the person who put him up, Kim Philby. So the two, because they're friends, because Burgess is living in his basement and throwing his underpants on the kids' train sets and drinking heavily downstairs, the American intelligence establishment links him up with Philby as this kind of duo.

46:43David:which is going to have its costs. And there's one particular dinner party, which goes very, very badly. I think it is possibly, because we're going to go into some detail, I think it is possibly the worst dinner party ever. I don't know. People know some other candidates for that. Please let us know. January 19th, 1951, dozen or so people round for the Philbees at dinner. Angleton and his wife are there, along with the FBI liaison to the CIA. Also, another very interesting and important character in our story, a guy called Bill Harvey.

47:16Gordon:Bill Harvey, listeners may recall, was an office of security guy at the CIA, who later on will end up being responsible for the mafia portfolio and liaising with some of the underworld types that the agency enlists in attempts to kill Castro. Yeah. So that's where he ends up. That's where he ends up. But also very hard drinking guy.

47:43David:Yeah. Ex-Feeb. Ex-Feeb. Ex-Feeb. So he fell out, starts in the FBI, falls out with Hoover, partly because after one party, he slides off the road in his car and he's so drunk that he doesn't get up. He just sleeps in the car, which is reported missing. And eventually they find him the next day, kind of drunk asleep in his car. And I think Hoover, even Hoover is like too much. And so then he goes to the CIA. He goes to the CIA. And he's a big guy, big drinker. I mean, people describe him as like something from a Raymond Chandler, which I think is a good description. Always carries a snub revolver in a holster.

48:23David:He thinks he's a tough guy, doesn't he? And he takes that even to embassy functions. Definitely not Ivy League, not Yale, like the other CIA guys. He's from Indiana. He's from Indiana. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who'd like posh Brits.

48:36Gordon:No, no, I think he would be culturally predisposed to dislike both Philby and certainly Burgess.

48:42David:Yeah. So he's been around to Philby's before for dinner. In one dinner party, he falls asleep over the coffee and they leave him there snoring gently until midnight when his wife wakes him up saying, Come now, Daddy, it's time you were in bed and takes him away. But this time in January, it's going to be even worse. The evening starts, this worst dinner party ever, with pitchers of martini, which Aileen has made ready for the evening. She knows what's coming. It seems like the CIA guys like the martinis and the Feeb guys like the whiskey after dinner. So that's the kind of, you've got to get the balance because you've got both Feebs and CIA people at this dinner.

49:18Gordon:And so they have both. So they have both, yeah. How many drinks do you think people were having at these dinner parties? Because obviously one of the themes of this series is that everyone is boozing all the time. But if you had to put a number on it, how many would you say? How many units of alcohol? Well, because I think most people today, if you said someone goes out on the weekend and they have three martinis at dinner, you'd be like, that's a heavy night.

49:45David:I think that is before they start dinner. They'd have done three martinis. Yeah. Then they're boozing with dinner. And then it's probably three or four whiskeys afterwards, don't you think?

49:53Gordon:Yeah. I mean, it certainly does feel that way. And I think it's astounding to think about what their livers must have been like.

49:59David:Yeah, it is. So Harvey is there, he likes drinking. Libby, his wife, is there. She likes drinking. And she's also, you get the sense again, she's a bit awkward at these fancy dinner parties. This isn't kind of her world. Dinner's coming to an end. It's about 9.30 in the evening. And at that point, who turns up uninvited? Guy Burgess. Guy Burgess. Because he emerged from the basement of the Philby home in a naval jacket. But he just turns up for the dinner party. So he insults various guests, particularly the Americans. And then he pulls out a piece of paper. And one of the things about Guy Burgess is he loves to doodle to sketch.

50:38David:So he starts sketching people around the table. He's a kind of caricaturist. It's one of his party tricks. And everyone's like, well, you know, who is it? And he says, well, it's Harvey's wife, Bill Harvey's wife, Libby. And so, of course, they'll say, oh, show us, because that's what you'd say, wouldn't you? You'd like, let's see how close it is. You know, is it a nice kind of comic picture of Libby Harvey? So he slides it across the table. And, you know, everyone's hoping this might kind of lighten the mood, a bit of lighthearted fun. She looks at it and she literally screams. One account simply says it was her looking with the face like a dreadnought, like a battleship, like a kind of deformed head.

51:21David:But there is another version, which is, I think, the one we're going to go with, Which is that she is pictured with her skirt hiked up, her legs spread, and everything on display caricatured by Guy Burgess. We should say, this is the kind of thing that Guy Burgess would do. Yeah, he's a cruel guy. He's a cruel guy. So she shrieks at this picture and bursts into tears. Bill Harvey, the big guy, Raymond Chandler guy, he gets up, reaches for the drawing, looks at it, calls Burgess a son of a bitch, and then tries to throw a punch at him. Now, this is one of the details I love about it, is that James Jesus Angleton holds back Harvey.

52:03David:I mean, Angleton's this like wiry, thin guy.

52:07Gordon:How's he holding back big Bill Harvey from punching Burgess? I think that this should be one of the paintings on the wall at CIA headquarters. of James Jesus Angleton. Holding back Bill Harvey from Punching Guy Burgess, right up there with the picture of Tony Mendez doing the document work in the Argos story. It's one of the great moments in the CIA. One of the great moments in Anglo-American history. With a crumpled drawing down on the floor that Bill Harvey is thrown aside.

52:38David:So Philby hurriedly takes Burgess down to his basement hovel flat. The Harveys storm out. Philby rushes out to kind of placate them. And, you know, Harvey goes, you know, Burgess, he's a deranged pervert, I think is what he says, which again backs up the idea it was the really bad caricature and refuses to shake Philby's hand. Aileen, meanwhile, retreats to the kitchen, broken because this is her dinner party and this has not gone well. And someone comes back and finds Philby sat with his head in his hands, repeatedly saying to Burgess, how could you? How could you?

53:17Gordon:Who hasn't ended one of their dinner parties with their head in their hands? Just muttering to yourself.

53:22David:How could you? This is the worst dinner party ever. But it's not just a bad dinner party because it's going to have consequences. I think that's what's so important is Bill Harvey is never going to forgive or forget this humiliation of his wife by Guy Burgess and Philby. And he's now he's got Philby and Burgess in his sights. They are an enemy.

53:49Gordon:But just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for Kim Philby, it is absolutely going to get worse. because the investigation into those leaks that we spoke about earlier in the episode, those leaks that came out of the British embassy in Washington in the Second World War, are really going to spin out and implicate Kim Philby and his friends.

54:09David:That's right. That investigation is going to lead into a very secret mole hunt. And mole hunts are the theme of our special collection of bonus episodes for club members. and we're going to be looking at some of the history relating to Kim Philby, but also talk to people who've actually been mole hunters. So if you want to hear those episodes, do join the club at therestisclassified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.