[12][page needed] While working to aid German refugees in Vienna, Philby met Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann), a young Austrian communist of Hungarian Jewish origins.

[24] In February 1937, Philby travelled to Spain, then embroiled in a bloody civil war triggered by the coup d'état of Falangist forces under General Francisco Franco against the government of President Manuel Azaña.

"[26] In December 1937, during the Battle of Teruel, a Republican shell hit just in front of the car in which Philby was travelling along with correspondents Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, Bradish Johnson of Newsweek and Ernest Sheepshanks[27] of Reuters.

[26]In 1938, Walter Krivitsky (born Samuel Ginsberg), a former GRU officer in Paris who had defected to France the previous year, travelled to the United States and published an account of his time in "Stalin's secret service".

[15][page needed] On a short trip back from Spain, Philby tried to recruit Flora Solomon as a Soviet agent; she was the daughter of a Russian banker and gold dealer, a relative of the Rothschilds and wife of a London stockbroker.

Burgess was arrested in September for drunken driving and was subsequently fired,[36] while Philby was appointed as an instructor on clandestine propaganda at the SOE's finishing school for agents at the Estate of Lord Montagu[37][page needed] in Beaulieu, Hampshire.

The new London rezident, Ivan Chichayev (code-name Vadim), re-established contact and asked for a list of British agents being trained to enter the Soviet Union.

[15][page needed] Philby provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa and of the Japanese intention to strike into southeast Asia instead of attacking the Soviet Union as Adolf Hitler had urged.

The first was ignored as a provocation, but the second, when confirmed by the Russo-German journalist and spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, contributed to Stalin's decision to begin transporting troops from the Far East in time for the counteroffensive around Moscow.

[39] At this time, the German Abwehr was active in Spain, particularly around the British naval base of Gibraltar, which its agents hoped to watch with many detection stations to track Allied supply ships in the Western Mediterranean.

[41] During 1942–43, Philby's responsibilities were then expanded to include North Africa and Italy, and he was made the deputy head of Section Five under Major Felix Cowgill, an army officer seconded to SIS.

[43][44] Charles Arnold-Baker, an officer of German birth (born Wolfgang von Blumenthal) working for Richard Gatty in Belgium and later transferred to the Norwegian/Swedish border, voiced many suspicions of Philby and his intentions but was repeatedly ignored.

Angleton, later chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Counterintelligence Staff, became suspicious of Philby when he failed to pass on information relating to a British agent executed by the Gestapo in Germany.

She noted that they produced an extraordinary wealth of information on German war plans but next to nothing on the repeated question of British penetration of Soviet intelligence in either London or Moscow.

[15][page needed] A more serious incident occurred in August 1945, when Konstantin Volkov, an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain for himself and his wife.

Volkov had insisted that all written communications about him take place by bag rather than by telegraph, causing a delay in reaction that might plausibly have given the Soviets time to uncover his plans.

[48] A month later Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in Ottawa, took political asylum in Canada and gave the Royal Canadian Mounted Police names of agents operating within the British Empire that were known to him.

In 1948, troubled by Philby's heavy drinking and frequent depressions and his life in Istanbul, she experienced a breakdown, staging an accident and injecting herself with urine and insulin to cause skin disfigurations.

[55] His dissolution had a troubling effect on Philby; the morning after a particularly disastrous and drunken party, a guest returning to collect his car heard voices upstairs and found "Kim and Guy in the bedroom drinking champagne.

[71] From 1960, Philby's formerly marginal work as a journalist became more substantial and he frequently travelled throughout the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen.

[73] Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer recently stationed in Beirut who was a friend of Philby's and had previously believed in his innocence, was tasked with attempting to secure his full confession.

[74] She recalled returning home to Beirut from a sight-seeing trip in Jordan to find Philby "hopelessly drunk and incoherent with grief on the terrace of the flat", mourning the death of a little pet fox that had fallen from the balcony.

[5] On the evening of 23 January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to meet his wife for a dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy.

Journalist Ben Macintyre, author of several works on espionage, speculated that MI6 might have left open the opportunity for Philby to flee to Moscow to avoid an embarrassing public trial.

[5] Secret files released to the National Archives in late 2020 indicated that the British government had intentionally conducted a campaign to keep Philby's spying confidential "to minimise political embarrassment" and prevent the publication of his memoirs, according to a report by The Guardian.

[90] Though he claimed publicly in January 1988 that he did not regret his decisions and that he missed nothing about England except some friends, Colman's mustard and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce,[91] his wife Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova later described Philby as "disappointed in many ways" by what he found in Moscow.

[96] While working as a correspondent in Spain, Philby began an affair with Frances Doble, Lady Lindsay-Hogg, an actress and aristocratic divorcée who was an admirer of Franco and Hitler.

[44] Philby said that at the time of his recruitment as a spy there were no prospects of his being useful; he was instructed to make his way into the Secret Service, which took years, starting with journalism and building up contacts in the British establishment.

He said that there was no discipline there; he made friends with the archivist, which enabled him for years to take secret documents home, many unrelated to his own work, and bring them back the next day; his handler photographed them overnight.

Commenting on his sabotage of the operation to secretly send thousands of anti-communists into Albania to overthrow the communist government, Philby defended his actions by saying that he had helped prevent another world war.