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London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent
Aloysius J. Gleek:
LONDONSPYMI6_KIM PHILBY
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LM9qVRC-0Q[/youtube]
The BBC has uncovered previously unseen footage of one of Britain's most
infamous spies talking about his work as a double agent.
Published on Apr 4, 2016
Aloysius J. Gleek:
LONDONSPYMI6_KIM PHILBY
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc-lecture.html
EUROPE
Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin in ‘81,
Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6
By STEVEN ERLANGER
APRIL 4, 2016
Kim Philby’s grave at a cemetery in Moscow on Monday. Credit Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
LONDON — Kim Philby, the double agent whose betrayal of his country to the Soviet Union still marks British life, boasted in a 1981 lecture that was recently discovered by the BBC and broadcast on Monday of the ease with which he fooled a complacent establishment.
Mr. Philby, who defected to Moscow in 1963 and died there in 1988 at 76, delivered his hourlong lecture in English in East Berlin to members of the Stasi, the feared East German intelligence service, whose recording of the talk was discovered in the Stasi archives.
Aging and puffy, wearing large dark glasses, Mr. Philby addressed his audience as “dear comrades.” After describing his successes with a cut-glass accent and a deep note of satisfaction, he gave them his best advice: “Deny everything.”
Even when confronted with an incriminating document you wrote, said Mr. Philby, who survived numerous vettings even after his loyalties were in grave doubt, insist “it’s a forgery.”
With a thin smile, he said: “All I had to do really was keep my nerve. My advice to you is to tell all your agents that they are never to confess.”
The son of a famous desert explorer and official in the Indian Empire who later became a Muslim and took the name Hajj Abdullah, Harold Adrian Russell Philby was known as Kim, after the young boy in the Kipling novel who serves his country as a spy.
Born in India, he was educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where historians now say he was recruited, and not, as he claimed, in Austria in 1934.
Kim Philby in 1955.
Credit Associated Press
In what he called his “30 years in the enemy camp,” Mr. Philby was aided by class assumptions, he said.
“Because I had been born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of an influential standing, I knew that they would never get too tough with me,” he told the Stasi. “They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they had been proved wrong afterwards, I could have made a tremendous scandal.”
Mr. Philby, with a note of amusement, described how easy it was for him to steal secret documents. He befriended the archivist at MI6 and bought him drinks, and then he had access to files that were not within his area.
“Every evening I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports which I had written myself, full of files taken out of the actual documents, out of the actual archives,” he said. “I was to hand them to my Soviet contact in the evening. The next morning I would get the file back, the contents having been photographed, and take them back early in the morning and put the files back in their place. That I did regularly, year in, year out.”
The best-known video recording of Mr. Philby is from a news conference in 1955, in his mother’s London apartment, in which he denied being a Communist spy after being dismissed by MI6 but cleared in Parliament by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
He was later rehired, and it was not until late 1962 that the British became convinced he was a double agent and sent a new interrogator to meet him in Beirut.
Mr. Philby disappeared in January 1963 and emerged in Moscow about six months later. He escaped, he told the Stasi, because of further British incompetence. The agent sent to keep an eye on him could not resist going skiing after hearing that fresh snow had fallen on the Lebanese mountains.
Mr. Philby was part of a ring of Cambridge spies that included Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who preceded him to Moscow after Mr. Philby warned them in 1951 that they were under suspicion and about to be interrogated by British counterintelligence officials. Their defection raised more suspicion about Mr. Philby, but he survived the episode.
It was not until 1979 that the long-suspected “fourth man,” Anthony Blunt, an art historian close to the queen, was publicly revealed to have helped recruit the other three men while they were at Cambridge in the 1930s.
But it was the career of Mr. Philby, who set up MI6’s section to spy on the Soviet Union to which he was loyal, that was most astonishing, as he rose to head the very counterintelligence department that should have discovered his treachery.
In 1965, the Russians awarded him the Red Banner of Honor for his services to the K.G.B., and he later received the privileges of a K.G.B. general.
Not without humor, Mr. Philby told the Stasi audience how his Soviet controllers told him to become chief of the anti-Soviet section of MI6 by removing his boss, Felix Cowgill.
“I said, ‘Are you proposing to shoot him or something?’ ” Mr. Philby recalled.
Told to use bureaucratic methods, “I set about the business of removing my own chief,” he said, then added dryly: “You oughtn’t to listen to this,” prompting laughter.
“It was a very dirty story,” said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds. “But after all, our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time, but we do it for a cause that is not dirty in any way.”
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2A2g-qRIaU[/youtube]
Kim Philby is interviewed about his association with Guy Burgess.
Uploaded on Dec 30, 2008
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/shortcuts/2016/jan/19/alan-turing-james-bond-london-spy-how-mi5-became-britains-most-inclusive-employer
MI5/MI5
Alan Turing, James Bond
and London Spy:
how the security services became
Britain’s most inclusive employer
Where once homosexuality might have led to blackmail, exposure
or disgrace, MI5 and MI6 now welcome gay people
By Richard Norton-Taylor and Tom Rob Smith
Tuesday 19 January 2016 14.03 EST
Thames House, MI5’s headquarters on London’s Millbank Photograph: Myung Jung Kim/PA
If you had walked past MI5’s headquarters in central London earlier today, you might have noticed the rainbow flag flying above the building. It is not the first time – it flew there on the day of London’s Pride festival last summer. But this time it was raised to mark the accolade of Stonewall’s employer of the year: Britain’s Security Service came top in the annual Stonewall Workplace Equality Index. The index measures an organisation’s work in tackling discrimination and creating an inclusive workplace for lesbian, gay, bi and trans people.
MI5 in particular, it might be argued, needs to be inclusive. Much of its work, as it director general Andrew Parker, said, “goes on by necessity out of view”. Its employees cannot talk about their work with outsiders. They need a workplace that is tolerant and welcoming, and an esprit de corps that encourages diversity.
Historically, when homosexuality was illegal, spying might have been a particularly attractive career for people used to hiding their personal – as well as political – proclivities. They could keep secrets, and tell lies. Perhaps the most notorious gay spies were Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, two members of the Cambridge ring whose circle was imbued with sexual liberation, of all kinds. (There was one exception. The ascetic John Cairncross told me years after he was exposed as the “Fifth Man” that he did not take to the fellow members of the spy ring because of their class – which protected them from exposure – and lifestyle.)
Bond gets up close and personal with Raoul Silva (played by Javier Bardem) in Skyfall.
Photograph: Moviestore / Rex Features
Now even James Bond, the most highly charged heterosexual of all spies, is confronted in Skyfall with a flirtatious gay scene when villain Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem, undoes Bond’s shirt and strokes his chest while Bond is tied to a chair. “First time for everything?” he asks. Daniel Craig’s Bond, replies: “What makes you think this is my first time?”
In 1954, Alan Turing, the codebreaking genius of wartime Bletchley Park, the forerunner of GCHQ, died in an apparent suicide after battling with his sexuality and being sentenced to chemical castration. More than 50 years later, Gareth Williams, the GCHQ maths genius, was found dead in his London flat while seconded to MI6. His death , unsurprisingly, is often thought to have been an inspiration for the recent BBC2 series, London Spy. The similarities between Williams and Alex, played by Edward Holcroft, are pretty clear – although writer Tom Rob Smith has said his character is a work of fiction. Nevertheless, these are cases – one fact, the other fiction – when their employers did not face up to a duty of care in a profession which can be uniquely lonely.
MI5 now has a LGBT “champion” to promote diversity, an 80-plus-strong LGBT network, and a “reverse mentoring” scheme for staff who want to develop their understanding of diversity. Staff are offered “unconscious bias training”. Meanwhile MI6, Bond’s employer, uses Stonewall’s logo on recruitment ads appealing for people who are “able to get on with diverse groups”.
Until the early 90s, MI5 – like the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 – prevented gay people from security-sensitive posts on the grounds they were vulnerable to blackmail. MI5 heading Stonewall’s table will be leaving many of Britain’s former security chiefs aghast – and be a lesson to any of them still in post, trying to hold fast to their service’s old and damaging ethos.
The fictional view: Edward Holcroft and Ben Wishaw in the BBC2 drama London Spy.
Photograph: Joss Barratt/BBC/WTTV Limited
‘The Secret Service used to embody the sense that
gay people were not part of mainstream society’
– London Spy writer Tom Rob Smith on MI5
The news that MI5 has come top of Stonewall’s employers list is wonderful. My drama London Spy was never intended as a commentary about these organisations today. It was grappling with a historic question, which is why were organisations such as MI5 so adamant that gay people were unsuitable for the secret services? I wanted to look at it from a slightly different perspective, which was that if you are aware that your country would not employ you, or would prosecute you for your sexuality, are you in a sense made a spy by your country?
If that link to your country is cut at a very early age, you look for other countries where you might be able to be happy or welcome. The Soviet Union peddled the myth that there was equality over there, that gay people would be free and happy, and you can see why that was conceptually appealing to some. It was never the fact that gay people were somehow intrinsically less trustworthy, which was certainly the impression having the blanket ban on gay employees gave out. And that was always what the character of Scotty [played by Jim Broadbent] was grappling with historically.
We often talk about equality as somehow doing things for people or minorities. Actually, it benefits society at large. It’s clearly not beneficial to have a group of people feeling disconnected from their country.
One of the reasons this news is so wonderful is that the Secret Service used to embody a sense that gay people were not part of mainstream society. And so for it to go to being the best place for someone who’s gay to work is a really remarkable transformation.
Tom Rob Smith (as told to Daniel Martin)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on April 05, 2016, 12:22:58 am ---http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/shortcuts/2016/jan/19/alan-turing-james-bond-london-spy-how-mi5-became-britains-most-inclusive-employer
The fictional view: Edward Holcroft and Ben Wishaw in the BBC2 drama London Spy.
Photograph: Joss Barratt/BBC/WTTV Limited
The news that MI5 has come top of Stonewall’s employers list is wonderful. My drama London Spy was never intended as a commentary about these organisations today. It was grappling with a historic question, which is why were organisations such as MI5 so adamant that gay people were unsuitable for the secret services? I wanted to look at it from a slightly different perspective, which was that if you are aware that your country would not employ you, or would prosecute you for your sexuality, are you in a sense made a spy by your country?
Tom Rob Smith
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on March 06, 2016, 06:16:04 am ---
Spies like us
As BBC drama London Spy begins, Barry Didcock
explores our abiding fascination with spooks
“I haven't had the John le Carré life, but I have had a life of wondering how I am a spy on some level – and that connects with being gay and leading a double life in the sense that you have this persona,” he explains. “At school I was terrified. I couldn't even comprehend it [being gay] so my way of dealing with it was to say, 'I'll be a much more convincing liar if I can convince myself that it isn't true.' So on one level I shut that whole part of my brain down and I became a spy to myself. I was living a cover that I started to try to believe in order to make it more convincing. That's my reason for getting into spy stories.”
Tom Rob Smith
--- End quote ---
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