Kim Philby
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Codename(s)	Stanley
Birth name	Harold Adrian Russell Philby
Born	(1912-01-01)1 January 1912
Died	11 May 1988(1988-05-11) (aged 76)
Buried	Kuntsevo Cemetery, Ryabinova Ulitsa, Moscow, Russia
Nationality	British
Spouse	Alice (Litzi) Friedman Aileen Furse Eleanor Brewer Rufina Pukhova
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge

Kim Philby on an USSR postage stamp

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912–11 May 1988^[1]) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a double agent before defecting to the Soviet Union. He served as both an NKVD and KGB operative.^[2]

In 1963, Philby was revealed to be a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, the other members of which were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviet Union. His activities were moderated only by Joseph Stalin's fears that he was secretly on Britain's side.^[3] Philby was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from 1946 to 1965.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Philby was born at Ambala in the Punjab while it was a province of British India. His father, St. John Philby, a well-known author, orientalist, and convert to Islam,^[4] was a member of the Indian Civil Service and later a civil servant in Mesopotamia and advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia.

Nicknamed "Kim" after the young boy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, Philby attended Aldro preparatory school. Following in the footsteps of his father, he continued to Westminster School, which he left in 1928 at the age of 16. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and economics. Whilst at Cambridge, he was treasurer of the Cambridge University Socialist Society and canvassed for the Labour candidate for Cambridge in the 1931 election. He graduated in 1933 with a 2:1 degree in economics.^[5]

Upon Philby's graduation, Maurice Dobb – a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and tutor in economics – introduced him to the World Federation for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism in Paris. The World Federation was one of innumerable fronts operated by the German communist Willi Münzenberg, a member of the Reichstag who had fled to France in 1933.^[6] Dobb, a Communist sympathiser, also placed Philby in contact with the Comintern underground in Vienna, Austria.

Vienna[link]

Whilst in Vienna, working to aid refugees from Nazi Germany, Philby met and fell in love with Litzi Friedmann (born Alice Kohlmann), a young Austrian Communist of Hungarian Jewish origins. Philby admired the strength of her political convictions and later recalled that at their first meeting: "[a] frank and direct person, Litzi came out and asked me how much money I had. I replied £100, which I hoped would last me about a year in Vienna. She made some calculations and announced, 'That will leave you an excess of £25. You can give that to the International Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. We need it desperately.' I liked her determination."^[7] He acted as a courier to Vienna and Prague, paying for the train tickets out of his remaining £75 and using his British passport to evade suspicion. He also delivered clothes and money to refugees from the Nazis.^[8]

With threats of an armed uprising against the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (he was assassinated by Nazis the following year) and the killing of over 1,000 civilians by troops, Philby's British passport became still more valuable. Philby and Litzi married in February 1933, enabling her to escape to the United Kingdom with Philby two months later.^[8] It is possible that it was a Viennese-born friend of Friedmann's in London, Edith Tudor Hart – herself, at this time, a Soviet agent – who first approached Philby about the possibility of working for Soviet intelligence.^[8] According to Genrikh Borovik, who worked from Soviet archives, Tudor Hart recommended Litzi and Philby in 1934. Yuri Modin, later one of the KGB controllers of the Cambridge Five, agrees: "Contrary to received opinion, it was neither Guy Burgess nor one of our own agents who lured Philby into the toils of the Soviet espionage apparatus. It was Litzi."^[7]

His first Soviet controller was the Hungarian Arnold Deutsch (code-name Otto), who came to London from Vienna to study at London University. He was soon replaced by Teodor Maly (code-name Man), who was also Hungarian. Philby also dealt with Anatol Gorsky (code-name Kap) the OGPU resident in London and his predecessor, a German known as Reif (code-name Mar). All were shot in Moscow between 1936 and 1938 on trumped-up charges of being either German or Polish spies. His first task for Otto was to make a list of his Cambridge contemporaries who might respond to discreet contact. He listed seven, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.^[8]

London and Spain[link]

In London, Philby enrolled at the School of Slavonic languages to learn Russian, helped by his father, a friend of the director. The school trained people for a career in diplomacy or the intelligence services. Philby's Russian was never good and he soon took a job at a monthly magazine, the World Review of Reviews, for which he wrote articles and letters (sometimes under pseudonyms) and occasionally served as acting editor.^[9]

At this point, Philby and Litzi separated. They remained friends and divorced only in 1946. When the Germans threatened to overrun Paris in 1940, where she was then living, he arranged her escape to England. In 1936 he joined a trade magazine, the Anglo-Russian Trade Gazette, as editor. The paper was failing, and its owner changed its role to covering Anglo-German trade. Philby engaged in a concerted effort to make contact with Germans such as Joachim von Ribbentrop, at that time the German ambassador in London. He joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was supported both by the British and German Nazi governments, and made many trips to Berlin.^[8]

In February 1937, Philby travelled to Seville, Spain. At the time, Spain was embroiled in a bloody civil war, triggered by the rebellion of Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco against the socialist Republican government of President Manuel Azaña. Philby worked at first as a freelance journalist; from May 1937, he served as a correspondent for the Times of London, reporting from the side of the pro-Franco forces. He was also working for both Soviet and British intelligence, posting letters in a crude code to a fictitious girlfriend—Mlle Dupont in Paris—for the Russians. He used a simpler system for MI6 delivering post at Hendaye, France, for the British Embassy in Paris. When visiting Paris after the war, he was shocked to discover that the address that he used for Mlle Dupont was that of the Soviet Embassy. His controller in Paris, the Latvian Ozolin-Haskins (code name Pierre), was shot in Moscow in 1937. His successor, Boris Shpak (code-name Bazarov), a Lithuanian, suffered the same fate two years later.^[8]

Both services were interested in the combat performance of the new Messerschmitt Bf109s and Panzer I and IIs deployed with Nationalist forces in Spain. He told the British, after a direct question to Franco, that German troops would never be permitted to cross Spain to attack Gibraltar.^[8]

His Soviet controller at the time, Theodore Maly, reported in April 1937 to the NKVD that he had personally briefed Philby on the need "to discover the system of guarding Franco and his entourage." So as to assist in Franco's assassination, Philby was instructed to report on vulnerable points in Franco's security and recommend ways to gain access to him and his staff.^[10] However, such an act was never a real possibility; upon debriefing Philby in London on 24 May 1937, Maly wrote to the NKVD, "Though devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, [Philby] does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this [assassination] attempt."^[10]

In December 1937, during the battle of Teruel, a Republican shell hit just in front of the car in which Philby was travelling with the correspondents Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, Bradish Johnson of Newsweek, and Ernest Sheepshanks^[11] of Reuters. Johnson was killed outright, and Neil and Sheepshanks soon died of their injuries. Philby suffered only a minor head wound.

The Spanish Army Red Cross of Military Merit awarded by General Francisco Franco to Kim Philby at Salamanca town on 2nd March 1938

As a result of this accident, Philby, who was well-liked by the Nationalist forces whose victories he trumpeted, was awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco on 2 March 1938. Philby found that the award proved helpful in obtaining access to fascist circles: "Before then," he later wrote, "there had been a lot of criticism of British journalists from Franco officers who seemed to think that the British in general must be a lot of Communists because so many were fighting with the International Brigades. After I had been wounded and decorated by Franco himself, I became known as ‘the English-decorated-by-Franco’ and all sorts of doors opened to me."^[10]

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." He testified before the Dies Committee (later to become the House Un-American Activities Committee) regarding Soviet espionage within the United States, and in 1940 was interviewed by MI5 officers in London. Krivitsky claimed that two Soviet intelligence agents had penetrated the British Foreign Office, and that a third Soviet intelligence agent had worked as a journalist for a British newspaper during the civil war in Spain. Krivitsky was shot in a Washington hotel room the following year.^[12]

Alexander Orlov (born Leiba Feldbin; code-name Swede), Philby's controller in Madrid, who had once met him in Perpignan, France, with the bulge of an automatic rifle clearly showing through his raincoat, also defected. In order to protect his family, still living in Russia, he said nothing about Philby, an agreement Stalin respected.^[8] Whilst on a short trip back from Spain, Philby tried to recruit Flora Solomon, daughter of a Russian banker and gold dealer, a relative of the Rothschilds and wife of a London stockbroker, as a Soviet agent. At the same time, Guy Burgess was trying to get her into MI6. But the resident in France, probably Pierre at this time, suggested to Moscow that he suspected Philby's motives. Solomon introduced Philby to his second wife, Aileen Furse, but went to work for the British retailer Marks & Spencer.^[8]

World War II[link]

In July 1939 Philby returned to the Times office in London. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret protocol that the Wehrmacht and the Red Army would divide Poland, shocked Philby. He often asked, "Why was this necessary?" When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, contact with his Soviet controllers was lost and Philby failed to attend meetings. During the Phoney War from September 1939 until the Dunkirk evacuation, Philby worked as the Times correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force headquarters.^[8] After being evacuated from Boulogne on 21 May, he returned to France in mid-June (now representing the Daily Telegraph in addition to The Times). He briefly reported from Cherbourg and Brest, sailing for Plymouth less than twenty-four hours before the French surrender.^[13]

Esther Marson-Smedley, a correspondent with the Daily Express who shared the train ride from Plymouth to London, then introduced him to Marjorie Maxse, who offered him a role in the War Office. On his first meeting in her office, Philby was surprised to see his old friend from Cambridge, Guy Burgess, who was already working there. His time there, however, was short-lived; the under-funded section was absorbed by the new Special Operations Executive (SOE) in July 1940. Burgess was fired for "irreverence",^[14] and Philby was appointed as an instructor in the art of clandestine propaganda at the SOE's training establishment in Beaulieu, Hampshire.^[15]

Philby's role as an instructor of sabotage agents again brought him to the attention of the OGPU. The new London resident, Ivan Chichayev (code-name Vadim), re-established contact and asked for a list of names of British agents being trained to enter the USSR. Philby replied that none had been sent and that none were undergoing training. This statement was underlined twice in red and marked with two question marks by disbelieving staff at Moscow Central in the Lubyanka, according to Genrikh Borovik, who saw the telegrams much later in the KGB archives.^[8]

Section IX was often known as Section D (SIS Sections used Roman numerals). Philby was originally a Section D officer and is so noted in a letter of 24 September 1940 written by Lt. Col. Valentine Vivian, the head of Section V at that time. Under Section IX was The Statistical Research Centre War Office (a cover name), mobilised on September 1939 on the outbreak of war at War Station No X Bletchley Park, charged with breaking the German Enigma codes.^[16] Philby provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa and of the Japanese intention to strike south at Singapore instead of attacking the USSR as Hitler had urged. The first was ignored as a provocation, but the second, when confirmed by the Russo-German journalist and spy in Tokyo Richard Sorge, enabled Stalin to transport Siberian troops from the Far East in time for Georgy Zhukov to use them to save Moscow.^[8]

By September 1941, Philby was working for Section V of MI6, responsible for offensive counter-intelligence. On the strength of his knowledge and experience of Franco's Spain, he was put in charge of the subsection which dealt with Spain and Portugal. This entailed responsibility for a network of undercover operatives in Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar, and Tangier.^[17] 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 cameras and radar to track Allied supply ships in the Western Mediterranean. Thanks to British counter-intelligence efforts, of which Philby's Iberian subsection formed a significant part, the project (code-named Bodden) never came to fruition.^[18] During 1942–43 Philby's responsibilities were expanded to include North Africa and Italy, and he was made the deputy head of Section V under Major Felix Cowgill, an army officer seconded to SIS.^[14] Cowgill was the SIS representative on the XX Committee run by John Masterman, which dealt with double agents working for the Abwehr but controlled by the British. In late 1944, Philby was chosen to replace Cowgill as head of Section.^[19]Charles Arnold-Baker, an officer of German birth (born Wolfgang von Blumenthal) working or Richard Gatty in Belgium and later transferred to the Norwegian Swedish border, voiced suspicions of Philby but was ignored.

While with Section V, Philby met James Jesus Angleton, a young American counter-intelligence officer working in liaison with SIS in London. Angleton, later chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) counter-intelligence staff, became suspicious of Philby when he failed to pass on information relating to a British agent executed by the Gestapo in Germany. It later emerged that the agent – known as Schmidt – had also worked as an informant for the Rote Kapelle organisation, which sent information to both London and Moscow.^[20] Nevertheless, Angleton's suspicions went unheard.

In late summer 1943, the SIS provided the GRU with an official report of the activities of German agents in Bulgaria and Romania, soon to be invaded by the Red Army. The NKVD complained to Cecil Barclay, SIS representative in Moscow, that much had been withheld. Barclay reported the complaint to London. Philby claimed to have overheard discussion of this by chance and sent a report to his controller. This turned out to be identical with Barclay's dispatch, convincing the NKVD that Philby had seen the full Barclay report. A similar lapse occurred with a report from the Japanese Embassy in Moscow to Tokyo. The NKVD received the same report from Richard Sorge, its spy in Tokyo, but with a most significant extra paragraph that Hitler might seek peace with the Soviet Union. These lapses by Philby aroused intense suspicion in Moscow.

Elena Modrzhinskaya at GUGB headquarters in Moscow was the person who assessed all material from the Cambridge Five. 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 Russian intelligence in either London or Moscow. Philby had repeated his claim that there were no such agents. She asked, "Could the SIS really be such fools they failed to notice suitcase-loads of papers leaving the office? Could they have overlooked Philby's communist wife?" Modrzhinskaya concluded that all were double agents, working essentially for the British.^[8]

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. For a large sum of money, Volkov offered the names of three Soviet agents inside Britain, two of whom worked in the Foreign Office and a third who worked in counter-espionage in London. Philby was given the task of dealing with Volkov. He warned his Soviet controller and went to Istanbul – slowly. By the time he arrived in Turkey, three weeks later, Volkov had been removed to Moscow, in bandages.

Philby's role might have compromised his position. However, Volkov's defection had been discussed with the British Embassy in Ankara on telephones tapped by Soviet intelligence. Volkov had insisted that all written communications about him take place by diplomatic bag rather than by telegraph, causing a delay in reaction that might plausibly have given the Soviets time to uncover his plans. Philby was thus able to evade blame and detection.^[21] A month later Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in Ottawa, took political asylum in Canada and gave the Royal Canadian Mounted Police many agent names; Philby could do nothing about this.

Istanbul[link]

In February 1947, Philby was appointed head of British intelligence for Turkey, and posted to Istanbul with his second wife, Aileen, and their family. His public position was that of First Secretary at the British Consulate; in reality, his intelligence work required overseeing British agents and working with the Turkish security services.^[22]

Philby planned to infiltrate five or six groups of émigrés into Soviet Armenia or Soviet Georgia. But efforts amongst the expatriate community in Paris produced just two recruits. Turkish intelligence took them to a border crossing into Georgia but soon afterwards shots were heard. Another effort was made using a Turkish Gulet for a seaborne landing, but it never left port. He was implicated in a similar campaign in Albania. Colonel David Smiley, an aristocratic Guards officer who had helped Enver Hoxha and his Communist guerillas to liberate Albania, now prepared to liberate it from Hoxha. He trained Albanian commandos – some of whom were former Nazi collaborators – in Libya or Malta. From 1947, they infliltrated the southern mountains to build support for former King Zog. The first three missions, overland from Greece, were trouble-free. Larger numbers were landed by sea and air under Operation Valuable, which continued until 1951, increasingly under the influence of the newly-formed CIA. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, disliked the idea, which was promoted by former SOE men now in SIS. Most infiltrators were caught by the Sigurimi, the Albanian Security Service.^[23] Clearly there had been leaks, and Philby was later suspected as one of the leakers. His own comment was "I do not say that people were happy under the regime but the CIA underestimated the degree of control that the Authorities had over the country."^[8]

Aileen Philby (née Furse) had suffered since childhood from psychological problems which caused her to inflict injuries upon herself. In 1948, troubled by the heavy drinking and frequent depressions that had become a feature of her husband's life in Istanbul, she experienced a breakdown of this nature, staging an accident and injecting herself with urine and insulin to cause skin disfigurations.^[24] She was sent to a clinic in Switzerland to recover. Upon her return to Istanbul in late 1948, she was badly burned in an incident with a charcoal stove, and returned to Switzerland. Shortly afterward, Philby was moved to the job as chief SIS representative in Washington, D.C., with his family.

Washington, D.C.[link]

In September 1949, the Philbys arrived in the United States. Officially, his post was that of First Secretary to the British Embassy; in reality, he served as chief British intelligence representative in Washington. His office oversaw a large amount of urgent and top-secret communications between the United States and London. Philby was also responsible for liaising with the CIA and promoting "more aggressive Anglo-American intelligence operations."^[25] A leading figure within the CIA was Philby's wary former colleague, James Jesus Angleton, with whom he once again found himself working closely. Angleton remained suspicious of Philby, but lunched with him every week in Washington. Teddy Kollek, an Austrian Jew, former agent of Mossad and mayor of Jerusalem, recognised him from their prewar Vienna days, saw them together and assumed that Angleton had "turned" Philby into a triple agent.^[26]

However, a more serious threat to Philby's position had come to light. During the summer of 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk had reused a one time pad to transmit intelligence traffic. This mistake made it possible to break the normally impregnable code. Contained in the traffic (intercepted and decrypted as part of the Venona project) was information that documents had been sent to Moscow from the British Embassy in Washington. The intercepted messages revealed that the British Embassy source (identified as "Homer") travelled to New York City to meet his Soviet contact twice a week. Philby had been briefed on the situation shortly before reaching Washington in 1949; it was clear to Philby that the agent was Donald Maclean, who worked in the British Embassy at the time and whose wife, Melinda, lived in New York. Philby had to help discover the identity of "Homer", but also wished to protect Maclean.

In January 1950, on evidence provided by the Venona intercepts, Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs was arrested. His arrest led to others: Harry Gold, a courier with whom Fuchs had worked, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Meanwhile, the investigation into the British Embassy leak was still ongoing, and the stress of it was exacerbated by the arrival in Washington, in October 1950, of Guy Burgess – Philby's unstable, dangerously alcoholic, and flamboyantly homosexual Cambridge colleague and fellow Soviet spy.^[27]

Burgess, who had been given a post as Second Secretary at the British Embassy, took up residence in the Philby family home and rapidly set about causing offence to all and sundry. Aileen Philby resented him and disliked his presence; Americans were offended by his "natural superciliousness" and "utter contempt for the whole pyramid of values, attitudes, and courtesies of the American way of life."^[27] J. Edgar Hoover complained that Burgess used British Embassy automobiles to avoid arrest when he cruised Washington in pursuit of homosexual encounters.^[27] 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. They had already been down to the Embassy but being unable to work had come back."^[28]

Burgess' presence was problematic for Philby, yet it was potentially dangerous for Philby to leave him unsupervised. The situation in Washington was tense. From April 1950, Donald Maclean had been the prime suspect in the investigation into the Embassy leak.^[29] Philby had undertaken to devise an escape plan which would warn Maclean, currently in England, of the intense suspicion he was under and arrange for him to flee. Burgess had to get to London to warn Maclean, who was under surveillance. In early May 1951, Burgess got three speeding tickets in a single day – then pleaded diplomatic immunity, causing an official complaint to be made to the British Ambassador.^[30] Burgess was sent back to England, where he met Maclean in his London club.

The SIS planned to interrogate Maclean on 28 May 1951. On 23 May, concerned that Maclean had not yet fled, Philby wired Burgess, ostensibly about his Lincoln convertible abandoned in the Embassy car park. "If he did not act at once it would be too late," the telegram read, "because [Philby] would send his car to the scrap heap. There was nothing more [he] could do."^[31] On 25 May (Maclean's thirty-eighth birthday), Burgess drove Maclean from his home in Tatsfield to Southampton, where the two of them boarded a boat to France and thence to Moscow.

London[link]

Burgess had been intended to aid Maclean in his escape, not accompany him in it. The "affair of the missing diplomats," as it was referred to before Burgess and Maclean surfaced in Moscow,^[32] attracted a great deal of public attention, and Burgess' disappearance, which identified him as complicit in Maclean's espionage, deeply compromised Philby's position. Under a cloud of suspicion raised by his highly-visible and intimate association with Burgess, Philby returned to London. There, he underwent MI5 interrogation aimed at ascertaining whether he had acted as a "third man" in Burgess and Maclean's spy ring. In July 1951, he resigned from MI6, preempting his all but inevitable dismissal.^[33]

Even after Philby's departure from MI6, speculation regarding his possible Soviet affiliations continued. Interrogated repeatedly regarding his intelligence work and his connection with Guy Burgess, he continued to deny that he had acted as a Soviet agent. From 1952, Philby struggled to find work as a journalist, eventually – in August 1954 – accepting a position with a diplomatic newsletter called the Fleet Street Letter.^[34] Lacking access to material of value and out of touch with Soviet intelligence, he all but ceased to operate as a Soviet agent.

In October 1955 Philby was officially cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, who told the House of Commons, "I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'Third Man', if indeed there was one."^[35] In November 1955 Philby gave a press conference in which – calmly, confidently, and without the stammer he had struggled with since childhood – he reiterated his innocence, declaring, "I have never been a communist."^[36]

Beirut[link]

After being exonerated, Philby was no longer employed by MI6, and Soviet intelligence lost all contact with him. In August 1956 he was sent to Beirut as a Middle East correspondent for The Observer and The Economist.^[32] There, his journalism served as cover for renewed work for MI6.

In Lebanon, Philby at first lived in Mahalla Jamil, his father's large household located in the village of Ajaltun, just outside of Beirut. Following the departure of his father and stepbrothers for Saudi Arabia, Philby continued to live alone in Ajaltun, but took a flat in Beirut after beginning an affair with Eleanor, the Seattle-born wife of New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer. Following Aileen Philby's death in England in 1957, and Eleanor's subsequent divorce from Brewer, Philby and Eleanor were married in London in 1959, and set up house together in Beirut.^[37] 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.^[38]

In 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a major in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, defected to the United States from his diplomatic post in Helsinki. Golitsyn offered the CIA revelations of Soviet agents within American and British intelligence services. Following his debriefing in the US, Golitsyn was sent to SIS for further questioning. The head of MI6, Dick White, only recently transferred from MI5, had suspected Philby as the "third man." Golitsyn proceeded to confirm White's suspicions about Philby's role.^[39] Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer recently stationed in Beirut who had previously believed in Philby's innocence, was tasked with attempting to secure Philby's full confession.

It is unclear whether Philby had been alerted, but he began suffering nervous breakdowns and increasing alcoholism. Eleanor noted that as 1962 wore on, expressions of tension in his life "became worse and were reflected in bouts of deep depression and drinking."^[40] 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 which had fallen from the balcony.^[41] When Nicholas Elliott met Philby in late 1962, the first time since Golitsyn's defection, he found Philby too drunk to stand, and with a bandaged head; he had fallen repeatedly and cracked his skull on a bathroom radiator, requiring stitches.^[42]

Philby told Elliott that he was "half expecting" to see him. Elliott confronted him, saying, "I once looked up to you, Kim. My God, how I despise you now. I hope you've enough decency left to understand why."^[43] Prompted by Elliott's accusations, Philby confirmed the charges of espionage and describe his intelligence activities on behalf of the Soviets. However, when Elliott asked him to sign a written statement, he hesitated and requested a delay in the interrogation. Another meeting was scheduled to take place in the last week of January. It has since been suggested that the whole confrontation with Elliott had been nothing but a charade to convince the KGB that Philby had to be brought back to Moscow, where he could serve as a British penetration agent of Moscow Centre.^[44]

On the evening of 23 January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to meet his wife for a dinner party at the home of Glen Balfour-Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy.^[45] The Dolmatova, a Soviet freighter bound for Odessa, had left Beirut that morning so abruptly that cargo was left scattered over the docks. Philby claimed that he left Beirut on board this ship.^[46] However, others maintain that he escaped through Syria, overland to Soviet Armenia and thence to Russia.^[47]

It was not until 1 July 1963 that Philby's flight to Moscow was officially confirmed.^[48] On 30 July Soviet officials announced that they had granted him political asylum in the USSR, as well as Soviet citizenship.^[49]

Moscow[link]

Upon his arrival in Moscow, Philby discovered that he was not a colonel in the KGB, as he had been led to believe. He was paid just 500 rubles a month, and his family was not immediately able to join him in exile.^[50] It was ten years before he walked through the doors of KGB headquarters, and he was given little real work. Philby was under virtual house arrest, guarded, with all visitors screened by the KGB. Mikhail Lyubimov, his closest KGB contact, explained that this was to guard his safety, but later admitted that the real reason was the KGB's fear that Philby would return to London.^[44]

Philby occupied himself by writing his memoirs, published in England in 1968 under the title My Silent War. (It is a measure of KGB distrust that the Russian version of this book was not published until 1980.^[51]) He continued to read the Times, which was not generally available in the USSR, listened to the BBC World Service, and was an avid follower of cricket.

Though Philby claimed publicly that he was content with his decisions, and that he missed nothing about England except "some friends, Colman's mustard, and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce,"^[52] Rufina later described Philby as "disappointed in many ways" by what he found in Moscow. "He saw people suffering too much," but he consoled himself by arguing that "the ideals were right but the way they were carried out was wrong. The fault lay with the people in charge."^[8] Philby drank heavily and suffered from loneliness and depression. According to Rufina, in the late 1960s he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists.^{[citation needed]}

Philby died of heart failure in Moscow in 1988. Only posthumously did he receive the praise and appreciation which had escaped him in life: he was awarded a hero's funeral and numerous medals by a grateful USSR, including the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest distinction awarded for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society.

Personal life[link]

In February 1934, Philby married Alice (Litzi) Friedmann, an Austrian communist whom he had met in Vienna. They subsequently moved to England; however, as Philby assumed the role of a fascist sympathiser, they separated. Litzi lived in Paris before returning to London for the duration of the Second World War; she ultimately settled in East Germany.^[53]

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 Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler. They travelled together in Spain through August 1939.^[54]

In 1940 he began living with Aileen Furse in London. Their first three children, Josephine, John, and Dudley Thomas, were born between 1941 and 1943. In 1946, Philby finally arranged a formal divorce from Litzi; he and Aileen were married on 25 September 1946, while Aileen was pregnant with their fourth child, Miranda. Their fifth child, Harry George, was born in 1950.^[55] Aileen suffered from psychiatric problems, which grew more severe during the period of poverty and suspicion following the flight of Burgess and Maclean. She lived separately from Philby, settling with their children in Crowborough while he lived first in London and later in Beirut. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957.^[56]

In 1956 Philby began an affair with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer. Following Eleanor's divorce, the two married in January 1959. After Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, Eleanor visited him in Moscow; in November 1964, following a visit to America, she returned, intending to settle permanently. However, in her absence, Philby had begun an affair with Donald Maclean's wife, Melinda. He and Eleanor divorced, and she departed Moscow in May 1965.^[57]

Melinda left Maclean, and briefly lived with Philby in Moscow; in 1968 she returned to Maclean.

In 1971 Philby married Rufina Ivanova Pukhova, a Russo-Polish woman twenty years his junior, with whom he lived until his death in 1988.^[58]

Philby in literature[link]

• One of the earliest appearances of Kim Philby as a character in fiction was in "Gentleman Traitor" by Alan Williams in 1974.
• Under the cover name of 'Mowgli' Philby appears in Duncan Kyle's WWII thriller "Black Camelot" published in 1978.
• Phllby has a key role in Mike Ripley's short story "Gold Sword" published in 'John Creasey's Crime Collection 1990' which was chosen as BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Story to mark the 50th anniversary of D-Day on 6th June 1994.
• Kim Philby appears as one of the central antagonists in William F. Buckley Jr's 2004 novel Last Call for Blackford Oakes.^[59]
• The Tim Powers novel Declare (2001) is partly based on unexplained aspects of Philby's life, providing a supernatural context for his behaviour.^[60]
• Philby is a central character in the 1981 Ted Allbeury novel The Other Side of Silence.^[59]
• The 1984 Frederick Forsyth novel The Fourth Protocol features an elderly Kim Philby's involvement in a plot to trigger a nuclear explosion in Britain. In the novel, Philby is a much more influential and connected figure in his Moscow exile than he apparently was in reality.^[61]
• The 1993 Joseph Brodsky essay Collector's Item (published in his 1995 book On Grief and Reason) contains a conjectured description of Philby's career, as well as speculations into his motivations and general thoughts on espionage and politics. The title of the essay refers to a postal stamp commemorating Philby issued in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
• The Robert Littell novel The Company (2002) features Philby as a confidant of former CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton.^[62]
• The 2003 novel Fox at the Front by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson depicts Philby selling secrets to the Soviet Union during the alternate Battle of the Bulge where German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel turns on the Nazis and assists the Allies in capturing all of Berlin. Before he can sell the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, he is discovered by the British and is killed by members of MI5 who stage his death as a heart attack.
• German author Barbara Honigmann's Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben tells the history of Philby's first wife, Litzi, from the perspective of her daughter.^[63]
• The 2005 John Birmingham novel Designated Targets features a cameo of Philby, under orders from Moscow to assist Otto Skorzeny's mission to assassinate Winston Churchill.
• John le Carré (David Cornwell) depicts and analyses Philby as Bill Haydon, the upper-class traitor in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In fact, Philby had ended le Carré's intelligence officer career by betraying him to the Russians.^[64]

Philby in film and television[link]

• Cambridge Spies, a 2003 four-part BBC drama, recounts the lives of Philby, Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean from their Cambridge days in the 1930s through the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Philby is played by Toby Stephens.
• Philby, Burgess and MacLean – Spy Scandal of the Century, a BBC drama produced for TV in 1977, covers the period of the late 1940s, when British intelligence investigated Kim Philby's colleague Donald Maclean until 1955 when the British government cleared Philby because it did not have enough evidence to convict him.
• Philby was the inspiration for the character of British intelligence officer Archibald "Arch" Cummings in the 2005 film The Good Shepard. Cummings is played by Billy Crudup.
• The 2005 film A Different Loyalty is an unattributed account taken from Eleanor Philby's book, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved. The film recounts Philby's love affair and marriage to Eleanor Brewer during his time in Beirut, and his eventual defection to the Soviet Union in late January 1963.
• In the 1987 adaptation of the above mentioned Frederick Forsyth novel The Fourth Protocol, Kim Philby is portrayed by Michael Bilton. In contradiction of historical fact, he is murdered by the KGB in the opening scene.
• In the 2007 (TNT) television three-part series The Company, produced by Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, and John Calley, Philby is portrayed by Tom Hollander.
• Graham Greene, Kim Philby's close friend, wrote the screenplay for The Third Man using Philby as a model for Harry Lime, one of the characters.

Philby in music[link]

• In the song "Philby", from the Top Priority album (1979), Rory Gallagher draws parallels between his life on the road and a spy's in a foreign country. Sample lyrics : "Now ain't it strange that I feel like Philby / There's a stranger in my soul / I'm lost in transit in a lonesome city / I can't come in from the cold."^[65]
• The Philby affair is mentioned in the Simple Minds song "Up On The Catwalk" from their sixth studio album Sparkle in the Rain. The lyric goes "Up on the catwalk, and you dress in waistcoats / And got brillantino, and friends of Kim Philby."^[66]

See also[link]

	United Kingdom portal
	Biography portal

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Colonel David Smiley, "Irregular Regular", Michael Russell – Norwich – 1994 (ISBN 978-0-85955-202-8). Translated in French by Thierry Le Breton, Au coeur de l'action clandestine des commandos au MI6, L’Esprit du Livre Editions, France, 2008 (ISBN 978-2-915960-27-3). With numerous photographs. Memoirs of a SOE and MI6 officer during the Valuable Project.
• Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files, 1994, published by Little, Brown & Company Limited, Canada, ISBN 0-316-91015-5 . Introduction by Phillip Knightley.
• Phillip Knightley, Philby: KGB Masterspy 2003, published by Andre Deutsch Ltd, London, ISBN 978-0-233-00048-0.
• Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, 1986, published by W.W. Norton & Company, London.
• Kim Philby, My Silent War, published by Macgibbon & Kee Ltd, London, 1968, or Granda Publishing, ISBN 978-0-586-02860-5. Introduction by Graham Greene.
• Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, 1968, published by André Deutsch, Ltd., London.
• Richard Beeston, Looking For Trouble: The Life and Times of a Foreign Correspondent, 1997, published by Brassey's, London.
• Desmond Bristow, A Game of Moles, 1993, published by Little Brown & Company, London.
• Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2001, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York.
• Anthony Cave Brown, "C": The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, 1987, published by Macmillan, New York.
• John Fisher, Burgess and Maclean, 1977, published by Robert Hale, London.
• S. J. Hamrick, Deceiving the Deceivers, 2004, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove: Chronicles of Wasted Time: Number 2, 1974, published by William Morrow & Company, New York.
• Barrie Penrose & Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, 1986, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York.
• Richard C.S. Trahair and Robert Miller, Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations, 2009, published by Enigma Books, New York. ISBN 978-1-929631-75-9
• Nigel West, editor, The Guy Liddell Diaries: Vol. I: 1939–1942, 2005, published by Routledge, London
• Nigel West & Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, 1998, published by Yale University Press, New Haven.

External links[link]

• Annotated bibliography of the Philby Affair
• Burgess, MacLean and Philby, FBI FOIA
• "BBC – History – The Cambridge Spies". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/spies_cambridge.shtml. Retrieved 17 February 2008. 
• John Philby – Daily Telegraph obituary

George Blake (born George Behar, 11 November 1922) is a former British spy known for having been a double agent in the service of the Soviet Union. Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR. He was not one of the Cambridge spies, although he is often grouped with them.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

George Blake was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1922. Blake was the son of a Dutch mother and a Turkish/Jewish father who was a naturalized British subject. He was named George after King George V.^[1] His father, Albert Behar, fought against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War despite his origins in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and received awards from the French and British for his gallantry. The Behars lived a comfortable existence in Holland until Albert's death in 1936. The thirteen year-old George was sent to live with relatives in Egypt, where he continued his education at the English School in Cairo. While in Cairo, he was close to his cousin Henri Curiel, who was later to become a prominent member of the Communist Party of Egypt. In 1991 Blake said that his encounter with Curiel, who was a decade older and already a communist, shaped his views in later life.^[2]

As a teenager Blake was a runner for the anti-Nazi Dutch resistance under the nom de guerre of Max de Vries. He was interned but released temporarily because of his youth. He would have been re-interned on his 18th birthday had he not escaped to London, disguised as a monk, in the meantime. In England he changed his name to Blake and worked for the Special Operations Executive. He intended to marry an MI6 secretary, Iris Peake, but her family prevented the marriage because of Blake's Jewish background and the relationship ended.

Blake said later that he switched sides during the Korean War after being greatly influenced by it. In an interview he was once asked, “Is there one incident that triggered your decision to effectively change sides?”, to which Blake responded, "It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side ... that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war."^[2]

Espionage activities[link]

For the duration of World War II, Blake's work involved translating German documents captured by British agents, and interrogating Germans captured in France following the D-Day landings.^{[citation needed]} At the end of the war, he was posted to Hamburg and put in charge of the interrogation of German U-boat captains. Following a crash-course in Russian he was recruited by MI6 in 1948 and was posted to the British embassy in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. Blake had been given the task of trying to establish an agent network in Korea.

Within months of his arrival in Seoul, on 24 June 1950, the city was captured by the advancing North Korean Army and Blake was taken prisoner by the communist forces, while he was at the British Legation. After capture by the North Koreans, and after reading the works of Karl Marx during his three-year detention, he became a Marxist. Following his release in 1953, Blake returned to Britain as a hero. In 1955 he was sent by MI6 to work as a case officer in Berlin, where ironically his task was to recruit Soviet officers as double agents. It was here that he made contact with the KGB and informed them of the details of British and US operations. In the course of nine years he betrayed details of some 400 MI6 agents to the Soviets, destroying most of MI6's operations in Eastern Europe. Blake later said of this, "I don't know what I handed over because it was so much".^[3] In 1959, Blake became aware of a Central Intelligence Agency mole inside GRU, and was thus instrumental in exposing P. S. Popov, who was executed in 1960.^[4]

In 1961 he was exposed as a Soviet agent by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski. He was arrested when he arrived in London after being summoned from Lebanon, where he was enrolled at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS).^[5]

The maximum sentence for any one offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 is 14 years, but his activities were divided into five time periods charged as five offences, and in May 1961 after an in camera trial at the Old Bailey he was sentenced to the maximum term of 14 years consecutively on each of three counts of spying for a potential enemy and 14 years concurrently on both the two remaining counts - a total of 42 years imprisonment - by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker of Waddington. This sentence was said by newspapers to represent one year for each of the agents killed when he betrayed them, although this claim appears to be an invention. It was the longest sentence (excluding life terms) ever handed down by a British court, until Nezar Hindawi was sentenced to 45 years for the attempted bombing of an El Al jet.

Escape from prison[link]

Five years later, on 22 October 1966, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison with the assistance of three men whom he met in jail: Sean Bourke, and two anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle, and Pat Pottle.

The escape was masterminded by Bourke, who originally approached Michael Randle only for financial help with the escape. Randle, however, became more involved and suggested they bring Pottle in on the plan as well, as he had suggested springing Blake to Randle in 1962 when they were both still in prison.

Their motives for helping Blake to escape were their belief that the 42-year sentence was "inhuman" and because of a personal liking of Blake.

Bourke had smuggled a walkie-talkie to Blake to communicate with him whilst in jail. It was decided that Blake would break a window at the end of the corridor where his cell was located. Then between 6 and 7 pm, whilst most of the other inmates and guards were at the weekly film showing, Blake could climb through the window, slide down a porch and get to the perimeter wall, where Bourke would throw a rope ladder made of knitting needles over the wall so that Blake could climb over and they would then drive off to the safe house.

During the escape, Blake fractured his wrist jumping from the perimeter wall, but apart from that it all went according to plan. This incident is mentioned in the book 'Life' by Keith Richards.

After the escape, it became apparent that the safe house Bourke had organised was not suitable as it was a bedsit that was cleaned by the landlady once a week, so Blake then spent several days moving between Randle and Pottle's friends' houses before Blake and Bourke moved in with Pottle until they were ready to get through customs and escape to the Soviet Union.^[5]

Moscow[link]

Blake fled to the USSR. He divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, and started a new life. In 1990 he published his autobiography No Other Choice (ISBN 0-671-74155-1). The book's British publisher had paid him about £60,000 before the government intervened to stop him profiting from sales. He later filed a complaint charging the British government with human rights violation for taking nine years to decide on his case and was awarded £5,000 in compensation by the European Court of Human Rights.^[6]

In an interview with NBC News in 1991, Blake said he regretted the deaths of the agents he had betrayed.

As of 2007, he was still living in Moscow, Russia on a KGB pension. He remains a committed Marxist-Leninist. Blake denied being a traitor, insisting that he had never felt British: "To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged."

In late 2007, Blake was awarded the Order of Friendship on his 85th birthday by Vladimir Putin.^[7]

Recently Blake has written a new book, Transparent Walls, the daily Vzglyad ("The View") reported. Sergey Lebedev, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation, writes in the book’s foreword that despite the book being devoted to the past, it is about the present as well. He also wrote that Blake, the 85-year-old Colonel of Foreign Intelligence, "still takes an active role in the affairs of the secret service."

Popular culture references[link]

• "Escape in Time" (1967), was an episode of The Avengers, in which a signboard said, "Where is Blake?" The episode itself featured super criminals following an "escape route" where they disappear to get away with their ill-gotten gains.
• The 1973 film The Mackintosh Man features a character named Slade, who is based on Blake and who makes a similar escape from prison.
• Blake appears as a character in the 1990 novel by Ian McEwan, The Innocent.
• The play Cell Mates (1995) by Simon Gray is about Blake and Sean Bourke. The original production starred Stephen Fry as Blake and Rik Mayall as Bourke. The production was thrown into turmoil when Fry walked out following a bad review.
• After the Break (2002), a radio play by Ian Curteis, centred on the uncomfortable relationship between Blake and Bourke after they had both fled to Moscow.
• Blake's story appears in the 1982 novel Shadow of Shadows by Ted Allbeury.

See also[link]

• Attorney General v Blake [2001] 1 AC 268

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Nigel West, Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991 (hard cover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).
• "Biography George Blake". http://allpersons.name/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=379&limitstart=1. 
• Sean Bourke, The Springing of George Blake. London: Cassell, 1970. ISBN 0-304-93590-5
• Kevin O'Connor, Blake, Bourke, and the End of Empires. London: Prendeville Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-9535697-3-X
• David Stafford, Spies Beneath Berlin. London: John Murray, 2002. ISBN 0-7195-6323-2
• British Garrison Berlin 1945 -1994, "No where to go", W. Durie ISBN 978-3-86408-068-5
• George Blake Superspy by H. Montgomery Hyde. Constable, 1987. ISBN 0-09-468140-6
• The First Directorate by Oleg Kalugin. St. Martins' Press, 1994.
• No Other Choice by George Blake. Jonathan Cape, London, 1990. ISBN 0-224-03067-1
• "1966: The Blake prison escape". libcom.org. 2006-09-10. http://libcom.org/history/1966-the-blake-prison-escape. 
• Ion Mihai Pacepa (2007-12-04). "Russian Spies of the Future". FrontPage Magazine. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=29087. 

Rory Gallagher
Gallagher, at the Manchester Apollo in 1982
Background information
Birth name	William Rory Gallagher
Also known as	Liam Rory Gallagher
Born	(1948-03-02)2 March 1948 Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland
Died	14 June 1995(1995-06-14) (aged 47) London, England
Genres	Blues, blues-rock, hard rock, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jazz, folk, skiffle
Occupations	Musician, songwriter, bandleader, producer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, bass, mandolin, saxophone, sitar, harmonica, banjo, dulcimer, dobro
Years active	1963–1995
Labels	Polydor, Chrysalis, Buddah, Castle
Associated acts	Taste
Website	www.rorygallagher.com
Notable instruments
1961 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster

William Rory Gallagher,  /ˈrɔriː ˈɡæləhər/ GAL-ə-hər; 2 March 1948  – 14 June 1995,^[1][2] was an Irish blues-rock multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader. Born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland,^[3] and raised in Cork, Gallagher recorded solo albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after forming the band Taste during the late 1960s. A talented guitarist known for his charismatic performances and dedication to his craft, Gallagher's albums have sold in excess of 30 million copies worldwide.^[4][5] Gallagher received a liver transplant in 1995, but died of complications later that year in London, England at the age of 47.^[6]

Biography[link]

Gallagher was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal; his father, Daniel, was employed by the Irish Electricity Supply Board, who were constructing a hydro-electric power plant on the Erne River above the town. The family moved, first to Derry City, where his younger brother Dónal was born in 1949, and then to Cork, where the two brothers were raised, and where Rory attended the North Monastery School. Their father had played the accordion and sang with the Tir Chonaill Ceile Band whilst in Donegal; their mother Monica was a singer and acted with the Abbey Players in Ballyshannon. The Theatre in Ballyshannon where Monica once acted is now called the Rory Gallagher Theatre.

Both sons were musically inclined and encouraged by their parents: at age nine, Gallagher received his first guitar from them. He built on his burgeoning ability on ukelele in teaching himself to play the guitar and perform at minor functions. After winning a talent contest when he was twelve, Gallagher began performing in his adolescence with both his acoustic guitar, and an electric guitar he bought with his prize money. However, it was his purchase three years later of a 1961 Fender Stratocaster for £100 that became his primary instrument most associated with him for the span of his lifetime.^[7]

Gallagher was initially attracted to skiffle after hearing Lonnie Donegan on the radio. Donegan frequently covered blues and folk performers from the United States. He relied entirely on radio programs and television. Occasionally, the jazz programs from the BBC would play some blues numbers, and he slowly found some song books for guitar, where he found the names of the actual composers of blues pieces. While still in school, playing songs by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, he discovered his greatest influence in Muddy Waters. Subsequently, Gallagher began experimenting with folk, blues, and rock music. Unable to find or afford record albums, Gallagher stayed up late to hear Radio Luxembourg and AFN where the radio brought him his only exposure to the actual songwriters and musicians whose music moved him most.^[8] Influences he discovered, and cited as he progressed, included Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, and Lead Belly. Initially, Gallagher struck out after just an acoustic sound.^[7] Singing and later using a brace for his harmonica, Gallagher taught himself to play slide guitar. Further, throughout the next few years of his musical development, Gallagher began learning to play alto saxophone, bass, mandolin, banjo, and the coral sitar with varying degrees of proficiency.^[9] By his mid-teens, he began experimenting heavily with different blues styles.^[10]

Gallagher began playing after school with Irish showbands, while still a young teenager. In 1963,^[11] he joined one named Fontana, a sextet playing the popular hit songs of the day.^[12] The band toured Ireland and the United Kingdom, earning the money for the payments that were due on his Stratocaster guitar. Gallagher began to influence the band's repertoire, beginning its transition from popular music, skirting along some of Chuck Berry's songs and by 1965, he had successfully molded Fontana into "The Impact", with a change in their lineup into an R&B group that played gigs in Ireland and Spain until disbanding in London.^[9] Gallagher left with the bassist and drummer to perform as a trio in Hamburg, Germany.^[11] In 1966, Gallagher returned to Ireland and, experimenting with other musicians back home in Cork, decided to form his own band.

Taste[link]

Gallagher on acoustic guitar, March 1976, Breda, Netherlands

Having completed a musical apprenticeship in the showbands, and influenced by the increasing popularity of beat groups during the early 1960s, Gallagher formed "The Taste", which was later renamed simply, "Taste", a blues rock and R&B power trio, in 1966.^[13] Initially, the band was composed of Gallagher and two Cork musicians, Norman Damery and Eric Kitteringham, however, by 1968, they were replaced with two musicians from Belfast, featuring Gallagher on guitar and vocals, drummer John Wilson, and bassist Richard McCracken.^[13] Performing extensively in the United Kingdom, the group played regularly at the Marquee Club, supporting both Cream at their Royal Albert Hall farewell concert, and the blues supergroup Blind Faith on a tour of North America. Managed by Eddie Kennedy, the trio released the albums Taste and On The Boards, and two live recordings, Live Taste and Live at the Isle of Wight.^[13] The latter appeared long after the band's break-up, which occurred shortly after their appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.^[14]