On 30 July 1963, Kim Philby’s defection from MI6 to the Soviet Union was made public. In 2016, the BBC broadcast previously unseen footage of his lecture to Stasi operatives in which he revealed the secrets behind his treachery.

“Almost all my life I have spent trying to avoid publicity of any kind,” says Kim Philby in a 1981 video unearthed by the BBC from the archives of East Germany’s spy service. It’s something of an understatement. Philby was a British double agent whose defection to the Soviet Union was made public on 30 July 1963. In the video, he is seen giving a seminar to Stasi operatives on how to succeed at espionage.

As the BBC’s former security correspondent Gordon Corera explained in his 2016 report on the previously unseen footage, “Philby offers a masterclass in betrayal, from his recruitment by Soviet spies after Cambridge to his joining Britain’s secret service MI6, whose secrets he stole.” It is the only known video in which the leading member of the so-called Cambridge Five KGB spy ring discusses his betrayal – a rare recording that is revealing on many levels.

“I’m looking back on my career in the enemy camp, this 30-year career in the enemy camp,” he says in the grainy video, standing behind a lectern in thick-rimmed glasses and a suit and tie. “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 archives. I used to hand them to my contact in the evening. Next morning I’d 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.”

As part of a circle that also featured Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, Philby passed British state secrets to the Kremlin during World War Two and the Cold War, including the period when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies. Yet there has sometimes been a rose-tinted view of their double-crossing, according to Antonia Senior, the author of Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire.

He had a callous disregard for the men he sent to their deaths – Antonia Senior

“The stage and screen portrayals of them, in particular, present them as glamorous rogues,” Senior tells the BBC. “In reality they were lying, unpleasant traitors who betrayed the people who loved them as well as their country… This was not a victimless crime. Their betrayals helped Stalin to enslave half of Europe, and the Cambridge Five were enthusiastic in advancing that imperialist project under the guise of world revolution.” 

Philby admits in his Stasi speech that he betrayed a joint CIA-MI6 operation in Albania, which led to hundreds of men being killed. And he described the Albanian agents he betrayed as “just down from the trees” in a 1968 autobiography that was labelled “unrepentant and self-regarding” by the New York Times. He had a “callous disregard for the men he sent to their deaths”, says Senior. 

The Magnificent Five 

After being recruited as a Soviet spy at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, Philby joined MI6 in 1940, later becoming the agency’s head of counter-Soviet intelligence. That position enabled him to feed critical British and American secrets directly to the KGB while sabotaging Western anti-communist operations. His rise through the ranks of British intelligence services was helped by his background and a phenomenon that Senior labels the “chapocracy” – a tight-knit network of privileged men within the establishment who shared the same elite educational backgrounds.