Kim Philby lives until the mid '90s

Cook

Banned
That's not what I meant at all, I'm pretty antagonistic towards both secret services in the Cold War, especially Stalin.

So you come into a thread specifically discussing Kim Philby, one of the most notorious Spies for the Soviet Union, an unapologetic agent for Joseph Stalin and try repeatedly, but with little success to make a case for moral equivalency where none exists?
 
So you come into a thread specifically discussing Kim Philby, one of the most notorious Spies for the Soviet Union, an unapologetic agent for Joseph Stalin and try repeatedly, but with little success to make a case for moral equivalency where none exists?

Actually it was more the fact that things like treachery were being focused on more than the fact that he was a Stalinist agent. But yeah, I made myself look like an arsehole, I guess it's late.

I'm going to shut up now anyways.
 

Cook

Banned
Actually it was more the fact that things like treachery were being focused on more than the fact that he was a Stalinist agent.

These two things are inseparable. Philby was a member of the British Secret service who knowingly and with intent committed treason, providing information to the Soviet Union that led directly to the deaths of opponents of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well as British agents, some of whom had thought Philby a friend and colleague.

That he took these actions as a true believer in an oppressive ideology in no way mitigates it.
 
True, the people who helped Blake escape from prison werent prosecuted either

They were, but the jury disgracefully betrayed their duty to uphold the rule of law and acquited them.

It's shocking that a man who by a fair reckoning was a mass murderer with the blood of hundreds of people on his hands was helped by self proclaimed peace protestors to scape justice and only served five years for his crimes. They were franlky lucky they weren't charged with treason and hung.
 
John cairncross wasn't prosecuted when he was reveled to be the fifth member of the Cambridge spy ring either
 
if Kim Philby doesn't die, the Soviet Union can't collapse.

-Tim Powers, Declare

Kim Philby, who was a spy for the Soviets working in the British government, caused much damage to western interests before defecting to the Soviet Union sometime around 1963. For his long service to their cause, the Russians gave him an apartment in Moscow, and a pension. He spent the rest of his life here. Once, years later, he told an interviewer that he had no regrets about what he had done. [I don't believe this. I'm sure he would have loved to have seen England again, and I can't think of anything more depressing than spending one's last years in a dingy, gray Moscow apartment.] He died sometime in the late 80s, during Gorbachev's administration.
But WI he had lived several years longer, say to about 1996? It would have been real poetic justice for him to have seen the demise of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe liberated, and communism declared one of the biggest disasters of the 20th century by historians. The question is, would the British govt. want him back, to put him on trial for treason? How would the Yeltsin administration respond to this? Would the British people scream for justice? I doubt the Russian people would care, one way or the other. Comments?
 
In Declare Powers posulated the soviet union was supported and maintained by a powerfull supernatural creature (Djinni who was paid by the mass murders of soviet citizens with loyal deaths being most valuable. The really secret service in Britain worked out a way to kill the Djinn and arranged for Philby to unwittingly carry it back to Moscow. They thought he would die soon and the Djinni would eat his body/soul but he survived until the 80's. As soon as he died and the protector was removed the system started to collapse.
 
I think a surviving Philby would be an irrelevance. The British had exhaustively and paranoidly investigated to such an extent that the KGB gave up trying to penetrate 5 and 6 and concentrated on technical information from comercial sources. Weirdly during much of his operation Philby was considered so good that the Russians assumed he was a plant and ignored his information:D
 
The seminal Dennis Potter play Traitor potrayed him as an alcoholic wreck of a man, I dont know how true it was
 
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