The Axe

When the axe entered the forest, the trees whispered, 'that handle used to be one of us'.

His father's name was St John, pronounced Sinjun to rhyme with Injun, and he was born in the Punjab in 1912 when his father worked for the Indian Civil Service. They lived very privileged lives, moved in all the right circles and he was definitely 'one of us'.

The son of great privilege, Harold was sent back to England to be educated at his father's old alma mater, Westminster School, and from there on to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was the education of choice for those fortunate enough to be 'one of us'.

It was the time of the Great Depression, when those who were 'one of us' and enjoying a privileged education at Cambridge, could salve their conscience by joining the Socialist Society where, for an hour each week, 'lots of us'  could conjure up group empathy for 'lots of them'.

It wasn't long before one of Harold's tutors pointed his new found Socialist empathy in the direction of the Federation For The Victims Of Relief From German Fascism, an organisation aiding victims of Hitler's growing Nazi extremism through the early 1930s. Harold was so enamoured with the organisation that after graduating with a 2:1 in History and Economics, he went to work for them in Vienna as 'one of us' doing our bit for 'lots of them'.

During his time in Vienna, Harold met a fellow worker, Litzi Friedmann, a young Austrian communist worker of Jewish descent and,  following the Austrian fascist uprising in 1934, they married, allowing Litzi to escaped Nazi reprisals and come to London because she too was now 'one of us'.

An Austrian friend of Litzi's, also living in London, introduced them to a Slovak academic named Arnold Deutsch who was a Soviet agent working at University College London. Arnold was a man of considerable culture and in no time at all, recruited Harold as a Soviet agent. 'One of us' had now become 'one of them'.

To earn his living, Harold turned his attentions to journalism, working for a number of periodicals and magazines as a freelance, first in Germany and then in Spain during the civil war. This experience provided him with not just a living, but ideal cover for pursuing his craft as an agent and ideally qualified for recruitment by MI6 at the outbreak of the war in 1939. 'One of us' was now more a 'one of us' than it was possible to imagine.

For decades Harold worked his way through the ranks of MI6, his upbringing, accent and mannerisms making him totally invisible in plain sight. He rose to the position of Head of Anti-Soviet Operations and even when it was clear that information was being leaked, serious suspicion could never be directed at 

someone who was so clearly 'one of us'. 

Throughout the forties, fifties and sixties, the Soviet Union received secrets from Harold that shaped the outcome of what had become known as the Cold War. But by 1963, the whispers were becoming too loud to ignore. Finally confronted by evidence, Harold chose flight over trial, slipping across borders into the Soviet Union, where he would live until his death in 1988. In Moscow, he was lauded as a master spy; in London, remembered as the ultimate betrayal. 

Harold Adrian Russell 'Kim' Philby had been given his nickname by his father after reading Kipling's novel of that name. In it, an orphaned Irish boy named Kimball O'Hara who lived on the streets of Lahore, is recruited by the British to gather information on his journeys across India as a travelling companion to a Tibetan Lama. The boy becomes slowly drawn further and further in to the Great Game – the secret intelligence gathering rivalry across Central Asia between the two great empires of Great Britain and Russia.

Kim Philby's life became the very embodiment of the plot of the novel after which he'd been named. He was never an intruder in the forest, but one of their own, raised, nurtured and shaped by them. It was for these very reasons that his acts of betrayal remained undetected for so long and were so utterly devastating.

Image by Freepik