Spy story

Did traitor Kim Philby have a gay affair with former director of the CIA?

Kim Philby and Jim Angleton first met at Bletchley Park, in early 1944. Angleton, a precociously literate 26 year old Yale graduate, had been spotted as a promising spy by his professors and sent to the British intelligence centre for espionage training. There, Philby, chief of MI6 intelligence operations in Spain and Portugual, taught him the black arts of counterintelligence.

The two formed a friendship - Philby, then aged 32, preferred Angleton’s quiet good manners to the fawning Anglophilia of his more provincial countrymen. A year later, when Angleton was assigned to run the US counterintelligence office in Rome, Philby dropped in from his posting in Turkey. They compared notes on the travails of marriage and the growing threat of the Soviet Union.

The men renewed their friendship in Washington in late 1949, when Philby took over the MI6 station here. Angleton, then a rising star at the newly-created CIA - and who would go on to become its counterintelligence chief - never guessed that his friend was really a communist spy, who was passing on his every confidence straight to Moscow.