Spy Philby Breaks Silence, Appears on Latvian Television Show

British master spy Kim Philby, who delivered sensitive British and U.S. secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War, has broken years of silence on his life in the Soviet Union, a Latvian state television spokesman said Friday.

Philby, 75, made a rare appearance during a round-table discussion on Latvian television Oct. 6, and a four-part series on his life--entitled “Igra,” or “The Game”--will be aired in late November, the spokesman said.

In his brief television appearance in October, Philby discussed recruitment attempts and said the British secret service sometimes recruited minorities in the Soviet Union for espionage work, according to the British Broadcasting Corp., which monitored the program.

Since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, Philby has avoided publicity.

In 1980 he gave a rare interview to the Soviet weekly Nedelya in which he defended his spying during and after World War II by contending that it actually served Britain and the United States by preventing another war.

The spokesman for Latvian state television said Philby was in good health but had become ill during the documentary’s filming.

“He got some flu and fell ill while here, but generally he is healthy for his age,” the spokesman said in a telephone interview from Riga, the Latvian capital.

“We are recording all these programs right now. It is difficult to say when the series will be shown, but it will be sometime after Nov. 18,” the spokesman said, adding that the series may later be shown on Soviet national television.

The Oct. 6 program centered on the activities of Latvian exiles in the West and Western intelligence agency attempts to recruit them for espionage.

As a senior intelligence officer in the British service, Philby was once a trusted coordinator between the British and American secret services in the post-World War II years. While serving in Washington, he told the Kremlin virtually every move made by the allies.

Philby was forced out of the British secret service after Washington expressed suspicions, but he later emerged as a Middle East journalist still spying for both sides.

After Britain confirmed that he was a Soviet spy, Philby disappeared on his way to a dinner party in Beirut in January, 1963, and resurfaced in Moscow a few months later.

He was identified as the notorious “third man” who tipped off Soviet double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in time for them to escape to Moscow before they could be arrested.