‘Third Man’ Spy Kim Philby Dies in Moscow at 76

Harold (Kim) Philby, longtime Soviet spy and central figure in espionage scandals that rocked Britain two decades ago, died in Moscow, the domestic Press Assn. news agency reported today.

The report quoted diplomatic sources in London, who said they had been informed by the Soviet Embassy here.

Officials at the Soviet Embassy were unavailable for immediate comment. Philby, 76, was part of an infamous spy ring rooted in Cambridge University that was to haunt British intelligence for years.

He and two colleagues, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, provided their Soviet masters with a mass of detail on British and U.S. policy at the height of the Cold War. Philby was regarded as by far the deadliest.

Philby, a member of a prominent British family, was a spy for 30 years while he worked for the British secret service. He was known as the “Third Man” who tipped off fellow spies MacLean and Burgess that they were under investigation by British authorities in the late 1950s.

Both fled to the Soviet Union, and Philby followed them to Moscow in 1963.

Until Philby’s defection, the identity of the third man in the ring had been unknown. The MacLean-Burgess-Philby spy scandals virtually wrecked the exchange of intelligence information between London and Washington.

At one point, Philby was so highly valued in the British secret service that he was being groomed to be its chief.

Philby told London’s Sunday Times in a Moscow interview in March that British security chiefs had allowed him to flee to save the embarrassment of a sensational trial.

Philby was decorated for his services by the Soviet KGB intelligence service and published his memoirs, titled “My Secret War.”

Asked by his interviewer, “Would you do it all again?” Philby replied: “Absolutely.”

He said he enjoyed living in the Soviet Union--”I never want to live anywhere else.”