When he disappeared from Beirut in January 1963, after telling his wife he would meet her at a diplomatic dinner party that evening, Kim Philby was a relatively obscure British journalist. During the quarter-century between his defection to the Soviet Union, for which he had been spying since the 1930s, and his death last week at 76 of undisclosed causes, Philby's legend grew to mythic proportions. Still active in the KGB, where he rose to the rank of general, Philby wrote a cryptic 1968 memoir, My Silent War, and gave only a handful of interviews. Yet his life and those of...
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