Young Philby

One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board- an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with the clothes on his back, a spare pair of reading glasses, ten small tins of Arm and Hammer indigestion tablets, and a much thumbed copy of James Hilto's Lost Horizon. The Englishman had used Lost Horizon for enciphering...
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One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board- an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with the clothes on his back, a spare pair of reading glasses, ten small tins of Arm and Hammer indigestion tablets, and a much thumbed copy of James Hilto's Lost Horizon. The Englishman had used Lost Horizon for enciphering purposes (page, line and letter number) when he had communicated with his Soviet controllers.
As the lights of Beirut vanished, the Englishman tried to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet Union. Would Moscow welcome him as a senior Soviet intelligence officer? Would the Great Game the Englishman was so keen to play have a third act? For spies and rock climbers, was there really no way out except up?