Portia Podsnap

I’ve read and heard the story of Kim Philby and his young fox, Jackie, many times. But there’s a lot of backstory and filler that usually gets left out. Linked below is a reminiscence from a photographer/zoologist named Tony Morrison who was traveling with a documentary team in 1962, under the production aegis of David Attenborough.

It appears one of the doco gang was an old acquaintance of Kim and met him again in Beirut. The crew had been keeping the baby fox in their hotel room, and now handed her off to Kim. Maybe Kim was well lubricated (not unimaginable) and came out with something Wodehouseian, as, “Oh I say, I rather f-f-fancy a p-pet f-fox at the mo’. Let’s do!” Anyway, the author provided advice on the fox’s care and treatment, based on his experience with raising the fox in the hotel.

Header of Kim Philby’s one-page Country Life column about Jackie.

Actual transfer of fox must have occurred in April or May of 1962, and the fox died from misadventure in August. Kim was heartbroken and wrote about Jackie in Country Life. 

Key points to keep in mind are that Jackie the fox lived with Kim and Eleanor Philby for only three or four months. And five months later, Kim skipped to Moscow, having been rumbled as a longtime KGB operative, the veritable “Third Man” in the Burgess-Maclean affair—something that he’d spent much of the 1950s denying.

Read the whole thing here.