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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal Copertina rigida – 29 luglio 2014
Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.
- Lunghezza stampa368 pagine
- LinguaInglese
- EditoreCrown Pub
- Data di pubblicazione29 luglio 2014
- Dimensioni16.31 x 3.48 x 24.18 cm
- ISBN-100804136637
- ISBN-13978-0804136631
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Descrizione prodotto
Recensione
New York Times Book Review Notable Book
An Amazon Best Book of the Year
Washington Post Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly's Best Spy Book of 2014
“Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship...When devouring this thriller, I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel. It reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John Le Carré, leavened with a dollop of P.G. Wodehouse...[Macintyre] takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era.”—Walter Isaacson, New York Times Book Review
“Superb… Riveting reading.” –Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
“Macintyre does here what he does best — tell a heck of a good story. A Spy Among Friends is hands down the most entertaining book I’ve reviewed this year.” —Boston Globe
“Macintyre is a superb writer, with an eye for the telling detail as fine as any novelist’s…A Spy Among Friends is as suspenseful as any novel, too, as the clues tighten around Philby’s guilt.”—Dallas Morning News
“By now, the story of British double agent Harold ‘Kim’ Philby may be the most familiar spy yarn ever, fodder for whole libraries of histories, personal memoirs and novels. But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes Philby’s destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating.”—David Ignatius, Washington Post
“A Spy Among Friends is a rollicking book. Mr. Macintyre is full of pep and never falters in the headlong rush of his narrative.”—Wall Street Journal
“Vivid and fascinating...[Macintyre] succeeds admirably.”—Newsday
“A crisply written tale of a classic intelligence case that remains relevant more than 50 years later.”—USA Today
“Excellent...I was thoroughly engrossed in this book, beginning to end. It has all the suspense of a good spy novel, and its characters are a complex mix of charm, eccentricity, intelligence and wit. And it offers a great--and mostly troubling—insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of those we entrust with the most important of our political and military secrets.”—The Huffington Post
“Working with colorful characters and an anything-can-happen attitude, Macintyre builds up a picture of an intelligence community chock-full of intrigue and betrayal, in which Philby was the undisputed king of lies…Entertaining and lively, Macintyre’s account makes the best fictional thrillers seem tame.” —Publishers Weekly [starred]
“Gripping and as well-crafted as an episode of Smiley’s People, full of cynical inevitability, secrets, lashings of whiskey and corpses.” —Kirkus Reviews [starred]
“Ben Macintyre (Double Cross) offers a fresh look at master double agent Kim Philby…Fans of James Bond will enjoy this look into the era that inspired Ian Fleming's novels, but any suspense-loving student of human nature will be shocked and thrilled by this true narrative of deceit.”—Shelf Awareness [starred]
“Ben Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating storylines in history. He has done it again, with this spellbinding tale of espionage, friendship, and betrayal. Written with an historian’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s eye for character, A Spy Among Friends is one terrific book.” —David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of Z
“Ben Macintyre is one of the most gifted espionage writers around. In A Spy Among Friends he weaves an absorbing tale of deceit and duplicity, of treason and betrayal. With exquisite detail and masterful control, Macintyre unveils the dark and treacherous interior worlds in which spies live.” —Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51 and Operation Paperclip
“In this spellbinding account of friendship and betrayal, Ben Macintyre masterfully describes how the Cambridge-educated Kim Philby evaded justice by exploiting the incestuous snobbery of the British old-boy network, which refused to believe that one of its own could be a major Soviet spy. As riveting as Macintyre’s earlier books were, this searing portrait of Britain's ruling class is even better.” —Lynne Olson, bestselling author of Citizens of London and Those Angry Days
“Ben Macintyre has written a truly fabulous book about the "fabulous" Kim Philby—the suave, dedicated, and most intriguing spy of the entire Cold War era. Philby and his colorful Cambridge comrades are endlessly fascinating. But Macintyre tells the devastating story in an entirely new fashion, with new sources and an astonishing intimacy.”
—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
“I have seldom had a better read than A Spy Among Friends. It reads like a thriller, a thriller of a peculiarly intricate and at times frightening sort, but you just can’t stop reading it.” —Lady Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: The Journey
“The Philby story has been told many times, but never with such sensitivity. Almost inadvertently, Ben Macintyre, a Times columnist, provides a devastating critique of the British class system and the disasters that result when people assume they know people… A Spy Among Friends is an extraordinary book about a sordid profession in which the most important attribute is the ability to lie…. Macintyre’s focus on friendship brings an intimacy to this book that is missing from the cardboard stereotypes that populate spy novels and conventional espionage histories…I’m not a lover of spy novels, yet I adored this book.” –The Times of London
“Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller, concentrating on Philby's friendship with and betrayal of Elliott and of Angleton, his pathetically dedicated admirer at the top of the CIA. Macintyre's account of the verbal duel between Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963 is worthy of John le Carré at his best.”–The Guardian
“A Spy Among Friends, a classic spookfest, is also a brilliant reconciliation of history and entertainment…An unputdownable postwar thriller whose every incredible detail is fact not fiction…[a] spellbinding narrative…Part of the archetypal grip this story holds for the reader is as a case study in the existential truth that, in human relations, the Other is never really knowable. For both, the mask became indistinguishable from reality…A Spy Among Friends is not just an elegy, it is an unforgettable requiem.” –The Observer
“Ben Macintyre’s bottomlessly fascinating new book is an exploration of Kim Philby’s friendships, particularly with Nicholas Elliott… Other books on Philby may have left one with a feeling of grudging respect, but A Spy Among Friends draws out his icy cold heart…This book consists of 300 pages; I would have been happy had it been three times as long.” –The Mail on Sunday
“Such a summary does no justice to Macintyre's marvellously shrewd and detailed account of Philby's nefarious career. It is both authoritative and enthralling... The book is all the more intriguing because it carries an afterward by John le Carré.” –The New Statesman
“No one writes about deceit and subterfuge so dramatically, authoritatively or perceptively [as Ben Macintyre]. To read A Spy Among Friends is a bit like climbing aboard a runaway train in terms of speed and excitement–except that Macintyre knows exactly where he is going and is in total control of his material.” –The Daily Mail
“Philby's story has been told many times before–both in biography and most notably in John le Carre's fictional masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy–but never in such exhaustive detail and with such panache as in Ben MacIntyre's brilliant, compulsive A Spy Among Friends… Reads like fiction, which is testament to the extraordinary power of the story itself but also to the skills of the storyteller…One of the best real-life spy stories one is ever likely to read.” –The Express
“Ben Macintyre has written an engaging book on a tantalising and ultimately tragic subject. If it starts as a study of friendship, it ends as an indictment.” –The Spectator
L'autore
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.
Apprentice Spy
One moment Nicholas Elliott was at Ascot Racecourse, watching the favorite, Quashed, come romping home at 7-2, and the next, rather to his own surprise, he was a spy. The date was June 15, 1939, three months before the outbreak of the deadliest conflict in history. He was twenty-two.
It happened over a glass of champagne. John Nicholas Rede Elliott's father, Sir Claude Aurelius Elliott, OBE, was headmaster of Eton (England's grandest public school), a noted mountaineer, and a central pillar of the British establishment. Sir Claude knew everybody who was anybody and nobody who wasn't somebody, and among the many important men he knew was Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to His Majesty's government, who had close links to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, the agency responsible for intelligence gathering abroad. Nicholas Elliott arranged to meet "Van" at Ascot and, over drinks, mentioned that he thought he might like to join the intelligence service.
Sir Robert Vansittart smiled and replied: "I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy."
"So that was that," Elliott wrote many years later.
The old boys' recruitment network had worked perfectly.
Nicholas Elliott was not obviously cut out to be a spy. His academic record was undistinguished. He knew little about the complexities of international politics, let alone the dextrous and dangerous game being played by MI6 in the run-up to war. Indeed, he knew nothing whatsoever about espionage, but he thought spying sounded exciting and important and exclusive. Elliott was self-confident as only a well-bred, well-heeled young Etonian, newly graduated from Cambridge University, with all the right social connections, can be. He was born to rule (though he would never have expressed that belief so indelicately), and membership in the most selective club in Britain seemed like a good place to start doing so.
The Elliotts were part of the backbone of the empire; for generations, they had furnished military officers, senior clerics, lawyers, and colonial administrators who ensured that Britain continued to rule the waves--and much of the globe in between. One of Nicholas Elliott's grandfathers had been the lieutenant governor of Bengal; the other, a senior judge. Like many powerful English families, the Elliotts were also notable for their eccentricity. Nicholas's great-uncle Edgar famously took a bet with another Indian Army officer that he could smoke his height in cheroots every day for three months, then smoked himself to death in two. Great-aunt Blanche was said to have been "crossed in love" at the age of twenty-six and thereafter took to her bed, where she remained for the next fifty years. Aunt Nancy firmly believed that Catholics were not fit to own pets since they did not believe animals had souls. The family also displayed a profound but frequently fatal fascination with mountain climbing. Nicholas's uncle, the Reverend Julius Elliott, fell off the Matterhorn in 1869, shortly after meeting Gustave Flaubert, who declared him "the epitome of the English gentleman." Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.
Towering over Nicholas's childhood was his father, Claude, a man of immovable Victorian principles and ferocious prejudices. Claude loathed music, which gave him indigestion, despised all forms of heating as "effete," and believed that "when dealing with foreigners the best plan was to shout at them in English." Before becoming headmaster of Eton, Claude Elliott had taught history at Cambridge University, despite an ingrained distrust of academics and an aversion to intellectual conversation. The long university vacations gave him plenty of time for mountain climbing. He might have become the most celebrated climber of his generation, but for a kneecap broken by a fall in the Lake District, which prevented him from joining Mallory's Everest expedition. A dominating figure physically and psychologically, Claude was nicknamed "the Emperor" by the boys at Eton. Nicholas regarded his father with awed reverence; in return, Claude alternately ignored or teased his only child, believing, like many fathers of his time and class, that displaying affection would make his son "soft" and quite possibly homosexual. Nicholas grew up convinced that "Claude was highly embarrassed by my very existence." His mother avoided all intimate topics of conversation, according to her only son, including "God, Disease and Below the Waist."
The young Elliott was therefore brought up by a succession of nannies and then shunted off to Durnford School in Dorset, a place with a tradition of brutality extreme even by the standards of British prep schools: every morning the boys were made to plunge naked into an unheated pool for the pleasure of the headmaster, whose wife liked to read improving literature out loud in the evenings with her legs stretched out over two small boys while a third tickled the soles of her feet. There was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape. Today such an institution would be illegal; in 1925 it was considered "character-forming." Elliott left his prep school with the conviction that "nothing as unpleasant could ever recur," an ingrained contempt for authority, and a hardy sense of humor.
Eton seemed like a paradise after the "sheer hell" of Durnford, and having his father as headmaster posed no particular problem for Nicholas, since Claude continued to pretend he wasn't there. Highly intelligent, cheerful, and lazy, the young Elliott did just enough work to get by: "The increased legibility of his handwriting only serves to reveal the inadequacy of his ability to spell," noted one report. He was elected to his first club, Pop, the Eton institution reserved for the most popular boys in the school. It was at Eton that Elliott discovered a talent for making friends. In later life he would look back on this as his most important skill, the foundation of his career.
Basil Fisher was Elliott's first and closest friend. A glamorous figure with an impeccable academic and sporting record, Fisher was captain of the First XI, the chairman of Pop, and son of a bona fide war hero, Basil senior having been killed by a Turkish sniper at Gaza in 1917. The two friends shared every meal, spent their holidays together, and occasionally slipped into the headmaster's house, when Claude was at dinner, to play billiards. Photographs from the time show them arm in arm, beaming happily. Perhaps there was a sexual element to their relationship, but probably not. Hitherto, Elliott had loved only his nanny, "Ducky Bit" (her real name is lost to history). He worshipped Basil Fisher.
In the autumn of 1935 the two friends went up to Cambridge. Naturally, Elliott went to Trinity, his father's old college. On his first day at the university, he visited the writer and poet Robert Gittings, an acquaintance of his father, to ask a question that had been troubling him: "How hard should I work, and at what?" Gittings was a shrewd judge of character. As Elliott remembered: "He strongly advised me to use my three years at Cambridge to enjoy myself in the interval before the next war"--advice that Elliott followed to the letter. He played cricket, punted, drove around Cambridge in a Hillman Minx, and attended and gave some very good parties. He read a lot of spy novels. On weekends he went shooting or to the races at Newmarket. Cambridge in the 1930s boiled with ideological conflict; Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish civil war would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme Right and extreme Left fought it out in university rooms and on the streets. But the fervid political atmosphere simply passed Elliott by. He was far too busy having fun. He seldom opened a book and emerged after three years with many friends and a third-class degree, a result he considered "a triumph over the examiners."
Nicholas Elliott left Cambridge with every social and educational advantage and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. But beneath a complacent and conventional exterior and the "languid, upper-class manner" lay a more complex personality, an adventurer with a streak of subversion. Claude Elliott's Victorian rigidity had instilled in his son a deep aversion to rules. "I could never be a good soldier because I am insufficiently amenable to discipline," he reflected. When told to do something, he tended to "obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about." He was tough--the brutality of Durnford had seen to that--but also sensitive, bruised by a lonely childhood. Like many Englishmen, he concealed his shyness behind a defensive barrage of jokes. Another paternal legacy was the conviction that he was physically unattractive; Claude had once told him he was "plug ugly," and he grew up believing it. Certainly Elliott was not classically handsome, with his gangly frame, thin face, and thick-rimmed glasses, but he had poise, a barely concealed air of mischief, and a resolute cheerfulness that women were instantly drawn to. It took him many years to conclude that he "was no more or less odd to look at than a reasonable proportion of my fellow creatures." Alongside a natural conservatism he had inherited the family propensity for eccentricity. He was no snob. He could strike up a conversation with anyone from any walk of life. He did not believe in God or Marx or capitalism; he had faith in King, country, class, and club (White's Club, in his case, the gentleman's club in St James's). But above all he believed in friendship.
In the summer of 1938 Basil Fisher took a job in the City, while Elliott wondered idly what to do with himself. The old boys soon solved that. Elliott was playing in a cricket match at Eton that summer when, during the tea interval, he was approached by Sir Nevile Bland, a senior diplomat and family friend, who tactfully observed that Elliott's father was concerned by his son's "inability to get down to a solid job of work." (Sir Claude preferred to speak to his son through emissaries.) Sir Nevile explained that he had recently been appointed Britain's minister at The Hague, in the Netherlands. Would Nicholas like to accompany him as honorary attaché? Elliott said he would like that very much, despite having no idea what an honorary attaché might actually do. "There was no serious vetting procedure," Elliott later wrote. "Nevile simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew me and had been at Eton with my father."
Before leaving, Elliott underwent a code training course at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott's first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.
Elliott arrived at The Hague in his Hillman Minx in the middle of November 1938 and reported to the legation. After dinner, Sir Nevile offered him a warning--"in the diplomatic service it is a sackable offense to sleep with the wife of a colleague"--and some advice--"I suggest you should do as I do and not light your cigar until you have started your third glass of port." Elliott's duties were hardly onerous--a little light bag carrying for the minister, some coding and decoding in the wireless room, and attendance at formal dinners.
Elliott had been in the Netherlands only four months when he got his first taste of clandestine work and an "opportunity to see the German war machine at first hand." One evening, over dinner, he fell into conversation with a young naval officer named Glyn Hearson, the assistant naval attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Commander Hearson confided that he was on a special mission to spy on the port of Hamburg, where the Germans were believed to be developing midget submarines. After a few more glasses, Hearson asked Elliott if he would care to join him. Elliott thought this a splendid idea. Sir Nevile gave his approval.
Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg's port by climbing over the wall. "We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour" taking photographs, Elliott recalled, before "returning to safety and a stiff drink." Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, "a singularly foolhardy exploit." But it had been most enjoyable and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits.
April 20, 1939, was Hitler's fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organized by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronized sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Fuhrer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle involving fifty thousand German troops, hundreds of tanks, and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France, and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler's march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. "The Fuhrer is feted like no other mortal has ever been," gushed Goebbels in his diary.
Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. "Mason-Mac" was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. The general remarked under his breath to Elliott that Hitler was well within rifle range: "I am tempted to take advantage of this," he muttered, adding that he could "pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking." Elliott "strongly urged him to take a pot shot." Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down.
Elliott returned to The Hague with two newly minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs and that the best way of contributing to this end would be to become a spy. "My mind was easily made up." A day at Ascot, a glass of fizz with Sir Robert Vansittart, and a meeting with an important person in Whitehall did the rest. Elliott returned to The Hague still officially an honorary attaché but in reality, with Sir Nevile Bland's blessing, a new recruit to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. Outwardly his diplomatic life continued as before; secretly he began his novitiate in the strange religion of British intelligence.
Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office mandarin who smoothed Elliott's way into MI6, ran what was, in effect, a private intelligence agency outside the official orbit of government but with close links to both MI6 and MI5, the Security Service. Vansittart was a fierce opponent of appeasement, convinced that Germany would start another war "just as soon as it feels strong enough." His network of spies gathered copious intelligence on Nazi intentions, with which he tried (and failed) to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the looming confrontation. One of his earliest and most colorful informants was Jona von Ustinov, a German journalist and fierce secret opponent of Nazism. Ustinov was universally known as "Klop," Russian slang for bedbug, a nickname that derived from his rotund appearance, of which he was, oddly, intensely proud. Ustinov's father was a Russian-born army officer; his mother was half Ethiopian and half Jewish; his son, born in 1921, was Peter Ustinov, the great comic actor and writer. Klop Ustinov had served in the German army during the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, before taking up a post with the German Press Agency in London. He lost his job in 1935 when the German authorities, suspicious of his exotically mixed heritage, demanded proof of his Aryanism. That same year he was recruited as a British agent, code-named "U35." Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanor. He was "the best and most ingenious operator I had the honor to work with," declared Dick White, his case officer, who would go on to head both MI5 and MI6.
Dettagli prodotto
- Editore : Crown Pub (29 luglio 2014)
- Lingua : Inglese
- Copertina rigida : 368 pagine
- ISBN-10 : 0804136637
- ISBN-13 : 978-0804136631
- Peso articolo : 662 g
- Dimensioni : 16.31 x 3.48 x 24.18 cm
- Posizione nella classifica Bestseller di Amazon: n. 5,258 in Memorie (Libri)
- n. 16,439 in Storia contemporanea dal XX secolo a oggi (Libri)
- n. 373,828 in Libri in inglese
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ben scritto fluido e pieno di notizie
The style is impeccable, the language rich and imaginative: the characters are rendered as the real people they are.
Will read again sooner or later.
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Spies do not, as the author asserts in this case, ooze from the home team on to the other side. Quite the contrary there is an Ah Ha moment in their relationship, occasionally dramatic, when the case officer knows he has hoked the pigeon. Thus, it was with the brilliant Arnold Deutsch, Philby’s recruiter, guide, philosopher, trainer and friend. Until he was executed. Philby was a Soviet asset while executions during the Great Purge thinned his superiors’ ranks.
The author advances a barely cogent and certainly incomplete argument argument that Elliott and Lunn left Philby, shriven, alone, and unguarded in Beirut while Elliott returned to London to negotiate the terms of Philby’s retirement to the East. The British government of the day could not afford the barrage of inculpatory fact that would bring it down and smudge the Security Services perhaps forever. Not a few including this writer believe that Moscow was asked or perhaps begged to welcome their boy home. An overly skeptical few opined later that the Brits had payed Moscow to receive Philby and put him in an attic room reserved for a dotty aunt. Philby’s exfiltration was not hurriedly planned or executed. The purported nephew of the Dolmatova’s skipper accosted this writer in a foreign land and asserted that Philby was taken aboard that bucket of rust and sailed from Beirut thru international waters to Odessa with Philby settled drowsily in a locked cabin. Why was the ship in port just when needed?
This book is salted with errors and omissions. Who in London decided Philby’s tasks? One does not just sit for hours in Arab coffee joints and listen to the day’s gossip. One recruits and meets agents and sends good dope to where it should be sent. The author does not disclose Philby’s specific requirements. Who and where were his agents and sub agents? Philby did not cause the Albanian debacle. The Albanians discussed the matter among themselves well before the event. Who had skin in this game? Was the Beirut station chief unaware of events in his parish? How closely did MI-6’s Director measure Philby’s accomplishments and failures? Did Philby work for a British boss in London or in Beirut? How did Philby’s work influence his government’s policies? Philby was fired…justly. And without any admission that he had influenced his government on his own in any way. Intelligence services serve policy makers who work for the electorate. The author sets up Philby and colleagues on both sides as pseudo governments of their own who worked on their own as they pleased. Why? Who was the driving force behind his re-employment? Detour on the road to a Marxist Damascus? Did Philby have a sponsor in the CFO or in parliament? It wasn’t Marcus Lipton. Why would any service keep employed an extravagant alcoholic with a tangled domestic life and uncertain loyalties? The author fails to note that many members of the US Intelligence community stayed away from Philby because of his personal life and unusual behavior. Not all saw him as a glamorous all- knowing figure from across the pond mostly because to at least a few he was obnoxious and condescending. A small minority, Hoover among them, despised him as they did Angleton. Why keep Elliott as the negotiator/caretaker/confident and Ambassador to London? His position in the narrative emerges just as important as Philby’s even though they had not worked together for years. Their time lines and Elliott’s ubiquity in this story trouble. Elliott’s family is given as principal sources for the book. Fair enough. Anything else? Elliott and Lunn’s subordinates must have been mute and deaf. Why?
Sir George Clutton’s post as HM Amb. did not please him. We attended Mass together at the Irish Columbans in Manila and never spoke. I was exceedingly junior. I knelt at the appropriate times. He remained upright leaning against a stone column every damn Sunday. I never knew why. He was wifeless, childless and solaced himself with a solitary life. Few knew him. Fewer still believed he existed. Many saw Christopher Biggs RIP a gallant and dear friend as the real ambassador, not Clutton. He was nearly blind and an art critic of repute. He knew Blunt and his circle. Upon his return to London he was assigned as the “Advisor”, an intimate of the Cabinet who must sign off on unofficially covered agents before dispatching them abroad. Overnight Clutton became a very important gent in Whitehall’s pantheon. Who asked Clutton to sign? He was iron stubborn. He refused to sign the document that permitted Philby to take up his post in Beirut for the ultimate benefit of his masters in Moscow giving no reason except his elegant if dilatory attendance upon such matters. He left Philby’s permit for his successor to sign. Does not the refusal of some-one as important as the “Advisor” suggest something may be out of joint? The author gives short shrift to this fascinating non-incident. So did Clutton’s colleagues. Clearly a pro Philby faction existed in the FCO as well as a group that considered Philby a bummer. Clutton later was HM Amb. To Poland.
The author mentions that his Russian hosts did not trust Philby as much as was wanted. Of course no member of any Intelligence Service trusts members of another service. Did Philby trust Elliott to make a deal with the Vashni – the important ones in London - to let him live or did Elliott trust Philby sufficiently to wait while he, Elliott, negotiated with their joint superiors? Philby must have known that his chance of living a full life in Russia were fifty-fifty at best
Philby’s work as a committee man in Washington was superb. He got himself appointed to different groups where he could embargo critical sections of the Venona messages and thwart the superb work of Meredith Gardner. He protected himself and other Soviet assets for several years. That accomplishment alone was worth a Hero Of The Soviet Union Grade 5 decoration.. The author does not credit Philby sufficiently for this subsidiary but priceless ploy. Further, exasperated readers cannot discover from this book who Philby’s agents were and who voted with him in the day to day work of running two intelligence services while advancing the cause of a third. We read much about lengthy lunches, but little
Shortly after WW2’s end Jimmy Angleton, Richard Helms plus Mrs. X RIP foregathered bibulously in Rome and concluded that Italy had at most 90 days before it toppled. Thus, began the war of posters well described elsewhere. This prescient group also assembled and distributed guns to a band of tough Milanese and former anti-communist resistants who nightly bashed targeted Reds. Good guys won 10 to 3. The Reds in Livorno held out (to this day). They hated Americans and their navy for having shelled their city into purgatory and almost the other place. It was this act of helping Italy survive Communist efforts to control the country that gratified Angleton most. Philby was never to be seen or heard during these parlous days, Why not? Possibly, only possibly, Philby had concerns for his post WW2 career path. To have converted Italy would have ensured a retirement dacha with three bedrooms on the Black Sea. Philby’s betrayal blotted his and others’ careers almost fatally, but Jimmy had other arrows in his quiver. Without doubt he had enemies within. This writer was forbidden, like swathes of others all over the U. S. Government from working with Angleton-tout court. Later, Philby’s relationships with his American friends were examined for wrong doing time out of mind. On the Philby side MI-6’s tawdry and blundering effort to exfiltrate Philby from Beirut still raised unanswered questions. In a small way this lacuna exonerates the American Intelligence community. Philby was forced to leave the game sedated and confined aboard a tired antique bottom ready for the breaker’s yard. Philby’s overt efforts to destroy both American and British Intelligence services failed. about agent’s meetings and the difficulties of handling awkward assets.
The incoming British Head of Station calls on his mates in the diplomatic Pantheon and anyone else who can do him harm or good. Sycophants and supplicants are legion. During these sometimes extended conversations deals are made, agreements are broken and new scams put into play. Records of these contrivances hostile and friendly are carefully recorded by their participants, but absent from Philby’s story.
Jimmy made his personal telephone calls after work outside his office. Philby’s ghost stayed with Angleton till his end of days. Many if not most of Washington’s senior Intelligence Community attended his Unitarian funeral most out of curiosity. Years ago, on a rainy afternoon at the Army Navy club in Washington DC Angleton sat at a small table two feet from the author and telephoned: “They’re after me. I need help.” Angleton was Philby’s friend. He had enemies. Jimmy feared prosecution from somebody and needed money for a legal team. He had little family money. Exotic Orchids cost. Breaking the habit of a life time I rose from our joint table and walked away. I never did know the result of this conversation.
The author has written a slick narrative that is a cover story aimed at covering another story that covers a porous narrative that will never be fully explicated. Philby was the wooden doll. Andrew Lownie in his Burgess book wrote about the world of espionage in the context of a declining society served by a malignant intelligence service itself founded and funded to serve and protect the Realm. It is a singular contribution to the field in method and substance. Is it not time for others to stop telling spy stories advanced by those who know little of their sometimes-horrible truths? I think so. Philby’s career was Kabuki Theater. Nobody caught the movements until after the curtain fell.
Please! The proper phrase is “Trade Craft” not “Spy Craft.
Mr. Ben Macintyre has written a book ostensibly about Kim Philby, the English traitor before, during and after WW2. The most interesting and affected persons in this horrid saga: George Clutton, Edgar Hoover, Nick Elliott, Peter Lunn, Meredith Gardner, Guy Liddell, Bill Harvey, Philby’s own family and several others have their entrails left almost untouched. That is a shame and bad history.
Spies do not, as the author asserts in this case, ooze from the home team on to the other side. Quite the contrary there is an Ah Ha moment in their relationship, occasionally dramatic, when the case officer knows he has hoked the pigeon. Thus, it was with the brilliant Arnold Deutsch, Philby’s recruiter, guide, philosopher, trainer and friend. Until he was executed. Philby was a Soviet asset while executions during the Great Purge thinned his superiors’ ranks.
The author advances a barely cogent and certainly incomplete argument argument that Elliott and Lunn left Philby, shriven, alone, and unguarded in Beirut while Elliott returned to London to negotiate the terms of Philby’s retirement to the East. The British government of the day could not afford the barrage of inculpatory fact that would bring it down and smudge the Security Services perhaps forever. Not a few including this writer believe that Moscow was asked or perhaps begged to welcome their boy home. An overly skeptical few opined later that the Brits had payed Moscow to receive Philby and put him in an attic room reserved for a dotty aunt. Philby’s exfiltration was not hurriedly planned or executed. The purported nephew of the Dolmatova’s skipper accosted this writer in a foreign land and asserted that Philby was taken aboard that bucket of rust and sailed from Beirut thru international waters to Odessa with Philby settled drowsily in a locked cabin. Why was the ship in port just when needed?
This book is salted with errors and omissions. Who in London decided Philby’s tasks? One does not just sit for hours in Arab coffee joints and listen to the day’s gossip. One recruits and meets agents and sends good dope to where it should be sent. The author does not disclose Philby’s specific requirements. Who and where were his agents and sub agents? Philby did not cause the Albanian debacle. The Albanians discussed the matter among themselves well before the event. Who had skin in this game? Was the Beirut station chief unaware of events in his parish? How closely did MI-6’s Director measure Philby’s accomplishments and failures? Did Philby work for a British boss in London or in Beirut? How did Philby’s work influence his government’s policies? Philby was fired…justly. And without any admission that he had influenced his government on his own in any way. Intelligence services serve policy makers who work for the electorate. The author sets up Philby and colleagues on both sides as pseudo governments of their own who worked on their own as they pleased. Why? Who was the driving force behind his re-employment? Detour on the road to a Marxist Damascus? Did Philby have a sponsor in the CFO or in parliament? It wasn’t Marcus Lipton. Why would any service keep employed an extravagant alcoholic with a tangled domestic life and uncertain loyalties? The author fails to note that many members of the US Intelligence community stayed away from Philby because of his personal life and unusual behavior. Not all saw him as a glamorous all- knowing figure from across the pond mostly because to at least a few he was obnoxious and condescending. A small minority, Hoover among them, despised him as they did Angleton. Why keep Elliott as the negotiator/caretaker/confident and Ambassador to London? His position in the narrative emerges just as important as Philby’s even though they had not worked together for years. Their time lines and Elliott’s ubiquity in this story trouble. Elliott’s family is given as principal sources for the book. Fair enough. Anything else? Elliott and Lunn’s subordinates must have been mute and deaf. Why?
Sir George Clutton’s post as HM Amb. did not please him. We attended Mass together at the Irish Columbans in Manila and never spoke. I was exceedingly junior. I knelt at the appropriate times. He remained upright leaning against a stone column every damn Sunday. I never knew why. He was wifeless, childless and solaced himself with a solitary life. Few knew him. Fewer still believed he existed. Many saw Christopher Biggs RIP a gallant and dear friend as the real ambassador, not Clutton. He was nearly blind and an art critic of repute. He knew Blunt and his circle. Upon his return to London he was assigned as the “Advisor”, an intimate of the Cabinet who must sign off on unofficially covered agents before dispatching them abroad. Overnight Clutton became a very important gent in Whitehall’s pantheon. Who asked Clutton to sign? He was iron stubborn. He refused to sign the document that permitted Philby to take up his post in Beirut for the ultimate benefit of his masters in Moscow giving no reason except his elegant if dilatory attendance upon such matters. He left Philby’s permit for his successor to sign. Does not the refusal of some-one as important as the “Advisor” suggest something may be out of joint? The author gives short shrift to this fascinating non-incident. So did Clutton’s colleagues. Clearly a pro Philby faction existed in the FCO as well as a group that considered Philby a bummer. Clutton later was HM Amb. To Poland.
The author mentions that his Russian hosts did not trust Philby as much as was wanted. Of course no member of any Intelligence Service trusts members of another service. Did Philby trust Elliott to make a deal with the Vashni – the important ones in London - to let him live or did Elliott trust Philby sufficiently to wait while he, Elliott, negotiated with their joint superiors? Philby must have known that his chance of living a full life in Russia were fifty-fifty at best.
Philby’s work as a committee man in Washington was superb. He got himself appointed to different groups where he could embargo critical sections of the Venona messages and thwart the superb work of Meredith Gardner. He protected himself and other Soviet assets for several years. That accomplishment alone was worth a Hero Of The Soviet Union Grade 5 decoration.. The author does not credit Philby sufficiently for this subsidiary but priceless ploy. Further, exasperated readers cannot discover from this book who Philby’s agents were and who voted with him in the day to day work of running two intelligence services while advancing the cause of a third. We read much about lengthy lunches, but little
Shortly after WW2’s end Jimmy Angleton, Richard Helms plus Mrs. X RIP foregathered bibulously in Rome and concluded that Italy had at most 90 days before it toppled. Thus, began the war of posters well described elsewhere. This prescient group also assembled and distributed guns to a band of tough Milanese and former anti-communist resistants who nightly bashed targeted Reds. Good guys won 10 to 3. The Reds in Livorno held out (to this day). They hated Americans and their navy for having shelled their city into purgatory and almost the other place. It was this act of helping Italy survive Communist efforts to control the country that gratified Angleton most. Philby was never to be seen or heard during these parlous days, Why not? Possibly, only possibly, Philby had concerns for his post WW2 career path. To have converted Italy would have ensured a retirement dacha with three bedrooms on the Black Sea. Philby’s betrayal blotted his and others’ careers almost fatally, but Jimmy had other arrows in his quiver. Without doubt he had enemies within. This writer was forbidden, like swathes of others all over the U. S. Government from working with Angleton-tout court. Later, Philby’s relationships with his American friends were examined for wrong doing time out of mind. On the Philby side MI-6’s tawdry and blundering effort to exfiltrate Philby from Beirut still raised unanswered questions. In a small way this lacuna exonerates the American Intelligence community. Philby was forced to leave the game sedated and confined aboard a tired antique bottom ready for the breaker’s yard. Philby’s overt efforts to destroy both American and British Intelligence services failed. about agent’s meetings and the difficulties of handling awkward assets.
The incoming British Head of Station calls on his mates in the diplomatic Pantheon and anyone else who can do him harm or good. Sycophants and supplicants are legion. During these sometimes extended conversations deals are made, agreements are broken and new scams put into play. Records of these contrivances hostile and friendly are carefully recorded by their participants, but absent from Philby’s story.
Jimmy made his personal telephone calls after work outside his office. Philby’s ghost stayed with Angleton till his end of days. Years ago, on a rainy afternoon at the Army Navy club in Washington DC Angleton sat at a small table two feet from the author and telephoned: “They’re after me. I need help.” Angleton was Philby’s friend. He had enemies. Jimmy feared prosecution from somebody and needed money for a legal team. He had little family money. Exotic Orchids cost. Breaking the habit of a life time I rose from our joint table and walked away. I never did know the result of this conversation.
The author has written a slick narrative that is a cover story aimed at covering another story that covers a porous narrative that will never be fully explicated. Philby was the wooden doll. Andrew Lownie in his Burgess book wrote about the world of espionage in the context of a declining society served by a malignant intelligence service itself founded and funded to serve and protect the Realm. It is a singular contribution to the field in method and substance. Is it not time for others to stop telling spy stories advanced by those who know little of their sometimes-horrible truths? I think so. Philby’s career was Kabuki Theater. Nobody caught the movements until after the curtain fell.
Please! The proper phrase is “Trade Craft” not “Spy Craft.
Davis J Kenney
Easter Sunday
Upperville
The incoming British Head of Station calls on his mates and anyone else who can do him harm or good. Sycophants and supplicants are legion. During these sometimes extended conversations deals are made, agreements are broken and new scams put into play. Records of these contrivances hostile and friendly are carefully recorded by their participants, but absent from Philby’s story.
Of course for outsiders like Lewis, slowly earning your way to an inner ring may not only take years but may turn out to be a hollow promise after all. But the nature of the old British establishment was that if you were born into the right family, went to the right school, had the right kind of accent and bearing, you could skip all those tawdry outer rings and accelerate right to the centre of things where commoners rarely, if ever, appear. The inner rings are inevitably smaller, and fewer people share the high-octane experience of access to key decisions and key information.
What MI6, the UK’s secret intelligence organisation, hadn’t bargained for was that once their trusted men were in the inner ring it was practically the only place they could let their guard down and share their experiences without fear of a snooping ear. And boy did they offload. Here were brothers, comrades, co-spies in a world where no one else knew their true work, not even their wives. And, from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, one man in particular – charming, intelligent, a veritable Bond – was picking them clean of every detail, every initiative, and every name.
Entrance into the UK spy organisation’s inner rings was surprisingly easy for Kim Philby. He simply asked a friend of his father’s to recommend him. ‘I know their people!’ was recommendation enough. In the 1940s the old boy network was considered as sound as a pound. A typical Eton old boy was as British as you could be. But it was at Cambridge that Philby first encountered the vision of a communist society. And it was an idealistic vision that held his loyalty for the remainder of his life. In fact he was so devoted to this ideal that he gave uncritical obedience to his KGB handlers from first to last. Philby’s beliefs as a student were well known, but when the Soviets recruited him they advised him not to join the Communist Party but rather to appear to grow out of that youthful phase and adopt more right-wing views. He obeyed, and became the KGB’s most senior operative; one who infiltrated the British security system to the highest levels. Philby, the Eton and Cambridge old boy, who loved cricket and was a thoroughly good egg, was ushered into the inner ring, and became the most notorious spy of his generation. He was so thoroughly British that the British refused to doubt him, and the KGB refused to trust him.
As Ben Macintyre describes in this highly readable account of Philby’s adventures, he actually became head of the UK’s anti-Soviet division – an almost unbelievable feat. The most senior Soviet spy in Britain became the head of the Britain’s anti-Soviet operations. And the information Philby was sending to the Soviet Union was so thorough and so accurate that the KGB began to be suspicious of him and had him followed.
After two other well-to-do Cambridge recruits were exposed as Soviet spies and defected, the spotlight fell (accurately) on Philby. He must have tipped them off. The CIA in America was certain of it. MI5 (British security service) and MI6 (British foreign intelligence service) had differing views on Philby. MI5 were convinced he had been a double-agent. MI6 thought those horrible people at MI5 were just slandering him, and had nothing concrete against him. And so, as an old boy truly in the security of a tightening inner ring, Philby was exonerated and declared to be so in Parliament by fellow-Etonian, Harold Macmillan. Incredibly, a few years later he was working for MI6 again.
Of course, it all finally caught up with him, and he was probably (Macintyre, and others infer) allowed to escape to Moscow where he received by the Soviet authorities. It was hardly a hero’s welcome for a lifetime or risk and deceit. He was kept at arms length. He lived in a small flat, avidly reading through old cricket games in old copies of the Times when he was able to get them, desperate of news from home. A humbling isolated end. A Briton in exile.
Philby’s betrayal, not only of country, but of friends, was intensely difficult to process by those who were closest to him. They were left devastated by his defection when the watertight evidence was revealed. We’re told Nicholas Elliot, in MI6, never fully recovered from the shock of it all. His closest friend was working for the Communists. He re-lived whole segments of his life with a new perspective. The realisation that he had spilled the beans on numerous activities which was relayed to the Soviet Union must have been unbearable to him. And the American James Angleton, another close friend, nearly destroyed the CIA through increasingly invasive internal witch-hunts prompted by the post-Philby paranoia.
Suave, sophisticated, well educated, gracious, the quintessential British gentleman, Kim Philby deceived them all. And all for an ideal it seems he didn’t care to review beyond his earlier infatuation with it. Somehow he looked past Stalin’s crimes and doggedly held on to a pristine ideal. He looked past the ruthless disappearance of KGB handlers who were suddenly under suspicion, and kept looking for the communist dream. He didn’t live to see the fall of it all along with the Berlin Wall in 1989.
As a result of his winnowing work he frustrated numerous cold-war operations, sent hundreds of agents to their deaths, and told a gazillion bare-faced lies, not least of which were his declarations of innocence in his mother’s flat before a crowd of reporters after Macmillan’s statement in the House of Commons. You can see footage of that and of him speaking in the USSR here
‘Meet it is I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’, said Hamlet. Macintyre’s superbly readable account of the secret world of high-class spies has certainly been one of my most engaging reads of this year, and is a subject which continues to fascinate. Surely it’s time for a film version.
Recensito nel Regno Unito il 16 settembre 2019
Of course for outsiders like Lewis, slowly earning your way to an inner ring may not only take years but may turn out to be a hollow promise after all. But the nature of the old British establishment was that if you were born into the right family, went to the right school, had the right kind of accent and bearing, you could skip all those tawdry outer rings and accelerate right to the centre of things where commoners rarely, if ever, appear. The inner rings are inevitably smaller, and fewer people share the high-octane experience of access to key decisions and key information.
What MI6, the UK’s secret intelligence organisation, hadn’t bargained for was that once their trusted men were in the inner ring it was practically the only place they could let their guard down and share their experiences without fear of a snooping ear. And boy did they offload. Here were brothers, comrades, co-spies in a world where no one else knew their true work, not even their wives. And, from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, one man in particular – charming, intelligent, a veritable Bond – was picking them clean of every detail, every initiative, and every name.
Entrance into the UK spy organisation’s inner rings was surprisingly easy for Kim Philby. He simply asked a friend of his father’s to recommend him. ‘I know their people!’ was recommendation enough. In the 1940s the old boy network was considered as sound as a pound. A typical Eton old boy was as British as you could be. But it was at Cambridge that Philby first encountered the vision of a communist society. And it was an idealistic vision that held his loyalty for the remainder of his life. In fact he was so devoted to this ideal that he gave uncritical obedience to his KGB handlers from first to last. Philby’s beliefs as a student were well known, but when the Soviets recruited him they advised him not to join the Communist Party but rather to appear to grow out of that youthful phase and adopt more right-wing views. He obeyed, and became the KGB’s most senior operative; one who infiltrated the British security system to the highest levels. Philby, the Eton and Cambridge old boy, who loved cricket and was a thoroughly good egg, was ushered into the inner ring, and became the most notorious spy of his generation. He was so thoroughly British that the British refused to doubt him, and the KGB refused to trust him.
As Ben Macintyre describes in this highly readable account of Philby’s adventures, he actually became head of the UK’s anti-Soviet division – an almost unbelievable feat. The most senior Soviet spy in Britain became the head of the Britain’s anti-Soviet operations. And the information Philby was sending to the Soviet Union was so thorough and so accurate that the KGB began to be suspicious of him and had him followed.
After two other well-to-do Cambridge recruits were exposed as Soviet spies and defected, the spotlight fell (accurately) on Philby. He must have tipped them off. The CIA in America was certain of it. MI5 (British security service) and MI6 (British foreign intelligence service) had differing views on Philby. MI5 were convinced he had been a double-agent. MI6 thought those horrible people at MI5 were just slandering him, and had nothing concrete against him. And so, as an old boy truly in the security of a tightening inner ring, Philby was exonerated and declared to be so in Parliament by fellow-Etonian, Harold Macmillan. Incredibly, a few years later he was working for MI6 again.
Of course, it all finally caught up with him, and he was probably (Macintyre, and others infer) allowed to escape to Moscow where he received by the Soviet authorities. It was hardly a hero’s welcome for a lifetime or risk and deceit. He was kept at arms length. He lived in a small flat, avidly reading through old cricket games in old copies of the Times when he was able to get them, desperate of news from home. A humbling isolated end. A Briton in exile.
Philby’s betrayal, not only of country, but of friends, was intensely difficult to process by those who were closest to him. They were left devastated by his defection when the watertight evidence was revealed. We’re told Nicholas Elliot, in MI6, never fully recovered from the shock of it all. His closest friend was working for the Communists. He re-lived whole segments of his life with a new perspective. The realisation that he had spilled the beans on numerous activities which was relayed to the Soviet Union must have been unbearable to him. And the American James Angleton, another close friend, nearly destroyed the CIA through increasingly invasive internal witch-hunts prompted by the post-Philby paranoia.
Suave, sophisticated, well educated, gracious, the quintessential British gentleman, Kim Philby deceived them all. And all for an ideal it seems he didn’t care to review beyond his earlier infatuation with it. Somehow he looked past Stalin’s crimes and doggedly held on to a pristine ideal. He looked past the ruthless disappearance of KGB handlers who were suddenly under suspicion, and kept looking for the communist dream. He didn’t live to see the fall of it all along with the Berlin Wall in 1989.
As a result of his winnowing work he frustrated numerous cold-war operations, sent hundreds of agents to their deaths, and told a gazillion bare-faced lies, not least of which were his declarations of innocence in his mother’s flat before a crowd of reporters after Macmillan’s statement in the House of Commons. You can see footage of that and of him speaking in the USSR here
‘Meet it is I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’, said Hamlet. Macintyre’s superbly readable account of the secret world of high-class spies has certainly been one of my most engaging reads of this year, and is a subject which continues to fascinate. Surely it’s time for a film version.
The author gives us a look at Kim Philby, the most notorious double agent in UK history and how he could have done everything that he did to spill tonnes of blood of UK agents by passing secrets to the USSR. The friendship at the heart of the story is that of Philby, Nicholas Elliott and James Angleton, the latter two, unwittingly, told Philby everything that he needed to know to give to the Russians and to upset many UK missions.
The Old Boy network in the UK is partly to blame for all of the issues that occurred, it was the means to the end for Philby to continue his work with little worry for years. Indeed he may never have been caught if it hadn't been for the defections of Maclean and Burgess.
I enjoyed the writing style of the author and look forward to reading more of his books in the future.