A Spy Among Friends

Cambridge, the 1930s. Young men dabble in Communism, with some of them taking it more seriously than others. Some of the serious ones ended up in high government posts, to wit, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and of course, Kim Philby. Philby's life and times are covered in the new volume A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre. Macintyre covers the whole of Philby's life, particularly his relationship with his life-long friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliot (about whom John leCarré provides an interesting afterword), and his CIA colleague James Angleton. That Philby was able to get away with his perfidity for so long, spying for the Soviets under the nose of MI6 is (according to Macintyre) a tribute to the British class system: his colleagues in MI6 did not believe that someone of good breeding, who had gone to the right schools, was a member of the right clubs, could possibly be a traitor. The divide was that members of MI5 (roughly, in Britain, the FBI, to MI6's CIA), who were largely from less-prestigious backgrounds, had no problem believing the evidence that Philby was a double-agent. They were able to put together the trail of broken operations, murdered spies, leaked secrets, and hints from defectors, and see Philby. His drinking buddies and old school chums were not. And thus, Philby was finally fired by MI6 in 1951 when Burgess and Maclean defected --- after having been warned by Philby. But he was rehired in 1956 and sent to Beirut, where, as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, he also worked for MI6. In 1962, a Soviet defector was finally able to finger Philby, and in early 1963, he was interrogated by his old friend Elliot. After several rounds of questioning, and Philby's confession, the KGB managed to spirit him out of Lebanon and on to Moscow, where he lived out his days. It is the real history of the fictional wilderness of mirrors leCarré captures in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and as a vital part of cold war history, it's worth a read.