Review: Paul Varian retired from CNN last fall after 30 years as an editor, writer and senior executive producer.
I’ve always been a fan of spy thrillers, whether fiction or non-fiction, but no John le Carre novel or movie treatment helped me understand the Cold War saga of British turncoat Kim Philby like Ben Macintyre’s suspenseful and authoritative 2014 account, which benefits greatly from his access to personal papers and previously unseen British intelligence files.
But the clarity of his narrative is more a byproduct of the path he followed in tracing the depth and intensity of Philby’s multi-layered deceptions and betrayals. “A Spy Among Friends” is not a biography, as such, but a look at the exploits of a highly placed double agent through the eyes of two of his unsuspecting closest colleagues and friends — fellow M16 officer, Cambridge alum and drinking buddy Nicholas Elliott and legendary U.S. counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, who spent a career hunting for moles while becoming one of Philby’s unwitting sources of sensitive secrets.
Philby, a willing and early convert to communism, was a member of the “Cambridge 5” — British intelligence agents recruited by the Soviet Union during their school days or shortly thereafter who provided classified information to the Soviets during World War II and the postwar period. Philby is believed to have helped two of them defect to Russia in the 1950s; he followed in their footsteps in 1963.
Macintyre, a British journalist and author, focuses mainly on Philby’s relationship with Elliott, a friendly but emotionally detached young man whom Philby introduced to his ambitious, hard-drinking fraternity of spies, including some of his fellow communist plants, and the two developed a lifelong bond.
“They spoke the same language,” Elliott’s son Mark is quoted as saying. “Kim was as close a friend as my father ever had.”
And that friendship was rooted in the social gatherings of those who gathered the secrets but were forbidden from sharing with outsiders. Still, when lubricated by liquor, they often casually discussed them with each other.
“Even by the heavy-drinking standards of wartime, the spies were spectacular boozers,” Macintyre writes. And, “no one served (or consumed) alcohol with the same joie de vivre and determination as Kim Philby.”
Philby and Eliott both rose rapidly through the ranks of British intelligence. Philby, described by le Carre “the most charming, witty, elegant, courteous and compulsively entertaining spy I ever met … and the most enigmatic,” learned how to play two sides of the street during the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, spying for both the British and Soviets while covering the conflict as a newspaperman.
Over the years, he proved adept at deflecting detection of his covert activities for the Soviets, barely surviving an investigation of his activities following the defections of his comrades. Before long, he was back on the payroll of British intelligence, and the Soviets, working in the Middle East. It was while he was assigned to Beirut that he was challenged by his old friend, Nicholas Elliott, to fess up once and for all. This is the book’s dramatic crescendo, previewed in Macintyre’s introduction.
“Elliott has come to Beirut to extract a confession,” he writes. “He has wired up the apartment and set watchers on the doors and street. He wants to know how many have died through Philby’s betrayal of their friendship. He wants to know when he became a fool. He wants to know the truth, or at least some of the truth.”
Le Carre questioned Elliott at length about that confrontation and excerpts of that “interrogation” appear as an “Afterword” to Macintyre’s thoroughly engrossing book.
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