Friends Like These

A
Spy Among Friends

Philby and the great betrayal

Ben Macintyre

(Bloomsbury, 2014)

Do we need another book about the Cambridge spies? Surely everything of
interest has been said and now we're just picking at an old scar
without much chance of revealing anything of interest underneath.

I'm mostly inclined to agree with that view, as the participants pass
from old age into what Larkin called 'the only end of age' the
likelihood of a new angle being found is ever more remote.

Times journalist Ben Macintyre pulls this trick off by Kim Philby, one of
the main protagonists and exploring his long three way friendship
with two lesser known figures, fellow British agent Nicholas Elliot
and CIA legend James Angleton. This opens up insights into the world
that shaped and to varying degrees was to destroy all three.

Theirs was a friendship forged in idealism, lubricated with prodigious
amounts of alcohol and shattered by one of the great betrayals of the
century. The fall-out from the latter would, when the final reckoning
was made, cost thousands of lives.

Along the way he takes his readers to some truly eccentric places, from the
high society world of the inter-war years inhabited by Philby and
Elliot where membership of MI6 was conferred on the chosen through a
discreet tap on the shoulder, to the non-stop party that was Cairo in
wartime. At times the cast of grotesques on show resembles that of a
espionage thriller written by Nancy Mitford high as kite on
absinthe.

Behind the high jinks in high places though is a sordid story of betrayal
and its personal consequences of which Macintyre never loses sight.
Kim Philby emerges as a self-destructive character, messed up no
doubt by his emotionally chilly upbringing, but also capable of
fooling himself in the way only the clever can that he was right
despite all evidence to the contrary.

Nothing else could explain the willingness with which he deluded himself that
the Soviet regime he supported from the thirties until his death
wasn't using the information he passed on to murder its own citizens.

Macintyre writes with unsparing clarity about the consequences of betrayal for
all three men, not just in terms of their careers, but their personal
lives too. Philby was to end his days as a drink soaked exile in
Moscow turning over his regrets in a gilded cage; Elliot hid his pain
at being betrayed by an old friend behind a faultless mask of
affability ending his days as a security adviser to Mrs Thatcher;
Angleton rose to near the top of the CIA, but spent much of his
career wrapped around by a cloak of paranoia.

This isn't the one dimensional world of gadgets and faux glamour worked up
by Ian Flemming and kept alive by film adaptations that are better
than the original books and writers more talented than their author
who are willing to swap a little of their literary kudos for some
second hand popularity. Instead it is an often sordid drama rooted in
human frailty and the tangled webs we weave when we practice to
deceive