Spy Among Friends (Macintyre)

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
Ben Macintyre, 2014
Crown Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804136655


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK


Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times (London) newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.

Books
MacIntyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief (1992). He also wrote The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (2004). In 2008 MacIntyre released an informative illustrated account of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, to accompany the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, which was part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations.

Three of his most recent books center on World War II and have become international bestsellers. In 2007, he published Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy. The story centers on Chapman, a real-life double agent during the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, issued in 2010, recounts the Allied deception their impending invasion of Italy. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, released in 2012, is about the Allies' D-Day spy network.

All three books have been made into BBC documentaries—Operation Mincemeat (in 2010), Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story (in 2011), and Double Cross (in 2012). His most recent book, published in 2014, is A Spy Among Friends: Phil Kilby and the Great Betrayal. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
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 Carre, 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


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


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.
Guardian (UK)


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.
Observer (UK)
 

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.
Mail on Sunday (UK)


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 Carre.
New Statesman (UK)


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.
Daily Mail (UK)
 

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.
Express (UK)


(Starred review.) 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 review.) Ben Macintyre 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 review.) A tale of espionage, alcoholism, bad manners and the chivalrous code of spies—the real world of James Bond, that is, as played out by clerks and not superheroes.... Gripping and as well-crafted as an episode of Smiley's People, full of cynical inevitability, secrets, lashings of whiskey and corpses.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these talking points to help start a discussion for A Spy Among Friends (Spoiler Alert in effect—beware if you've not read the book.):

1. The central question raised by Macintyre's book, and by Nicholas Elliot, is how could—and why did—a man as Kim Philby, with a decidedly English upbringing and all of its prequisites, undertake a life of deception on such a grand scale? And why would he choose communism over capitalism? Talk about Philby: how would you describe him? What kind of person was he? What motivated him?

2. Talk about MI-6's Nicholas Elliot and the CIA's James Angleton, two of the sharpest, most wizened spies in the West. What about their personalities, backgrounds, or world views enabled both to be so thoroughly duped by Philby?

3. Philby himself says, in his own mind, he didn't betray Britain so much as remain intensely loyal to the USSR, an ideology he was firmly committed to. What do you think?

4. What about the Vermehrens, Erich and Elisabeth, the couple Elliot recruited in Turkey during the war? What motivated them...and how was their motivation different from  Kim Philby's? Consider, too, that their defection ended up destroying the members of their families by both Nazis (during the war) and Soviets (after the war). The bigger questions here is where does one's loyalties lie...or where should they lie?

5. One of the many ironies of the Philby's double agentry is that the better the information was that he provided his Soviet overseers, the less they trusted him. Why did Moscow distrust Philby during the early war years? Were the Soviets paranoid, an extension of Stalin's paranoia? Or did their mistrust make sense? What changed their minds?

6. What kind of individual does it take to be a spy, keeping secrets from everyone, including those you are most intimate with—spouses, family, and close friends? Could you ever work in intelligence, particularly undercover operations?

7. Talk about the role that social class played in this story. How did it aid Philby's ability to deceive his close friends and associates?

(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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