Quick Review

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre

If they knew what they were about, Ben Macintyre's publishers would do well to try and get a book out of him at least every other Father's Day.  I can think of very few nonfiction authors who have produced such a string of consistently readable -- and saleable -- popular histories, or come to that, books better suited to what might be called the Dad Market.  While not a parent myself, I would seem to have settled comfortably into the recliner reading group.  Our motto might be something on the lines of, "Tell me something I didn't know about something I'm pretty sure I know all about."  Macintyre's our guy.  He has a nose for those dusty corners of the historical record wherein evidently may still be found neglected narratives from seemingly exhausted subjects like WWII and yes, now, the Cold War.  We love that.  What's more, he knows how to write for a popular audience without resort to speculative fictionalization and or any faddish or ahistorical contemporary intellectual agenda.  No wizards.  No theory.  No woo woo.  Damn straight, Ben.  Clearly, he enjoys finding a good story to tell rather more than making hay from whatever he might have hoped to find.  He's reasonably skeptical of the official version of events, yes, but he never seems to be out to prove or disprove anything, so much as to get as near the truth as an examination of the available evidence will allow.  Sound man.  And what stories he finds!  Fascinating stuff.  Obviously, he's the kind of guy you'd hope to meet in a dull bar and almost never do. I've read every book Ben Macintyre's written from his first, Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony (you wouldn't believe me if I told you, but trust me,) down to this latest biography of one of the most charming, and duplicitous shits in recent history.  (That's nine books in roughly twenty years, or a new book every two and a half years. My alternating Father's Days scheme just might work then, with just a bit of a push from Macintyre -- not to nag.)

In Macintyre's fresh telling of what must by now be an awfully familiar story to anyone with an interest in either espionage or the Cold War, he quite cleverly avoids the more usual tack of either touting Philby as the ultimate "master spy" or making heroes of the purblind clubmen who, all but against their will, were eventually forced to expose him.  Instead, Macintyre patiently, and rather wittily picks apart the legend of the late Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988) by pricking up Philby's betrayal of his best friend and fellow MI6 officer, John Nicholas Rede Elliot (15 November 1916 -- 13 April 1994.)  The pair of them were, in all but that most important point of divergence, cut from the same cloth; privileged, well-educated, convivial, and coldly cosmopolitan gentlemen of a certain class who happened to find their line in espionage.  Perfectly natural they should have been chums.  That Nicholas Elliott should have been the interrogating officer for Philby's rather disappointing "confession" in Beirut in 1963, just before Philby's defection to the Soviet motherland, is only surprising until one's read Macintyre's book.  Now that too seems the most natural thing in the world, indeed, an almost inevitable finishing stitch in what was, in Macintyre's telling, a tapestry of false assumptions, left and right.

Philby's justification for having been a double-agent for the Soviets even as he rose ever higher in British intelligence service was that he betrayed not his country, but rather his class and the corrupt and unjust system to which they owed their privileges.  Couple of logical fallacies, to say nothing of breathtaking personal, professional and historical ironies there, but let all that for the moment stand.  What Macintyre's book shows in a carefully researched and tellingly detailed account of the facts is that the most shocking revelation to come from any objective review of Philby's career is found in neither his motives nor his actions -- keeping in mind that Philby helped the Russians kill a lot of people -- but rather the network of misplaced loyalties that allowed Philby to go on betraying his friends and his country for so long and to get away in the end.  "Kim," it seems, was always "one of us," right up until the moment he fled. He was protected, promoted, excused, explained away and defended on no better basis than that.  It is this that most intrigues Ben Macintyre and what he found best personified in the person of Nicholas Elliott and his disastrous friendship with Philby.

It's a wonderful device for reducing the mythology of the Cambridge spies, et al to the actual dimensions of their all too human frailties.  Philby was indeed a clever fellow, and, any way one looks at it, rather an exceptional spy.  Great fun at parties too, for awhile anyway. In his Janus-faced way, it must be said, a good friend; thoughtful, funny, supportive.  He was also a raging alcoholic, a fanatic, and terrible husband to, what was it? three? no, four wives.  From the moment he was invited into British intelligence, until well after he'd officially left, he did more damage to the efforts and intelligence organizations of his country and their allies -- by his lights, the enemies of his Soviet masters and "the Revolution," -- than anyone on what one might still call "our side" in the history of the Cold War.  Among other things, he sent not just agents, but even friends to their certain deaths.

And his best friend, Nicholas Elliott, seemingly every bit his equal in both intelligence and expertise, Philby supposedly fighting right at his side against a common foe, was just one of the men who unwittingly helped the double agent do his dirty worst; telling him everything they knew, trusting him implicitly, refusing to be believe the truth even when it was all too obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

How and why that happened is Macintyre's story.   

Finally, there is some small satisfaction in the unexpected coda to this Wodehousian tragedy, this comedy of manners and murders, old-school-ties and broken trust, in the delectable description -- only available to Macintyre and his Western readers because of the collapse of the senile Soviet Empire after Philby's death-- of just how frequently Kim Philby was disbelieved by his Communist bosses (wait for it) simply by being too good to be true.  Ah!  The perfect logic of the Paranoid State!  

That Kim Philby chose to subvert the corrupt system that made him in order to serve an even more corrupt system that didn't quite know what to make of him, is one of the better surprises here.  Ben Macintyre is good at surprises.  What's more, he's so good at what he does that not even reading yet another book about the sordid and sorry business of spies, Communist agents and double-agents, traitors and twits would I describe, in this case, as anything short of a pure pleasure. 

The only question now is can I wait another two and a half years For Macintyre's next one?  (And what will we get Dad for Christmas, damn it?)