Grove Koger

Ben Macintyre’s Spy among Friends, subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, is one of the most recent books about its subject to appear in English. I started out writing ”the most recent,” but in checking, I see that there are several newer studies. Macintyre’s appeared in 2014, but Michael Holzman’s Spies and Traitors: Kim Philby, James Angleton and the Friendship and Betrayal that Would Shape MI6, the CIA and the Cold War appeared two years ago. And then there’s Anthony R. Wells’ Crossroads in Time: Philby and Angleton: A Story of Treachery, published just this year. This last may be a novel, but if you’re up on your Philby lore, you probably realize that the man has inspired any number of works of fiction over the years, including, most notably, John le Carré’s masterful Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy of 1974. (Fittingly enough, le Carré wrote an afterword to Macintyre’s book.) And there are undoubtedly more writers at work right now on even more works, factual and fictional.

If you’re not familiar with Philby, let me fill you in. Born Harold Adrian Russell Philby in 1912, he was the son of Arabian explorer St John Philby, who nicknamed him “Kim” after the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel. Philby the son entered the British secret service, MI6, in 1940, but he probably wouldn’t merit more than a passing reference in books about the service if it weren’t for the fact that he had become a Soviet spy in the 1930s, going on to betray King and country and countless fellow British spies over the following years. Even today, the extent of his treachery remains hard to grasp, which is one reason that writer after writer has struggled to grasp it. 

Macintyre’s book approaches his subject from the point of view of Philby’s close friend and fellow spy Nicholas Elliott, who had joined MI6 in 1939. When the truth about Philby’s treason became inescapable in the early 1960s, Elliott was given the job of confronting him in Beirut, where Philby was then working as a journalist. Realizing that the game was up, Philby fled to the Soviet Union in January 1963.

Maggie and I have just finished watching the film version of A Spy among Friends, an intriguing short series starring Guy Pearce as Philby and Damian Lewis as Elliott. It’s a dramatization, meaning that it’s been lightly fictionalized, primarily through the introduction of a British agent (played by Anna Maxwell-Martin) who’s interrogating Elliott in hopes of determining whether he intentionally allowed Philby to escape. I wasn’t familiar with Pearce, who plays Philby with suitable opacity. Lewis, on the other hand, is well-known to us for his roles in the film Our Kind of Traitor (based on another excellent novel by le Carré) and the series Homeland. The interplay between Philby and Lewis in Beirut is at the dark heart of A Spy among Friends, and the audience is left wondering, fittingly enough, whether perhaps Elliott pushed Philby into fleeing—a conclusion that Philby, living in near-despair in wintry Moscow (below), is also left wondering.

Two notes: Boise-born James Angleton, who’s mentioned in two of the titles in my first paragraph, was a high-ranking CIA officer and another friend whom Philby betrayed. Like Philby, he’s a figure we’ll probably never come to terms with, in part because he played a deeply suspicious role in the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I’ve written about him twice in our city’s alternative newspaper, Boise Weekly, here and here. I also had the pleasure of compiling the entry “Spy Novels” in Salem Press’s reference set Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction (2008). You can read it here.

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