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

The crime:

Throughout the Second World War and much of the Cold War Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was a member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. He was, however, during the same period a double agent working for the Soviets as part of what has become known as the Cambridge Spy Ring. When finally exposed in 1963 he defected and lived in Russia until his death in 1988.

The book:

If lives hadn’t been at stake it might have all been very funny. This late in the day the British class system had become a ridiculous anachronism, and the account of these public-school toffs playing at being spies is full of wonderful Wodehouse moments. (Philby himself had a whole shelf of Wodehouse novels in his Moscow apartment when he died, while John Le Carré thought Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s friend/nemesis, “looked like a P. G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one.”) What are we to make of the tale of the waitress who set fire to a diner’s hair while attempting to flambé an omelet, requiring Elliott to douse her head with three glasses of white wine? Do I think that actually happened? No, but it’s a great story.

But it’s a great story that’s of a piece with a certain kind of broad humour. I mentioned Wodehouse but it’s actually something lower than that. Almost Benny Hill at times. Philby was part of what was dubbed the Cambridge Spy Ring or Cambridge Five because that’s where they all went to school, which doesn’t say anything good about Cambridge. It’s truly remarkable how, even into middle age (which, given their lifestyles, was old age for them) they were still trading in the same leering, juvenile schoolboy jokes and pranks that nobody else around them thought were funny.

What strikes one the most, however, is the sheer amateurism of British intelligence at the time. To take just a few examples: (1) While getting the teams of special operatives ready for insertion into Albania it turned out that none of the trainers spoke Albanian and none of the “Pixies” knew English. So training was done by sign language. (2) Donald Maclean (one of the Cambridge Five) was able to escape because surveillance teams didn’t work on evenings or over the weekends, and wouldn’t travel outside of London. (3) In the book’s climactic interview with Philby, Elliott, at the time one of MI6’s highest ranking and most experienced field agents, couldn’t even set up a tape recording system that worked (a window was left open so that street noises made the conversation mostly inaudible).

As I began by saying, this is great comic material. The names, of course, are also part of the fun. “Kim” was a nickname taken from Kipling, while it would be hard to best James Jesus Angleton for the Anglophile CIA counterintelligence chief. Among the supporting case we get the likes of Sarah Algeria Marjorie Maxse, Valentine Vivian, Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, and someone named (“unimprovably” in Macintyre’s estimation) Engelbertus Fukken. How could you take such people seriously?

I don’t even know how seriously they took themselves. Many of the old-boys’ club of spies that did so much to enable Philby thought all of this was fun. Maybe not just fun, but fun nevertheless. But in the twenty-first century I think we can look back on the English public-school educated gentleman and be more critical. These well-educated twits weren’t just eccentric but privileged to a point where they were a danger to themselves and others. By the time of the Cold War the aristocracy were already an anachronism, and the Philby case could be seen as the Altamont to their Summer of Love. It’s not just that they couldn’t be indulged anymore, but that they were a threat to national security and even social order.

Macintyre does make an effort, and this is an excellent book in almost every regard, but at the end I still couldn’t figure Philby out. On the one hand, like his friend/enemy Elliott he seems to have thought of spying as a game. But what were his motivations? There is much talk of loyalty to one’s friends and one’s country, and the potential for conflict between the two, but the fact is that Philby seems not to have felt any great loyalty to either (that is, if he even had any friends). He initially had some excuse for getting involved with the Russians, but why he doubled down after the end of the war is anyone’s guess. He never talked politics with others, leading Macintyre to describe him not as an ideologue or loyalist but as “a dogmatist, valuing only one opinion, his own.” But what dogma did he adhere to? He doesn’t seem to have been interested in anything much, and mainly wanted to lead a life of luxury with lots of drinking.

Macintyre suggests various explanations for his treachery. Maybe it had something to do with Philby’s relationship with his father. And maybe it had something to do with Eton. Maybe it connected to what C. S. Lewis describes as the British obsession with belonging to an “inner ring.” Perhaps he liked putting things over on people he felt superior to. And perhaps it did become, as Macintyre finally suggests, a kind of addiction. However you slice it, Philby comes off as both a terrible person and representative of his class.

Noted in passing:

One marker of his class was the fact that Philby, and a lot of the men (and women) around him, drank like fish. I suppose a bit of this comes with the territory of being a spy and having to attend a lot of social gatherings and liquid lunches, but even so this lot took it to excess. In Beirut, Philby was essentially a drunken wreck, but still functioning as a spy. What’s most impressive is that even when dead drunk he never had loose lips. As Elliott remarked to Le Carré, “He never said anything when he was pissed.” I thought that strange, as his level of drunkenness was often at a point where his mental functioning must have been severely impaired. But maybe this illustrates a deeper point: that underneath his mental armour and his layers of dissimulation and disguise there really wasn’t anything there. It’s often said that when people are drunk they don’t turn into someone different but only show you who they really are, only more so. When Philby got drunk there was nothing to reveal.

Takeaways:

You can’t trust a spy.

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