A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal Audio Download: Ben Macintyre, Michael Tudor Barnes, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc By Ben Macintyre

Bloomsbury presents A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre, read by Michael Tudor Barnes. The Sunday Times number one best selling story of Kim Philby, history’s most famous traitor, featuring an afterword by John le Carré. Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. Philby’s two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity, of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience, of an ideological battle waged by men with cut glass accents and well made suits in the comfortable clubs and restaurants of London and Washington, of male friendships forged and then systematically betrayed. With access to newly released MI5 files and previously unseen family papers, and with the cooperation of former officers of MI6 and the CIA, this definitive biography unlocks what is perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War. A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal Audio Download: Ben Macintyre, Michael Tudor Barnes, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

I was moved to read this as a result of one of the interesting chapters in John Le Carre's 'The Pigeon Tunnel', most of which I found less than edifying. I am just old enough to remember all the hoo hah about the Cambridge spies, and Philby's defection. I'd read Ben Macintyre's 'Agent Zigzag', which although I enjoyed, I found slightly heavy going. I'd then seen him on various TV documentaries, and particularly liked seeing him taken apart by an elderly Bletchley Park grande dame (which he took very well!)
This however, was unputdownable (if such a critical adjective exists). It was cleverly not a biography, of a study. I found Philby all the repellent; mainly as a result of his complete indifference to the many people he made to suffer (his wives, children, although Macintyre kept emphasising what a kind, attentive father he was) and most of all his utter lack of remorse at the many, many people his actions condemned to death. But ultimately, condemned by their own blinkered outlook and utter inability to believe 'one of us' could be a spy, the upper class mandarins of MI6 came across as the villains of the piece. This is well trodden ground, but it was brought into startling focus in this book. Macintyre was very sound on the class rivalries between MI5 and MI6 and explained it well, despite these kind of social gradations being possibly somewhat inexplicable to younger readers of the 21st century. Ultimately, and probably unfairly, I ended up disliking Nicholas Elliot nearly as much as Philby. His utter refusal to see any fault in his friend was an Achilles heel which had enormous consequences. Not that he was alone it seemed that MI6 moved heaven and earth to deny what was pointed out to them quite clearly, mainly on the grounds that Philby had never declared any communist sympathies, belonged to the right clubs and went to the right tailor. They refused to look for, or even believe, the evidence put in front of them for these very same reasons. I believe this to be entirely true from my own (very minor) experience in being vetted and the attitudes of those in command not all that many years ago. But Philby's skill was undeniable he just hoodwinked everyone. Although how any of them made any judgements at all about anything given the industrial quantities of alcohol they imbibed, is a mystery.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it compulsively from beginning to end. A Russian double agent and his daughter slumped on a garden bench, apparently poisoned by a ‘nerve agent’ called ‘Novichok’. The Russian spy was said to be recruited by MI6 in the 1990s as an infiltrator agent in Russian Secret Service GRU. Exiled to England after a spy swap, his ideal retirement plan ended in an excruciating nightmare. Who poisoned him in a sleepy English town? The event in Salisbury unfolds like Agatha Christie’s Whodunnit with the shades of the sinister events in Cold War era in the 1950s 60s, which makes the subject of the Cambridge Five even relevant.
Moral ambiguity is a trade mark of espionage. One of the spy fiction writers remarked that all spies are semi crooks in the murky world of intelligence, no matter which government they were serving. In Le Carré’s “The Spy who came in from the cold”, C admitted unabashedly that the methods used by both sides in the cold war have become much the same. “you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Who could claim that the dirty works carried out by CIA, MI6 or MI5 or Mossad were less wicked than those by KGB?
Spy among friends by Ben Macintyre depicts the relationship of three spymasters. With a gleeful irony, the author artfully contrasts the characters and lives of N Elliot and J Angleton with that of Philby. Elliot of MI6 and Angleton of CIA, two die hard anti communist agents were mercilessly duped by their best friend Philby. Compared with Knightley’s biography of Philby, Macintyre seems pretty scathing about him: “Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce.” The author charts Philby’s intrigues and betrayals like narrating the planning of an Italian Job; at the same time, he tacitly acknowledges the necessity of political expediency.
Macintyre is a witty writer, full of one liner quips and shrewd observations of characters, “Eccentricity is one of those English traits that looks like frailty but masks a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.” With plenty of fascinating anecdotes that smack of James Bond adventures, his non fiction sometimes reads like a racy thriller, a real page turner. magical-realism