“The heart is devious above
all else; it is perverse--who can understand it?--”Jeremiah, 17:9
“. . . if I had to
choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should
have the guts to betray my country” -- E.M. Forster
“Betrayal is a
repetitious trade . . . ” --John le Carré, A Perfect Spy.
We’re all Monday-morning armchair generals. At one time or
another, we all shout, “How could they not know!?” in indignant response to a surprise,
that, to someone standing on the outside at a later time, seems as obvious as
mud.
But for those at the center, the perceptions can be wildly
different. You really can’t see the
forest for the trees, even if the forest is on fire.
Case in point: Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (with an
afterword by John le Carré). Macintyre is the of author of Operation Mincemeat, another terrific true-life story of twentieth-century
espionage, the kind of book for which you'd happily starve in your chair.
Besides being a cracking suspenseful experience, A Spy Among Friends leaves you with many
questions to ponder: the uses and treachery of charm; the opaqueness of people;
the appeal and immoral nature of the spy business; the pleasures, dangers and
debilitating impacts of living a secret life in a secret world. And how even
the sharpest of us often miss what’s right in front of our nose.
Most significantly, it’s also about how little we know one
another; how we come to fool ourselves about others in our lives, the ones we
sometimes mistakenly call, with all our hearts, “friends.” Friendship is an act
of faith, and like many such acts, it can end in betrayal.
My knowledge of Philby (who was the most successful agent in
“The Cambridge Five” spy ring) was tangential until now, mostly gained through
novels such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (declared
one of the great novels of postwar England by Salman Rushdie, no less), films
such as Another Country and a
surprisingly dull British series, Cambridge
Spies.
The Cambridge Five spy ring is legendary among Cold War
historians and, especially, spy buffs: It started in 1934, when the
Cambridge-educated Kim Philby started spying for Stalin’s Soviet Union against
the West. For nearly the next thirty years, he fooled everyone in his circle,
friends and family alike. He became the “perfect” spy.
This is, in part, also a story about class. The son of a
colonial administrator and raised in England’s often brutal public school
system, Philby rose to join Britain’s best and brightest. He had, in Macintyre’s
words, “that inborn faith in his right, and ability, to change and rule the
world.” These are attributes no ambitious member of any empire can do without.
There was also ideology. Philby was turned on to Communism
in 1934, like many of the 1930s generation (including, I was told, my own college-age
mother, in faraway Illinois). With Nazism on the rise as the world sank into
the Great Depression, seemingly due to unregulated capitalism, communism, as cleverly
represented by Soviets, seemed the right response and best option for tens of millions
of people around the globe.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, as the old saying
goes.
But while the romance faded for many—especially after Stalin
made his pact with Hitler on the eve of World War II—it never faded with Kim
Philby. He remained a true believer, loyal above all to the abstract ideology.
“I have always operated on two levels,” he once said, “a personal level and a
political one. When the two have come into conflict, I have had to put politics
first.”
For the upper class in the British caste system, becoming a
spy for the Empire was absurdly easy. There were no real background checks, as
we know them. Only a whisper in the right ear, a call on “the old school tie”
(not the sartorial kind, as I once imagined) and presto--the door opened into a
clubby, booze-drenched, smoky secret world, elite and exclusive.
Trust was bestowed automatically, as it was on Kim Philby
and his fellow spies, four other Cambridge political romantics: Anthony Blunt, John
Cairncross, Guy Burgess, and Donald Mclean. Working separately within MI6 (the
equivalent of the CIA), these five members of this “league of gentleman,” stole
every secret they could lay their hands on, photographing and turning over huge
caches of documents to their Soviet masters.
By comparison, the West had nothing on the Soviet KGB in
those years. Advantage here to the Soviets. The Cambridge Five caused widespread
and bloody damage. Every effort to subvert to Soviet rule was thwarted once they
learned what the West was up to. It could reasonably be said this “great betrayal”
both intensified and prolonged the Cold War.
In 1951, Burgess and McLean were exposed and, tipped off by
Philby, fled to the Soviet Union. The more amazing part of this story was how
Philby managed to hang on and keep up his front for another ten years, despite
growing suspicion.
One reason for the Cambridge Five’s success was that they
received enormous of unwitting help from their side. On Philby’s part, that
involved following the old adage about holding your friends close, but your
enemies closer
Macintyre brilliantly centers his narrative around that very
idea. In this case, the ideological enemy Philby embraced most closely was one Nicholas
Elliott, another proud product of the upper-crust British establishment, and, I
think, this book’s most tragic figure.
Philby and Elliott met in 1940 when World War II was well
underway and Philby had been spying for the Soviets for six years. Both men
shared the British talent for offhand humor. For his part, Elliott was
immediately enthralled by Philby’s ultra-smooth charm (to which he also added a
stutter, a brilliant detail deepening the deception). Already members of the
same tribe, the two of them joined MI6, an even more elite and terribly secret society.
Spies keep their secrets from the world, but, when alone
among themselves with the blinds drawn and liquor gushing, even the most
scrupulous can’t shut up. Especially when being charmed and entertained by
someone as affable as Kim Philby. Everybody loved Philby. Everyone wanted to be
his friend. The Soviets couldn’t have had a better mole.
Blinded by Philby’s rising star, the British spy
establishment spent years cheerily feeding top secret information to Philby
who, in turn, fed it right to his Soviet spymasters. Perhaps this was less of a
problem when both sides were united against a common enemy like the Nazis, but
once World War II ended and the Cold War began, it certainly became one once
the former allies became enemies.
During this time, both Philby and Elliott worked their way
up the British intelligence establishment, sometimes working together,
sometimes not, but always in touch professionally, and especially personally. Philby
also became great friends with, and simultaneous betrayer of, CIA cofounder and
head James Jesus Angleton, a strange and even horrific individual, whose
betrayal by Philby turned him into a clinical paranoid who nearly destroyed the
CIA.
Philby encouraged and nurtured these relationships with breathtaking
cold duplicity, even as his own handlers on the Soviet side were being murdered
in Stalin’s purges. No one, nothing mattered but the Cause.
No wonder the Cold War never seemed to end. The Soviets had
more than our number—they had the whole damn Rolodex.
Even after suspicion fell on Philby in 1951 after the
defection of Burgess and McLean (following Philby’s tip-off), Elliott and the
MI6 establishment stuck by him. Philby was dismissed from MI6 for a time, but
was eventually allowed back in.
But his Boy Wonder days were over. Philby would never be
fully trusted again. Add to that, he was sinking into a whirlpool of alcoholic
dissolution, common throughout the secret world, where severe stress is almost
constant. And when Soviet defectors started crossing over with stories of an “Agent
Stanley” and witnesses from Philby’s youthful past started filling in other
details, what most everyone outside the Philby circle suspected became obvious.
Even so, according to Macintyre, Elliot and his bosses in
the British government couldn’t bring themselves to arrest Philby: He had
burrowed so deep and risen so high in MI6, even becoming chief liaison between
the British Government and the CIA, that trying him on charges of treason and
espionage would have only added to the already terrible damage, exposing more
secrets, further ruining international relationships.
After Elliott finally confronted Philby in a Beirut hotel
room in 1963, a conversation evidence shows as excruciatingly polite as only
the British can be, he and his government stepped back and allowed Philby to
slip away . . .
. . . to Soviet
oblivion as it turns out. Though well-treated on his arrival in Moscow, Kim
Philby was never allowed to feel at home. “In Britain,” Macintyre writes,
“Philby was too British to be doubted; in Russia, he was too British to be
believed.” In the end, Philby, a man who transcended Forster’s choice to betray
both friends and country, turned against Communism, but too late to do him or
anyone much good.
As he did in Operation
Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre tells a terrific, absorbing story, full of human
detail and a sharp eye for individual quirks, especially among British
eccentrics (Philby kept a wild fox as a pet, for instance, while Elliott was a
relentless kidder with a flair for the off-color joke.)
But Operation
Mincemeat was the story of a wartime success. A Spy Among Friends is a much darker, even tragic, story of betrayal
that does credit to no one. It’s the kind of book you close with a head shake
and a sad sigh.
Copyright 2016 by
Thomas Burchfield
Photo by author
Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster
shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark,
winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in
2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The
Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing,
those three are available at Amazon
in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes
and Noble, Powell's
Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads
at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join
his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in
Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.
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