Philby was forced to resign from MI6 in 1952 after he fell under suspicion of being a spy after Soviet agents Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, a friend of Philby’s, exfiltrated from Britain to the USSR to avoid arrest. This is almost a dual biography of Philby and his best friend and professional associate in British Intelligence, Nicholas Elliott.Įlliott was the man, Macintyre insinuates, that let Philby bolt from Beirut in 1963 to his master since 1934, the Soviet Union. Philby himself, when he died in 1988, had a bookshelf full of them in his Moscow apartment. I myself have read three, but there are several in this book’s bibliography that I’ve never heard of much less read. There are a lot of biographies of Philby. it is an attempt to describe a particular sort of friendship that played an important role in history. This is not another biography of Kim Philby.

But the career of Kim Philby shows its downside. (That element of nepotism was a large resentment on the part of the rebels in the American Revolution.) That method worked for a long time. My impression of the British Empire is that, for a long time, it ran on the cheap and its administrators were often picked via nepotism and allowed a great deal of flexibility. “I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people,” and with that Harold Adrian Russell aka Kim Philby passed his security check on the personal word of Valentine Vivian, deputy head of the Secret Intelligence Service aka MI6, and started on his legendary career as a double agent.

Review: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Ben Macintyre, 2014. Another spy book, but this one will be the last one for a while.

Book review a spy among friends