Bloomsbury paperback edition 2015
Before Lockdown (what a horrible word), my daughter gave me the paperback edition of Ben MacIntyre's The Spy and the Traitor (Viking, September 2018), the story of the UK springing the Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky from Russia. I found it enthralling - John Le Carré's comment that it was The best true spy story I have ever read, is not far off the mark. Then, in June 2021, my daughter gave me two more books by MacIntyre: Agent Sonya. The True Story of WW2's Most Extraordinary Spy (paperback edition, 2021) and this one about Kim Philby, first published in 2014. MacIntyre seems to have cornered the market in such gripping true stories - e.g. Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross.
The subtitle to this book on Philby - perhaps the most notorious British defector in history - is Philby and the great Betrayal. Philby betrayed two of his four wives, his close friends, both inside and outside MI5 and MI6, the most shocking being Nicholas Elliott, who stood by him loyally for over two decades until the facts of his deceit became too strong. The two men learned the spy trade together during the Second World War. They belonged to the same clubs, drank in the same bars, wore the same well-tailored clothes, and married women of their own 'tribe'. It was Elliott who interviewed Philby for the final time in Beirut in January 1963.
Philby in 1955
The major players in the Philby story were invariably wise after the event. Spies, even more than most people, invent the past to cover up mistakes. This seems particularly true about his close friend Elliott and the American James Angleton, who ended up as the chief of CIA counter-intelligence. Philby seems also to have bamboozled others such as 'C,' Sir Stewart Menzies, wartime head of MI6; Guy Liddell, MI5 head of counter intelligence; Miles Copeland, the jazz musician, wartime spy and CIA agent; Edgar J, Applewhite, the Yale-educated CIA station chief in Lebanon; How could they all be so 'wrong' about Philby? No one likes to admit they have been totally conned. The truth was simpler, as it almost is: Philby was spying on everyone, and no one was spying on him, because he fooled them all. Not quite. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, always had his suspicions of him; as did, Bill Harvey, of the CIA counter-intelligence; and Dick White, chief of MI5 and later of MI6, never quite trusted him and should have trusted his own antennae more.
However charming his outward façade was, the increasingly drunken Philby, got through to near the end because he was an amoral shit. His father seemed to be, too. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, Westminister College and Trinity College, Cambridge educated, with his debonair charm, his stammer, ended his life in the 1960s to 1980s Moscow, dying in hospital there on 11th May 1988, mendacious to the last.
NB It was fascinating to read of Jona von Ustinov being recruited in 1935 as a British agent codenamed U35. Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanour. It was only last night that I was watching on YouTube the 1988 An Audience with Peter Ustinov. The description could have matched the son (born 1922).
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