A spy among friends: kim philby by Ben Macintyre; Bloomsbury; Price: Rs.399; Pages 352 THE SECOND WORLD WAR and the Cold War which followed were the great eras of spies and secret agents glorified by Ian Fleming™s James Bond and John le Carre™s Smiley. A Spy Among Friends details the cloak and dagger activities of three of the best known spies of World War II and the Cold War period: the American James Jesus Angleton, and Britons Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby. The central character of this fascinating book is Philby, the cleverest and most enigmatic of the three. Unknown to the other two, he was a double-agent employed by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, but also working for the Soviet Union™s NKVD secret service. He was a close friend of Angleton (working for the US Central Intelligence Agency) and Elliott (also with MI6), both of whom were completely in the dark about his duplicity. Philby™s clandestine reports to his Soviet handlers sabotaged over 30 major covert operations conducted by the Americans and the British in Germany during WWII, and later in the captive Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, resulting in the exposure and execution of thousands of operatives, guerrillas, and their families. Though their blood was on Philby™s hands, he seems to have had no remorse whatever because he felt he was working for the nobler cause of the global triumph of communism. To a significant extent, the secret of Philby™s success as a master spy and double agent was his upper class background and admission into Cambridge University as an undergraduate student. œThroughout the 1930s, Cambridge boiled with ideological conflict, writes Macintyre. œHitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish Civil War would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme right and extreme left would fight it out in university rooms and in the streets. Driven by Soviet propaganda and ideological fervour kindled by the fellow-travelling Fabian Socialists of Bloomsbury, the Cambridge spies included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess (both of whom later defected to the Soviet Union, with Philby helping in Maclean™s defection), Anthony Blunt (an art curator, who later disengaged himself from the Soviet Union and was never prosecuted), and Allan Nunn May, a nuclear scientist. And unlike most spies, particularly double agents who become turncoats for financial reward, the Cambridge spies did it for the ideological triumph of communism. Nicholas Elliott, however, was not ideologically motivated ” he was simply looking for a job after graduation. His father, Sir Claude Elliott (OBE), was headmaster of Britain™s grandest public school, Eton, and knew everybody who mattered in the British establishment. Thus his induction into MI6 was a cakewalk. At the ascot races, Nicholas met Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty™s Government, who had close links to MI6. Over drinks, Nicholas told œVan that he would like to join the intelligence service. œSir Robert Vansittart smiled and replied: ˜I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy.™ The…
