A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre

Kim Philby was recently in the news after the BBC discovered a tape of his speech to the East German Stasi in 1981 in which he said he was able to get away with spying because he was "born into the British governing class."  Philby was one of the Cambridge spies for the Soviet Union for many years, finally being detected in 1963 and fleeing to Russia.  His statement is no surprise to anyone who has followed the case, as Ben Macintyre writes about the repeated investigations of Philby in A Spy Among Friends (Crown, 2015), "Philby had not run away, he was happy to help and he was, importantly, a gentleman, a clubman and a highflier, which meant he must be innocent."  In addition, if he were guilty it meant that all of MI6 (British intelligence), of which he was a chief officer, had been fooled and the intelligence services looked like idiots.

The British also overreacted to the McCarthyism in America, thinking that there couldn't be any spies in their ranks, and refusing even to look very closely.  I can even understand this to a certain extent.  I was in graduate school in art history in the seventies when it was finally revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt had been the fourth Cambridge spy (along with Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess).  We were all shocked that the leading authority on Poussin had been a spy, how could this be?  Of course one of the reasons Blunt and Philby could get away with it for so long was that they deliberately built up impeccable relationships with other members of the establishment and never revealed their true political sympathies. In America Alger Hiss was successful for so many years for similar reasons:  how could such a successful and classy diplomat be a spy, accused as he was by the scruffy Whittaker Chambers?

The price that England paid for allowing Philby and the other agents to go undetected for so long was considerable, as the spies revealed all the English agents and told Russia about every operation against them.  As Macintyre writes, "The fox was not merely guarding the henhouse but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties, and planning its future construction."  Macintyre's gracefully written book is a fascinating manual of how a spy can get away with it for a long time by manipulating friends and co-workers.