A spy Among Friends : : Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Philby, Kim	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024

Apprentice spy -- Section V -- Otto and Sonny -- Boo, boo, baby, I'm a spy -- Three young spies -- The German defector -- The Soviet defector -- Rising stars -- Stormy seas -- Homer's odyssey -- Peach -- The robber barons -- The third man -- One man in Beirut -- The fox who came to stay -- A most promising officer -- I thought it would be you -- Teatime -- The fade -- Three old spies.
"Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby's best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world. But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow - and not just Elliott's words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott's unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him - until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake."--book jacket.

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a notorious esionage betrayal and the MI6 culture that facilitated it submitted by bec on June 29, 2021, 2:06pm This is one of my favorite books by MacIntyre, who's made a career of writing smart, nuanced, funny nonfiction around espionage in the Second World War and the Cold War. The account of Philby's decades-long service to the KGB as a high-ranking MI6 officer is almost morbidly gripping- a slow-motion trainwreck. What I didn't expect, and what I really appreciated, was MacIntyre's deep exploration of the clubby culture that made the betrayal possible: where Philby is defended against accusations because he's been to all the right schools, knows all the right people, etc. The organization's homogeneous culture and adherence to obsolete norms and status symbols is ultimately catastrophic.