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A Spy Among Friends
Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
Ben Macintyre
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Copyright 2014 by Ben MacintyreAfterword copyright 2014 by David
Cornwell
Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by
Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company,
New York.
Originally published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing
Plc, London.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication
reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a
retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the
publisher or, in case of
photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the
Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an
infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in
Publication is available upon request
ISBN: 978-0-7710-5550-8ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-5551-5
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Book design: Donna SinisgalliJacket design: based on an original
by David Mann
Jacket photographs: (Kim Philby) Popperfoto / Getty Images; (men
in coats) Mark Owen / Arcangel Images;
(London) cristapper, (Red Square) Braindrops, both
iStockphoto.com
McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada
Limited,
a Penguin Random House Companywww.randomhouse.ca
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ALSO BY BEN MACINTYRE
Forgotten FatherlandThe Napoleon of Crime
A Foreign FieldJosiah the Great
Agent ZigzagFor Your Eyes Only
The Last WordOperation Mincemeat
Double Cross
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In memor y of Rick Beeston
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Friends: noun, general slang for members of an intelligence
service; specifically British slang for members of the Secret
Intelligence Service [or MI6].
INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my
friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a
choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his
patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It
would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and
Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had cho-sen to
betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country
Rome.
E. M. FORSTER, 1938
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Contents
Preface xi
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
Apprentice Spy 3
CHAPTER 2
Section V 19
CHAPTER 3
Otto and Sonny 35
CHAPTER 4
Boo, Boo, Baby, Im a Spy 52
CHAPTER 5
Three Young Spies 68
CHAPTER 6
The German Defector 79
CHAPTER 7
The Soviet Defector 90
CHAPTER 8
Rising Stars 106
CHAPTER 9
Stormy Seas 124
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X CON T E N T S
CHAPTER 10
Homers Odyssey 142
CHAPTER 11
Peach 158
CHAPTER 12
The Robber Barons 174
CHAPTER 13
The Third Man 190
CHAPTER 14
Our Man in Beirut 208
CHAPTER 15
The Fox Who Came to Stay 220
CHAPTER 16
A Most Promising Offi cer 232
CHAPTER 17
I Thought It Would Be You 244
CHAPTER 18
Teatime 256
CHAPTER 19
The Fade 268
CHAPTER 20
Three Old Spies 283
Afterword by John le Carr 295
Acknowledgments 307
Notes 309
Select Bibliography 355
Index 361
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Introduction
Beirut, January 1963
Two middle- aged spies are sitting in an apartment in the
Christian Quarter, sipping tea and lying courteously to each other,
as evening approaches. They are English so English that the habit
of politeness that binds them together and keeps them apart never
falters for a moment. The sounds of the street waft up through the
open window, car horns and horses hooves mingling with the clink of
china and the murmured voices. A microphone, cunningly concealed
beneath the sofa, picks up the conversation and passes it along a
wire, through a small hole in the wainscot-ing, and into the next
room, where a third man sits hunched over a turning tape recorder,
straining to make out the words through Bakelite headphones.
The two men are old friends. They have known each other for
nearly thirty years. But they are bitter foes now, combatants on
opposing sides of a brutal conflict.
Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott learned the spy trade together
during the Second World War. When that war was over, they rose
together through the ranks of British intelligence, sharing every
secret. They belonged to the same clubs, drank in the same bars,
wore the same well- tailored clothes, and married women of their
own tribe. But all that time, Philby had one secret he never
shared: he was covertly working for Moscow, taking everything he
was told by Elliott and passing it on to his Soviet spymasters.
Elliott has come to Beirut to extract a confession. He has wired
up the apartment and set watchers on the doors and street.
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2 a sP Y a MonG f r i e n D s
He wants to know how many have died through Philbys betrayal of
their friendship. He wants to know when he became a fool. He needs
to know the truth, or at least some of the truth. And once he
knows, Philby can flee to Moscow or return to Britain or start anew
as a triple agent or drink himself to death in a Beirut bar. It is,
Elliott tells himself, all the same to him.
Philby knows the game, for he has played it, brilliantly, for
three decades. But he does not know how much Elliott knows. Perhaps
the friendship will save him, as it has saved him before.
Both men tell some truth, laced with deception, and lie with the
force of honest conviction. Layer upon layer, back and forth.
As night falls, the strange and lethal duel continues, between
two men bonded by class, club, and education but divided by
ideology; two men of almost identical tastes and upbringing but
conflicting loyalties; the most intimate of enemies. To an
eaves-dropper their conversation appears exquisitely genteel, an
ancient English ritual played out in a foreign land; in reality it
is an un-sparing, bare- knuckle fight, the death throes of a
bloodied friend-ship.
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