Entertaining but ultimately disappointing: Mick Smith a new Kim Philby book
Ben Macintyre, son of former Oxford history don Angus MacIntyre, has made an enviable reputation as a spy writer, taking well-known stories and rewriting them for a modern audience. Agent ZigZag, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross — these wonderful tales have been recycled by Macintyre in a thoroughly entertaining fashion.
There is no denying that these ‘cuts jobs’ — newsroom jargon for re-writes of existing research — have made the stories accessible to a general readership unversed in the tradecraft of the spy. Unsurprisingly, they have all become bestsellers.
His latest book A Spy Among Friends retells the story of Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring, promising new material from recently released MI5 files.
Although some reviews have suggested there is little new to say on Philby, and MI6 never releases its files, an astonishing number of reports and letters written to his opposite numbers in MI5 have made their way into the National Archives. A reasonable amount of research would have provided numerous new slants on the story of one of Britain’s most notorious traitors, elevating A Spy Among Friends above the level of a cuts job and making it a useful addition to the voluminous literature on Philby.
Sadly, there is no evidence of such research. The only recently released MI5 files Macintyre uses are the well-worked Guy Liddell diaries, most of which have already been published, albeit in edited form.
In an attempt to get to the real Kim Philby, Macintyre tries to tell the story through his relationship with Nicholas Elliott, one of the MI6 officers who refused to believe the Service’s golden boy could possibly be a Soviet spy.
His premise is that Elliott was Philby’s best friend, their stories so closely entwined that telling one without the other is impossible. It is not Macintyre’s fault that Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy by Tim Milne, Philby’s closest and oldest friend inside MI6, is published at the same time.
Certainly, Elliott regarded himself as a friend of Philby, but they only became really close when Elliott was made head of station in Beirut, where he ignored the suspicions that Kim was a KGB agent, completely unaware that every secret they shared was passed to Moscow. It is a sorry tale and, despite this book’s flaws, a fascinating one.
Michael Smith is editor of Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy by Tim Milne.
A Spy Among Friends
By Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury, £20
Accessible account of Kim Philby story, but lacking new research
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