Review of Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre

Around the time World War II began, two young men joined one of England's most exclusive clubs, the intelligence service now known as MI6. The two had similar backgrounds: tony prep schools and Cambridge, where they became friends, and forebears who had served the British Empire. In other words, both were in the country's ruling elite and well plugged into the old boys' network. They were both admitted to the British intelligence service with little more than a "he's one of us" type of introduction.

That's where the similarity ends. Nicholas Elliott was everything that his background would suggest: conservative, patriotic and a firm believer that he and his class were born to rule. Kim Philby was only pretending to be the same. In reality, he was a Marxist, had been an agent of the USSR since 1934, and for over 30 years ruthlessly betrayed his country, his friends, family and colleagues, and sent hundreds, or even thousands, to certain death by betraying them to Soviet intelligence.

Kim Philby

In a presentation at a bookstore upon this book's publication in the UK, Macintyre said this is "a story of male friendship and Englishness." The "Englishness" part of the story is tightly linked to the friendship part. Britain's MI6, formerly the Secret Intelligence Service, is the UK's foreign intelligence service. (For US readers, MI6 is the rough equivalent of the CIA, while MI5 is like the FBI.) When Elliott and Philby joined, MI6 was a very upper-crust place, filled with Eton/Cambridge men, from families that had been running the show in the British Empire for generations.

Elliott wasn't even a particularly good student, but he was from the right sort of family, so he had his ticket stamped to Eton and Cambridge. When he graduated from Cambridge, his third-class degree was no bar to him. He had only to express an interest in becoming a spy to an old family friend and he was in. Kim Philby's credentials were better, his degree was a 2:1, but he was also hired with just an "I know his people" from the right sort and, apparently, no checking into his background. A background, by the way, that included working for the underground Comintern in Vienna in the tumultuous uprising of 1933 and marrying another one of its activists.

Macintyre takes us into the heyday of espionage, and it's a wild ride. It's mind-boggling how many familiar names there are, from Peter Ustinov's father, to even Pope John XXIII, when he was Monsignor Roncalli. Macintyre gives the reader an evocative depiction of the atmosphere of spydom, from the intensely serious to the downright silly. For an example of the latter, I had to laugh out loud at the description of that hotbed of spies, Istanbul, during World War II, when a chief of station of any one of the combatant countries' agencies would enter a certain nightclub, the bandleader would swiftly lead the orchestra in a rousing version of "Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy." (Macintyre sets down all the lyrics, which are delightful, and I'm just disappointed that I haven't been able to find an online recording, other than some modern––and dreadful––hip-hop version.)

Cambridge University

But just when I might be shaking my head or laughing at some absurdity Macintyre describes, he would drench me with a cold bucket of reality, describing how Philby eagerly turned over information about anti-communists, knowing that they would be mercilessly killed by the Soviets. In some cases, his reasons appeared to be ideological, but in others it was done to avoid his being exposed. In his later writings, it's clear Philby never felt any qualms about the blood on his hands.

Nicholas Elliott

Adding to the chill reality is the fact that Philby got away with it for so long and was climbing the ladder within MI6, on his way to possibly even becoming chief of service. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody in MI6 to match up all those cases where the Soviets seemed to know what the British were up to with the small handful of people who could have given away the game to them. Was it sheer stupidity? Both Philby, in his reports, and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper rated many of the MI6 higher-ups as lacking in brain power. But Macintyre makes the case that Philby was the right sort, and that this made his betrayal quite literally unthinkable to the posh clubmen in MI6. It's a shame Philby's victims weren't the right sort, or they might have been served better.

Philby didn't find it hard to manipulate Yalie and Anglophile
James J. Angleton, who would become the CIA's chief of
counterintelligence and unwitting source for Philby and the USSR

Retelling the well-known Philby story within the framework of his friendships and the British gentlemen's club mentality of MI6 reanimates the familiar tale of Philby's treason. This is an espionage book, but it is not about spycraft. It is a study of personalities and a society. Macintyre's focus is on how Philby was able to make strong––and maybe even sincere in his mind––friendships, such as the ones with Elliott and James J. Angleton, who later become head of the American CIA, assiduously pump his friends for information, promptly turn over all of that intelligence to the Soviets, and get away with it long after he should have been exposed.

While the betrayal-of-friendship aspect of Philby's story is interesting, it is the "Englishness" part that is most revealing––"Englishness" actually meaning the world of the English upper class. What Macintyre exposes is a peculiar kind of tribal sociopathy, in which the clubmen of MI6 simply couldn't see that one of their own might not fall into line with their worldview. Worse yet, they didn't see anyone outside their class as quite worthy of their consideration. For example, when they trained Albanian guerrillas to slip back into the country, rally locals and overthrow the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, the MI6 handlers dismissively called the Albanians the "Pixies." And when Philby's perfidy ensured that the guerrillas were wiped out almost immediately, the MI6 functionaries rued the failure of the mission, but had no depth of feeling for the loss of all those men.

Elliott and his tribe belonged to White's, the oldest
and most exclusive gentlemen's club in London

The upper-class types within MI6 failed to see the betrayer in their midst and also failed to understand that the exclusionary nature of their system played a part in creating traitors. Just one example is George Black, an MI6 agent who was not part of the tribe, hated the British class system and became a Soviet agent after having been in a North Korean prison camp in the 1950s. After he was exposed and put on trial, he was sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison.

This is actually Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, but this is
just how I picture Elliott, sitting down for his chat with le Carré

And yet, when MI6 finally saw the light with Philby, just a couple of years after Blake's sentencing, putting Philby on trial was apparently unthinkable. He was immediately offered complete immunity if he would reveal all, and Macintyre makes a good case that he was allowed to do a "fade," to slip away to Russia, after he was interrogated. Was it just because MI6 couldn't stand another round of bad publicity? That must have had something to do with it, but I was struck by the author John le Carré's talk with Nicholas Elliott some years later. When le Carré asked Elliott if MI6 had considered having Philby liquidated, Elliott instantly reproved him, saying: "My dear boy. One of us." At that point, I lost whatever sympathy I felt for Elliott and his smug, hard-drinking, clubby tribe.

Earlier this year, I was riveted by Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy, which also described elements of social discrimination within an intelligence service, in this case the French service during the Dreyfus Affair. I thought that likely to be the most fascinating espionage title I would read in 2014, but A Spy Among Friends just edges it out. Even if you've read every book about Philby there is, I think you'll find food for thought in Macintyre's latest.

Note: Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

I've Got a Secret

A secret shared is a secret lost. And this goes double for spies. That's the message I take away from two books I just read, Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country and James Church's A Drop of Chinese Blood. Both Cumming and Church have intelligence agency experience (Cumming with MI6 and Church (a pseudonym) with the CIA in Asia) and their sophisticated books simmer with secrets, mysterious disappearances, double dealings, betrayals, conspiracies and hopes of redemption.

A Foreign Country opens in Tunisia, where ex-pat Jean-Marc Daumal mourns for his 20-year-old British au pair, Amelia Weldon, with whom he was having an affair. Now her passport and belongings are missing and she has disappeared. As much as he loved Amelia, he wonders if what had bound them together was "a shared aptitude for deceit."

Flash forward thirty-some years to the present. Philippe and Jeannine Malot, an elderly vacationing French couple, are killed on the beach in Egypt. A "target" called HOLST is kidnapped in Paris. Thomas Kell (age 42, estranged from his wife and forced to retire from MI6 months earlier) receives a phone call from MI6's Jimmy Marquand. Amelia Levene, who's due to take over as chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in six weeks, is missing from Nice. It's possible she's only having an affair, but maybe not. Kell is the only one who really knows what makes Levene tick. If he finds her quickly without attracting attention, all will be forgiven and Kell can come in from the cold.

The past is never far from the present for this book's characters. Take Kell for example. His entire personality grew out of a talent for the clandestine. He can't remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder to join the SIS at twenty and he hasn't been able to create a successful life since retirement. All he knows is "the calling of the secret world." Kell despises the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS and the attention his former superiors paid to their own personal advancement. He likes Levene and sees her as the "last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive," even though the male-dominated agency is nearly allergic to a female chief. Kell tracks her down and when he does, he discovers the game of hide and seek is only beginning.

Cumming puts his SIS experience to good use. MI6 gossip and traditions, interrogation techniques (Kell has interesting comments about the CIA in Afghanistan), interactions between intelligence agencies and increasingly tech-heavy spycraft feel authentic and are woven tightly, with clear writing, into a labyrinthine plot. How easy for spies now to snap photos with camera phones, conduct research online, communicate via cell phones and email and use GPS devices for traveling and tracking. But how difficult to avoid detection, crack encrypted passwords, manage with no cell phone reception and escape being captured or killed! Whereas a spy's methods and equipment have changed, the personal toll of a career in espionage hasn't. I really liked the complexity and insights of major characters Thomas Kell and Amelia Levene. The villains are nasty, but Cumming makes them three-dimensional humans. The settings in France, Tunisia and England are well described.

A Foreign Country is Cumming's fourth stand-alone book and was published in 2012 by St. Martin's Press. It comes after last year's The Trinity Six and won 2012's Steel Dagger Award. Fans of John le Carré or Olen Steinhauer should enjoy it.

Cumming's Amelia Levene is a beautiful woman but, according to A Drop of Chinese Blood's Major Bing Zong-yuan, Fang Mei-lin is the most beautiful woman in the world. For weeks rumors have been flying that she might show up in the far-flung Chinese town of Yanji, where Bing is director of the Ministry of State Security operations on the China-North Korea border. Bing's MSS superiors in Beijing have been happy with his record of controlling corruption and keeping Yanji as clean of North Korean operations "as could be expected." They've recently sent special couriers warning him that he's responsible for Madame Fang's safety. When she arrives, she refuses to talk to Bing and surprises him by her intimacy with his Uncle O, a wily police detective in Pyongyang until he left North Korea in a hurry and came to stay with Bing. O is supposedly working as a private investigator, but he spends most of his time in his workshop at Bing's home making plans for bookshelves. O and Madame Fang go out for the night and the next day O says they'll meet again. Instead, she disappears over the river into North Korea.

Sudden disappearances aren't out of the ordinary in Yanji. A year before Bing arrived, his MSS predecessor vanished without explanation. After taking all their cash, Bing's wife drove off with a Japanese pastry chef in Bing's car. Lieutenant Fu Bin, a Third Bureau spy planted in O's special bureau, left unexpectedly. Now, Du Hwa, a young woman whose cherry-red lips and dress make Bing long for fruit, tells O that her father, a master forger and counterfeiter, is missing and she insists O must find him. It's a very urgent matter because some body pieces, assumed to be Mr. Du, have arrived and are being stored in her brother's restaurant freezer.

Yanji, China is close to the northern tip of North Korea.
It isn't considered a plum assignment for an MSS bureau chief.

Unfortunately, in the wake of Madame Fang's disappearance, O is compelled to join his nephew on a Beijing-ordered escort-and-recovery mission (dropping them in Ulan Bator, Mongolia before shipping them to North Korea) that is so mysterious and complicated these two men, responsible for carrying it out, must form multiple hypotheses to try to understand it. As O explains, with more than one hypothesis, "you don't end up stuffing all the evidence into one bag, whether or not it fits." The bigwigs in Beijing exert enormous control in many disturbing ways and this draws both satirical comments and apprehension from Bing, the book's narrator. The stunning amount of scheming by the various criminals and agents made me dizzy. Happily, O, Bing or someone else explained (or more often postulated) what the hell people were thinking and doing so I was able to keep up. It's not the first time a book has convinced me I don't have the guile to be a spy but I'm really not cut out to spy for China or North Korea. Or Mongolia, for that matter.

I don't want to give you the impression that because of its complex plot this book is no fun. It's very fun. The characters and settings are drawn extremely well. How often do you get to peek at an honest Chinese MSS agent's life on the North Korea border, sit at a table of Kazakh agents in an Irish bar in Ulan Bator or ride in a shipment crate with three men and a corpse on a train to North Korea? In addition to all the characters' entertaining maneuvering, the long-suffering Bing and uncooperative O have a sparring relationship that reminds me of Rex Stout's Archie and Nero Wolfe––if you throw in a smidgen of Kung Fu's Master Po befuddling his student Grasshopper. Although I must give Bing credit. He operates by the seat of his pants much of the time but he's a smart guy who knows more than he lets on. After all, his dad was O's brother. As for O, it's impossible for Bing, and us, to know exactly what O's "retirement" means.

It looks as if the four-book Inspector O series, which is set in North Korea and begins with The Corpse in the Koryo, is finished and a new series, set in China and featuring Major Bing and his uncle O, begins with A Drop of Chinese Blood, published by Minotaur Books in 2012. It helps if you've warmed up your noggin with the Inspector O books but it's not absolutely necessary. If you like Martin Cruz Smith, give this book a whirl. I loved it.

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

It's official. I'm a Baby Doc (my husband). A mean TSA agent (my kids). All this because I'm supervising the packing for our lake vacation trip. I'm feeling very misunderstood, much like some characters in books I've been reading.

You can bet no Wall Street guy has won a recent popularity contest. Grove O'Rourke, a top broker at Sachs, Kidder, and Carnegie, says some people think of Jack London's book when they hear "the call of the wild." He associates that phrase with his job, because stockbrokers yap and fight all day. As Norb Vonnegut's The Trust opens, O'Rourke is on the phone with his head under the desktop, trying to hear Palmer Kincaid, his old mentor and biggest client. Kincaid needs O'Rourke's help. By the time O'Rourke arrives in Charleston, South Carolina, Kincaid has died in a solo night-boating accident.

A Thousandth Man

Kipling wrote a poem about Solomon's one man in a thousand, who will stick closer than a brother when "the whole round world is agin you." Kincaid's 33-year-old daughter, Claire, tells O'Rourke her dad thought of him as his thousandth man. That's why his will asks O'Rourke to join Claire and JoJo, Kincaid's much younger second wife, on the board of the Palmetto Foundation, a conduit for philanthropists. The threesome has no sooner authorized a $25 million transfer to the Philippines, at the request of a priest from the Catholic Fund, when O'Rourke gets a phone call from lawyer Biscuit Hughes. Hughes is representing some people in Fayettesville, North Carolina, who are outraged that a huge adult superstore has moved into their neighborhood. The XXX-superstore's unlikely owner? The Catholic Fund.

It's obvious O'Rourke needs to stop answering the phone. But let's not pursue this unhelpful line of thinking. Better for us to listen to Santa Esmeralda play "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on O'Rourke's behalf, because the shit now hits the fan. Everyone is angry at the good-intentioned O'Rourke. FBI hard-ass Agent Izzy Torres. His manipulative SKC boss Katy Anders. Claire, who resents his distrust of Father Ricardo. And Manhattan girlfriend Annie, since Claire was a high school-age O'Rourke's Daisy Buchanan and O'Rourke is staying in Claire's Charleston guesthouse. Because Santa Esmeralda's version of this song is heard in Kill Bill: Volume 1, it's especially appropriate. O'Rourke's investigation of the Catholic Fund spawns a kidnapping and scenes that would fit right into Quentin Tarantino's movie.

Author Vonnegut, a distant cousin to Kurt Vonnegut, worked in wealth management and has written fiction and nonfiction about Wall Street. The Trust, published last month by Minotaur Books, is the second Grove O'Rourke book after Top Producer. Vonnegut's characters, even those who wear designer clothes and behave with southern wile and charm, carry out a rip-snortin' plot. O'Rourke begins a little buttoned down, but circumstances and the company of the rumpled Biscuit jerk him out of his cordovan loafers. The financial shenanigans are explained in terms even people who can't balance a checkbook can enjoy. While I recommend you read this snazzy thriller, I must issue a stern reminder. Humans aren't the only ones misperceived. Great Stuff Big Gap Filler is grossly misunderstood by one of The Trust's memorable villains. Read labels, people!

The characters in Pete Hautman's Mrs. Million don't only not understand each other. They don't even understand themselves. After middle Grabo sister Barbaraannette Quinn wins $8.9 million in Minnesota's Powerball lottery, she's as surprised as everyone else when she stands in front of the microphone and announces a $1 million reward for the safe return of her missing husband Bobby. Six years earlier, Bobby had set out fishing from their Cold Rock home and never returned.

Barbaraannette admits that the dumbest thing she's ever done is marrying Bobby and the second dumbest is offering big money for his return. Other than knowing how to have a good time and looking good in and out of his clothes (the guy is "hung like a racehorse"), there hasn't been much to admire about Bobby.

A co-misunderstanding of the color red

Now that he's worth all that money, everyone wants the award, including Bobby himself, who saw Barbaraannette make her announcement on TV. He and his Arizona girlfriend, Phlox, decide she'll claim the reward, so they head to Cold Rock. Unfortunately, they barely make it past the Taxidermy & Cheese Shoppe before Bobby is spotted by a couple of former business partners whom he cheated out of some money. Also figuring in the plot are a good-lookin' but not real smart young sociopath, Jayjay Morrow, fresh out of prison but not out of ideas for turning a fast buck; André Gideon, a finicky professor who lusts after Jayjay; Barbaraannette's sisters, who are nothing like her, and their mother, Hilde, who likes to escape from her assisted-living home by stealing a doctor's car; and Art Dobbleman, a very shy banker who's had a crush on Barbaraannette since high school.

Mrs. Million is the fifth book in a series about a group of small-town Minnesota gamblers, but it's only linked to the series by a mention. Hilde likens gambler Sam O'Gara, Barbarannette's father, to her missing husband Bobby. This book is similar in flavor to Carl Hiassen's Lucky You, which also involves a lottery winner's travails. Like Hiassen's heroines, Hautman's Barbaraannette has more determination and smarts than her sweetness might suggest. And like Hiassen's book, it's very entertaining. A good book for vacation reading.

I'm enjoying sharing my misunderstood state with some fictional characters. I'm now reading a good book of British espionage, Dead Spy Running, by Jon Stock. It's the first of a trilogy involving Daniel Marchant. (The second, Games Traitors Play, was published in March 2012 by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's.) The book begins when Marchant, who's been suspended from MI6, is running a London marathon. The US ambassador to England is also running. Marchant notices a fellow runner with a belt of explosives strapped around his waist running behind the ambassador's group. It's set to go off when he drops below a certain pace. Like his late father, Stephen Marchant, head of MI6 until he was forced to resign in disgrace, Daniel's intentions are suspected by his intelligence colleagues. Yet Daniel is determined to clear his father as well as himself.

Great British espionage deserves a great British band. I'll leave you with the Animals singing "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."