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Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
by Ben Macintyre
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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. He wants to know how many have died through Philby's 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 eavesdropper their conversation appears exquisitely genteel, an ancient English ritual played out in a foreign land; in reality it is an unsparing, bare-knuckle fight, the death throes of a bloodied friendship.
Chapter Two
Section V
The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm," that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children's names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink—and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity. "He was the sort of man who won worshippers," said one contemporary. "You didn't just like him, admire him, agree with him; you worshipped him." A stutter, which came and went, added to his appeal, betraying an attractive glimmer of fragility. People waited on his words, for what his friend, the novelist Graham Greene, called his "halting stammered witticisms."
Kim Philby cut a dashing figure in wartime London. As the Times correspondent in the Spanish civil war, reporting from the rebel Nationalist side, he had narrowly cheated death in 1937 when a Republican shell landed near the car he was sitting in (eating chocolates and drinking brandy), killing all three of the other passengers. Philby escaped with a minor head wound and a reputation for "great pluck." General Franco himself had pinned a medal, the Red Cross of Military Merit, on the young war reporter. Philby had been one of only fifteen newspaper correspondents selected to join the British Expeditionary Force sent to France on the outbreak of the Second World War. From the continent he wrote wry, distinctive dispatches for the Times as he waited with the troops for the fighting to start: "Many express disappointment at the slow tempo of the overture to Armageddon. They expected danger, and they have found damp." Philby continued reporting as the Germans advanced and quit Amiens with the panzers already rumbling into the city. He took ship for England with such haste that he was forced to leave behind his luggage. His expenses claim for lost items became a Fleet Street legend: "Camel-hair overcoat (two years' wear), fifteen guineas; Dunhill pipe (two years old, and all the better for it), one pound ten shillings." It is a measure of his reputation that the Times compensated its star correspondent for the loss of an old pipe. Philby was a fine journalist, but his ambitions lay elsewhere. He wanted to join MI6, but like every would-be spy he faced a conundrum: how do you join an organization to which you cannot apply, because it does not formally exist?
Excerpted from A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre. Copyright © 2014 by Ben Macintyre. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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