Uncovering the Betrayal of Kim Philby: The Inside Story of a Spy Among Friends

Stephen Tibbles: Lot of surprising facts, around the main story.

United Kingdom on Nov 03, 2023

Speed King: It moves a little slow. But that's because the author goes into great detail.

United States on Oct 18, 2023

Anna C.: I liked it. It is unputdownable.

Italy on Sep 13, 2023

Amazon Customer: I bought and read this book about ten years ago and didn't find it particularly interesting. However, after recently watching the ITV adaptation I decided to give it another go and unearthed it, so to speak, from my Kindle. I tried to see how far the TV version mirrored the book and found , as might be expected, only selective elements concentrated on. The characters and events were shrouded in darkness, so that you hardly see what was going on, all, no doubt, for dramatic effect, and extraneous characters were introduced, alien to the historic context, such as the female interrogator and her black husband. I disagree with the reviewers who complain that the book was less about espionage and more about relationships, after all, the clue is in the title "A Spy Among Friends". I did find the book somewhat repetitive, and despite the author's attempts at trying to show how the various agencies willfully turned a blind eye to Philby's treachery, to protect the old boy network and for fear of exposing themselves to ridicule, I still find it hard to believe that nobody let the cat out of the bag. There are no doubt better and more informative books on the subject, but all in all, this...

United Kingdom on Sep 07, 2023

Peter: This is a very good book.

The author gives us a look at Kim Philby, the most notorious double agent in UK history and how he could have done everything that he did to spill tonnes of blood of UK agents by passing secrets to the USSR. The friendship at the heart of the story is that of Philby, Nicholas Elliott and James Angleton, the latter two, unwittingly, told Philby everything that he needed to know to give to the Russians and to upset many UK missions.

The Old Boy network in the UK is partly to blame for all of the issues that occurred, it was the means to the end for Philby to continue his work with little worry for years. Indeed he may never have been caught if it hadn't been for the defections of Maclean and Burgess.

I enjoyed the writing style of the author and look forward to reading more of his books in the future.

Australia on Aug 05, 2023

LexLex: CS Lewis talked about the quest to gain access to the ‘inner ring’, something he was unable to do at Oxford due to the snobbery of the English establishment, and the embarrassment Lewis caused fellow academics by writing about the devil as though he were a real being.[i] As you gain entrance to one ring, you discover yet another further in which holds yet more influence. Every effort is made to progress to the inner rings. Entrance becomes more costly. You can forfeit your soul as you gain the world. Once inside each ring, you strengthen its walls so that it remains difficult for others to enter (one UK pastor was telling me of South African émigrés to England who, having scrambled to get British passports and residency, are now solidly and immovably pro-Brexit).

Of course for outsiders like Lewis, slowly earning your way to an inner ring may not only take years but may turn out to be a hollow promise after all. But the nature of the old British establishment was that if you were born into the right family, went to the right school, had the right kind of accent and bearing, you could skip all those tawdry outer rings and accelerate right to the centre of things where...

United Kingdom on Sep 16, 2019

David J Kenney: Mr. Ben Macintyre has written a book ostensibly about Kim Philby, the English traitor before, during and after WW2. The most interesting and affected persons in this horrid saga: George Clutton, Edgar Hoover, Nick Elliott, Peter Lunn, Meredith Gardner, Guy Liddell, Bill Harvey, Philby’s own family and several others have their entrails left almost untouched. That is a shame and bad history.
Spies do not, as the author asserts in this case, ooze from the home team on to the other side. Quite the contrary there is an Ah Ha moment in their relationship, occasionally dramatic, when the case officer knows he has hoked the pigeon. Thus, it was with the brilliant Arnold Deutsch, Philby’s recruiter, guide, philosopher, trainer and friend. Until he was executed. Philby was a Soviet asset while executions during the Great Purge thinned his superiors’ ranks.
The author advances a barely cogent and certainly incomplete argument argument that Elliott and Lunn left Philby, shriven, alone, and unguarded in Beirut while Elliott returned to London to negotiate the terms of Philby’s retirement to the East. The British government of the day could not afford the barrage of inculpatory...

United States on Aug 26, 2018

Errol Levine: This excellent book by the London journalist, Ben Macintyre, is suspenseful and indeed reads almost like a novel. One has to keep reminding oneself that Kim Philby’s spying for the Soviet Union resulted in hundreds of deaths. Surprisingly, despite the opening of Soviet–era archives in recent years, the book contains no startling new revelations. It does, however, contain much new interesting information about such incidents as “Operation Valuable” (an attempted infiltration of Communist Albania) and Commander Crabb’s attempt to photograph the underside of a warship that brought Comrades Krushschev and Bulganin on a “goodwill” visit to the United Kingdom. Both projects ended in failure due to Kim Philby‘s passing on of information about them to his Soviet handlers.

I don’t think I have ever read such a damning indictment of the English upper class as emerges from this book. Even Gilbert and Sullivan could not have invented more eccentric characters. Their names alone are risible. We have, for example, Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley, a journalist who first casually suggested to Philby that he might want to become involved with the Secret Services. Then there...

United States on Aug 14, 2014