A Spy Among Friends
Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
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"Reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John le Carré, leavened with a dollop of P.G. Wodehouse . . . [Macintyre] takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era." --New York Times Book Review
Master storyteller Ben Macintyre's thrillingly ambitious A Spy Among Friends tackles the greatest spy story of all: the rise and fall of Kim Philby, MI6's Cambridge-bred golden boy who used his perch high in the intelligence world to betray friend and country to the Soviet Union for over two decades.
In Macintyre's telling, Philby's story is not a tale of one spy, but of three: the story of his complex friendships with fellow Englishman operative Nicholas Elliott and with the American James Jesus Angleton, who became one of the most powerful men in the CIA. These men came up together, shared the same background, went to the same schools and clubs, and served the same cause--or so Elliott and Angleton thought. In reality, Philby was channeling all of their confidences directly to his Soviet handlers, sinking almost every great Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies and obfuscations to protect his secret, Angleton and Elliott never abandoned him. When Philby's true master was finally revealed with his defection to Moscow in 1963, it would have profound and devastating consequences on these men who thought they knew him best, and the intelligence services they helped to build.
This remarkable story, told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, is a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.
About this Author
Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including Colditz, Agent Sonya, Rogue Heroes, The Spy and the Traitor, Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, and A Spy Among Friends. He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. Several of his books have been made into films and television series, including Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, and Rogue Heroes.
Reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S BEST SPY BOOK OF 2014
A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2014
"A crisply written tale of a classic intelligence case that remains relevant more than 50 years later." --USA Today
"A Spy Among Friends is a rollicking book. Mr. Macintyre is full of pep and never falters in the headlong rush of his narrative." --Wall Street Journal
"Shrewdly written and highly readable." --National Post
"Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship. . . . When devouring this thriller, I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel. It reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John le Carré, leavened with a dollop of P. G. Wodehouse. . . . [Macintyre] takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era." --Walter Isaacson, New York Times Book Review
"A Spy Among Friends is the latest in Ben Macintyre's series on twentieth-century espionage. All are superb, and A Spy Among Friends is no exception. Macintyre gives the familiar story of Philby new life." --Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
"Macintyre does here what he does best--tell a heck of a good story. A Spy Among Friends is hands down the most entertaining book I've reviewed this year." --Boston Globe
"By now, the story of British double agent Harold 'Kim' Philby may be the most familiar spy yarn ever, fodder for whole libraries of histories, personal memoirs and novels. But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes Philby's destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating." --Washington Post
"Vivid and fascinating . . . [Macintyre] succeeds admirably." --Newsday
"[Macintyre] deserves full credit for delivering this complex, continent-hopping tale with clarity. . . . The result is, in every sense, a class act." --Entertainment Weekly
"Excellent . . . I was thoroughly engrossed in this book, beginning to end. It has all the suspense of a good spy novel, and its characters are a complex mix of charm, eccentricity, intelligence, and wit. And it offers a great--and mostly troubling--insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of those we entrust with the most important of our political and military secrets." --Huffington Post
"Riveting . . . Mr. Macintyre [is] a shrewd and masterful chronicler." --Washington Times
"Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller, concentrating on Philby's friendship with and betrayal of Elliott and of Angleton, his pathetically dedicated admirer at the top of the CIA. Macintyre's account of the verbal duel between Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963 is worthy of John le Carré at his best." --The Guardian
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