8 ms·

Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin, Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6

96 points by samsgro 11y ago

pinaceae 11y ago
well, for anyone who read le carré philby here confirms one of the key failings of british intelligence services - the utter disbelief that anyone from their top-universities/upper echelons could ever be a communist. tinker tailor soldier spy is basically all about that. they hired students who had openly joined leftist groups and never really followed up on that.
- deepnet 11y ago
  and Le Carré has said that he sexed even that up from his experience working as a spy.
- knughit 11y ago
  He wasn't communist, and that nonsense worldview is why they missed the problem. He was an opportunist, like many people in all governments. He sold info to russians while others just sold contracts to friends or embezzled directly. It's not us vs a foreign them, there are selfish and power-hungry monsters throughout all sides.
  - Agustus 11y ago
    He was not an opportunist, he was vindictive; when he did not get certain things or recognition, he sought out the Russian government's approval.
draw_down 11y ago
Yeah, it's easy, just be a wellborn member of British aristocracy.
- pcrh 11y ago
  I decided to look that up... The result is curious indeed. It appears that Kim Philby's father, St John Philby, was a senior civil servant, but not an aristocrat. He was what was called in those days an "Arabist" and had converted to Islam. He does seem, however, to have passed onto his son a love of intrigue... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby
  - fiftyacorn 11y ago
    But St John Philby also betrayed Britain. His official role was to protect British interests with the House of Saud, being Ibn Sauds right hand man. Instead he was also on the payroll of Standard Oil, and sold out to the Americans. This alone should have been a warning to the establishment
  - cmdkeen 11y ago
    Kim Philby was also mixed race - his mother was Indian. In British society at the time that very much didn't make him part of the Establishment, and he did face prejudice from senior officials because of it.
    - knight17 11y ago
      Do you've more information on this? Wikipedia says his mother is Dora Johnston, that doesn't sound like an Indian name.
      - draugadrotten 11y ago
        Picture of Dora: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/3424237_a_528244j.jpg http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/34242... Dora's parents: https://www.geni.com/people/Dora-Philby/6000000013566932381 https://www.geni.com/people/Dora-Philby/6000000013566932381
        cmdkeen 11y ago
        Looks like I was led astray by a newspaper article today, thanks for the correction. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-bad-liar-his-true-talent-lay-in-self-mythology/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-...
- zwischenzug 11y ago
  He wasn't an aristocrat, but a hereditary member of the establishment and apparently bought into the whole culture, so implicitly to be trusted.
nxzero 11y ago
Always thought the first rule was never lie, not deny, deny, deny. Watch interviews with former heads of the CIA when asked a question they don't want to answer to see what I mean.
- tinco 11y ago
  An interview is something different from an interrogation. See for example Gen. Alexanders lies to congress. Even after it's been made clear beyond any reasonable doubt that he was lying he goes to conferences and denies that he was lying when heckled about it. He'll deny and then confuse the audience by casting further doubt.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    The CIA are required to lie, by law. Therefore they are extremely good at it.
    - nxzero 11y ago
      Exactly which law(s) are you referring to; as in links are requested.
deepnet 11y ago
"Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know much about the world." Adam Curtis hilariously documents the 20th centuries near 100% failure rate of the British Secret Services (except when they manufactured a plot). And how they were created to hunt fictional spies dreamed up by paranoid tabloid readers obsessed with novels about German spies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
- knughit 11y ago
  Similar track record to 21st century USA FBI
- jonlucc 11y ago
  There is a book that paints the same picture of the CIA called A Legacy of Ashes.
  - azernik 11y ago
    And Le Carre's interesting The Looking Glass War - apparently intended as an antidote to his The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which he felt in retrospect had impressed people a bit too much about the British intelligence service's competence.
- steve19 11y ago
  I don't know about the British intelligence services, but at least in the CIA its very incestious, they recruit people who fit a certain mold, then recruit their children and their grandchildren. That they have a distorted world view is not surprising (not unlike SV, but without the sobering reality of markets and competition). 40 years after the OSS was superseded by the CIA, the CIA was still actively recruiting the grandkids of OSS employees. They like to keep everything in the family.
- Krij 11y ago
  CIA case officer Robert Baer's talk about this is pretty entertaining - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhpdFu4BpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhpdFu4BpA These days if you work in the world domination industry you are more likely working for Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.
cup 11y ago
Strange how the author slips "said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds" casually into the final paragraph.
- draw_down 11y ago
  Commies kill people because they're scum. When we kill people it's because we're trying to set the world right. /s
- glangdale 11y ago
  The article generally appears to be written with the assumption that the readers already are quite aware of the doings of the Cambridge Five - a reasonable assumption for people over a certain age, but probably less and less likely.
contingencies 11y ago
These days of course you would be confronted with a lot more that would make it hard to simply deny things: (a) Absolute records of your physical movements. (Cellphone, car) (b) Absolute records of your communications and social network. (Cellphone, email/social networks) (c) Video evidence of activity in almost any semi-formal place of work, carpark, ATM, shop, or similar. (Physical surveillance ubiquity) (d) Probable audio recording of your conversations via hacked cellphone.
- crdb 11y ago
  In theory, you can watch anybody, but for this to work, you'd need someone to actually look at the evidence i.e. suspect the person in the first place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes... And in this case it's the guardians of the guardians: who are you going to trust with watching the head of MI6's counter-intelligence division 24/7? As the CIA found in its paranoid early days, over-suspicion is highly counter-productive (see e.g. [1]). You just HAVE to trust your managers. Even if all services have some kind of internal intelligence setup to watch the watchers, it's focused downwards where the risks are higher and cost of suspicion lower, and it has to be run by people you trust the most. You balance the cost of a mole, versus the opportunity cost of turning down genuine defectors and trusting your own staff. This is why (according to [2]) many European services are run by people from wealthy, old families, preferably with at least a few members who have served. It's expected that on average, these people have profound ties to their country - if nothing else, in the form of immense property portfolios - and thus are much less likely to defect. You can't bribe them, you can't offer them a better life [3], what's left? Ideology, and that can be somewhat watched for. Of course, you deny yourself some great talent that way but as with managing a hedge fund, you want to limit downside rather than maximize upside. Nationalism and dynastic politics are a form of defense against foreign enemies. Hence Philby. He was trusted by design, not because MI6 were "bloody incestuous fools" or whatever, and no amount of surveillance would have changed that. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside-Showdown/dp/0345472500 http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside-Showdown/dp/0345... [2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-services/dp/1482745518 http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... [3] Kalugin recalls in http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0312114265 http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espiona... that he was somewhat worried about Philby's living conditions in the Soviet Union (unheated flat, alcoholism, etc.). It's been a while since I read the book but I recall he or someone else decided to push for him to have a good quality of life as an advertisement to other potential defectors; only then was Philby put up in proper accommodation and welcomed by the Soviet system.
hackuser 11y ago
Before you take Philby's comments at face value, a few things to note: 1) Philby gave this speech under the auspices of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state where communication was heavily controlled and censored, with art required to be politically acceptable, with neighbors spying on each other and family members reporting disloyal statements to secret police, and with copy and fax machines requiring licenses (IIRC); where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, imprisoned in a mental hospital or sent to Siberia; and where propaganda was omnipresent. He said no more than what was allowed and likely, I think, what he was told to say. 2) In the recording the audio doesn't match the video. The BBC attributes that to equipment issues; but maybe his speech was edited or dubbed. The Soviets seemed to do things like that regularly; for example, leaders who later became unpopular with the regime were reputedly removed from historical photos with an 'airbrush' (this was before digital imagery) and from all other historical records. 3) At least one aspect of his speech sounds clearly like Soviet propaganda: He attributes a large part of his success to being in the 'governing class' in England; that is, Philby is blaming UK's the class system for their intelligence incompetence. A foundation of Soviet ideology was that they were a classless system, superior to the West where the masses were oppressed by the elite. It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.
- feral 11y ago
  >It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence. Why do you need handlers or propagandists to attribute this to? Couldn't this simply be what he believed? He was an ideologically motivated spy after all. Do you think it's implausible his position in the UK class system got him in, and protected him?
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Personally I think it more likely that Brits just don't like to be reminded of the fact that their society was built on a class system, and its not going away any time soon. It doesn't matter if the Soviets say it or not: Brits don't like to be reminded that their empire requires rather a lot of serfs in order to even get itself out of bed in the morning ..
signa11 11y ago
i remember reading an excellent book called "spycatcher" which details a first-hand account of peter-wright (employed by mi5) exposing kgb spies in the highest echelon of mi5.
- PaulRobinson 11y ago
  Spycatcher was banned in the UK on publication by Margaret Thatcher which a) immediately validated there was truth in its page and b) made it a huge best seller. It's actually a pretty dull book, I think, apart from a few fun stories like breaking into the building sites of embassies and pouring thousands of bugs into the wet concrete walls meaning the entire walls would test as "live" making the whole complex unusable for classified work. Interesting side-note about Spycatcher for geeks: In the book, Peter Wright talks about he "and Tony bugging and burgling their way across London in the 1960s". "Tony" was his engineer who installed bugs. His name was Tony Sale. You best know him, perhaps, as the founder of the Bletchley Park Trust. After his time with MI5 he decided to restore Bletchley Park and rebuild the machines there like Colossus, etc. I met him on a visit there in 1999, and I think I was the first person in many, many years who had asked him about his connections, because he seemed slightly taken aback that I knew he was an ex-colleague of Peter Wright's. Nice bloke. Liked Peter as a man, thought what he'd done with the book was potentially very, very dangerous.
  - satori99 11y ago
    Another interesting factoid... The British government tried to stop publication of Spycatcher in Australia also, but was defeated in court by the man who is now our Prime Minister.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    > a) immediately validated there was truth in its page Alternatively, it was simply a question of the fact that he had broken the agreement he had signed that prevents ex-intelligence officers from publishing memoirs without them going through official screening first.
    - 11y ago
yitchelle 11y ago
I read this book a few months back, and was amazed to how easy it was get to the top secret information. Good information as it was easy to read and to understand. http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby-Betrayal/dp/0804136653 http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby-Betrayal/dp/0...
- arethuza 11y ago
  His autobiography ("My Silent War") is worth reading - the process for getting into the intelligence services seemed pretty cursory - seemed to be pretty much lunch at a club to make sure he seemed like a decent chap...
- fitzwatermellow 11y ago
  Whilst we are compiling a bibliography, I'll add another suggestion: the excellent fictionalization of the Cambridge spies by John Banville, The Untouchable
- piratebroadcast 11y ago
  All of Ben's books are amazing. Check Agent ZigZag out. I've read it like 4 times. Such an amazing fun story. http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage-Betrayal-ebook/dp/B000VSW7SO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage-Betrayal-...
  - jgalt212 11y ago
    Zig Zag was good, but if just starting with Ben Macintyre, I'd start with the Philby book. It's the better of the two. I've read both.
  - yitchelle 11y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. Just bought it. At first I though it was fiction, but it is a true story.
DanBC 11y ago
Here's the BBC Radio programme about the tape: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv The BBC have had many interesting programmes about Philby and the Cambridge spies. It's really hard to search the BBC website to find these programmes, and many of them are no longer available to listen to. It's odd that the BBC missed the opportunity to have a meta page of all the Philby coverage, linking to the programmes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w or this one
- mazuhl 11y ago
  The BBC did have a really interesting viewer for all the meta data at http://open.bbc.co.uk http://open.bbc.co.uk - but that seems to have disappeared. http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/ http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/
petecooper 11y ago
Full-fat version for non-mobile devices: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc-lecture.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bb...
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
A quote from C. S. Lewis seems apropos: "We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

96 points by samsgro 11y ago

well, for anyone who read le carré philby here confirms one of the key failings of british intelligence services - the utter disbelief that anyone from their top-universities/upper echelons could ever be a communist. tinker tailor soldier spy is basically all about that. they hired students who had openly joined leftist groups and never really followed up on that.

deepnet 11y ago
and Le Carré has said that he sexed even that up from his experience working as a spy.
knughit 11y ago
He wasn't communist, and that nonsense worldview is why they missed the problem. He was an opportunist, like many people in all governments. He sold info to russians while others just sold contracts to friends or embezzled directly. It's not us vs a foreign them, there are selfish and power-hungry monsters throughout all sides.
- Agustus 11y ago
  He was not an opportunist, he was vindictive; when he did not get certain things or recognition, he sought out the Russian government's approval.

draw_down 11y ago

Yeah, it's easy, just be a wellborn member of British aristocracy.

pcrh 11y ago
I decided to look that up... The result is curious indeed. It appears that Kim Philby's father, St John Philby, was a senior civil servant, but not an aristocrat. He was what was called in those days an "Arabist" and had converted to Islam. He does seem, however, to have passed onto his son a love of intrigue... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Philby
- fiftyacorn 11y ago
  But St John Philby also betrayed Britain. His official role was to protect British interests with the House of Saud, being Ibn Sauds right hand man. Instead he was also on the payroll of Standard Oil, and sold out to the Americans. This alone should have been a warning to the establishment
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  Kim Philby was also mixed race - his mother was Indian. In British society at the time that very much didn't make him part of the Establishment, and he did face prejudice from senior officials because of it.
  - knight17 11y ago
    Do you've more information on this? Wikipedia says his mother is Dora Johnston, that doesn't sound like an Indian name.
    - draugadrotten 11y ago
      Picture of Dora: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/3424237_a_528244j.jpg http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/34242... Dora's parents: https://www.geni.com/people/Dora-Philby/6000000013566932381 https://www.geni.com/people/Dora-Philby/6000000013566932381
      - cmdkeen 11y ago
        Looks like I was led astray by a newspaper article today, thanks for the correction. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-bad-liar-his-true-talent-lay-in-self-mythology/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-...
zwischenzug 11y ago
He wasn't an aristocrat, but a hereditary member of the establishment and apparently bought into the whole culture, so implicitly to be trusted.

nxzero 11y ago

Always thought the first rule was never lie, not deny, deny, deny. Watch interviews with former heads of the CIA when asked a question they don't want to answer to see what I mean.

tinco 11y ago
An interview is something different from an interrogation. See for example Gen. Alexanders lies to congress. Even after it's been made clear beyond any reasonable doubt that he was lying he goes to conferences and denies that he was lying when heckled about it. He'll deny and then confuse the audience by casting further doubt.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  The CIA are required to lie, by law. Therefore they are extremely good at it.
  - nxzero 11y ago
    Exactly which law(s) are you referring to; as in links are requested.

deepnet 11y ago

"Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know much about the world." Adam Curtis hilariously documents the 20th centuries near 100% failure rate of the British Secret Services (except when they manufactured a plot). And how they were created to hunt fictional spies dreamed up by paranoid tabloid readers obsessed with novels about German spies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...

knughit 11y ago
Similar track record to 21st century USA FBI
jonlucc 11y ago
There is a book that paints the same picture of the CIA called A Legacy of Ashes.
- azernik 11y ago
  And Le Carre's interesting The Looking Glass War - apparently intended as an antidote to his The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which he felt in retrospect had impressed people a bit too much about the British intelligence service's competence.
steve19 11y ago
I don't know about the British intelligence services, but at least in the CIA its very incestious, they recruit people who fit a certain mold, then recruit their children and their grandchildren. That they have a distorted world view is not surprising (not unlike SV, but without the sobering reality of markets and competition). 40 years after the OSS was superseded by the CIA, the CIA was still actively recruiting the grandkids of OSS employees. They like to keep everything in the family.
Krij 11y ago
CIA case officer Robert Baer's talk about this is pretty entertaining - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhpdFu4BpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIhpdFu4BpA These days if you work in the world domination industry you are more likely working for Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.

cup 11y ago

Strange how the author slips "said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds" casually into the final paragraph.

draw_down 11y ago
Commies kill people because they're scum. When we kill people it's because we're trying to set the world right. /s
glangdale 11y ago
The article generally appears to be written with the assumption that the readers already are quite aware of the doings of the Cambridge Five - a reasonable assumption for people over a certain age, but probably less and less likely.

contingencies 11y ago

These days of course you would be confronted with a lot more that would make it hard to simply deny things: (a) Absolute records of your physical movements. (Cellphone, car) (b) Absolute records of your communications and social network. (Cellphone, email/social networks) (c) Video evidence of activity in almost any semi-formal place of work, carpark, ATM, shop, or similar. (Physical surveillance ubiquity) (d) Probable audio recording of your conversations via hacked cellphone.

crdb 11y ago
In theory, you can watch anybody, but for this to work, you'd need someone to actually look at the evidence i.e. suspect the person in the first place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes... And in this case it's the guardians of the guardians: who are you going to trust with watching the head of MI6's counter-intelligence division 24/7? As the CIA found in its paranoid early days, over-suspicion is highly counter-productive (see e.g. [1]). You just HAVE to trust your managers. Even if all services have some kind of internal intelligence setup to watch the watchers, it's focused downwards where the risks are higher and cost of suspicion lower, and it has to be run by people you trust the most. You balance the cost of a mole, versus the opportunity cost of turning down genuine defectors and trusting your own staff. This is why (according to [2]) many European services are run by people from wealthy, old families, preferably with at least a few members who have served. It's expected that on average, these people have profound ties to their country - if nothing else, in the form of immense property portfolios - and thus are much less likely to defect. You can't bribe them, you can't offer them a better life [3], what's left? Ideology, and that can be somewhat watched for. Of course, you deny yourself some great talent that way but as with managing a hedge fund, you want to limit downside rather than maximize upside. Nationalism and dynastic politics are a form of defense against foreign enemies. Hence Philby. He was trusted by design, not because MI6 were "bloody incestuous fools" or whatever, and no amount of surveillance would have changed that. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside-Showdown/dp/0345472500 http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside-Showdown/dp/0345... [2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-services/dp/1482745518 http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... [3] Kalugin recalls in http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0312114265 http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espiona... that he was somewhat worried about Philby's living conditions in the Soviet Union (unheated flat, alcoholism, etc.). It's been a while since I read the book but I recall he or someone else decided to push for him to have a good quality of life as an advertisement to other potential defectors; only then was Philby put up in proper accommodation and welcomed by the Soviet system.

hackuser 11y ago

Before you take Philby's comments at face value, a few things to note: 1) Philby gave this speech under the auspices of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state where communication was heavily controlled and censored, with art required to be politically acceptable, with neighbors spying on each other and family members reporting disloyal statements to secret police, and with copy and fax machines requiring licenses (IIRC); where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, imprisoned in a mental hospital or sent to Siberia; and where propaganda was omnipresent. He said no more than what was allowed and likely, I think, what he was told to say. 2) In the recording the audio doesn't match the video. The BBC attributes that to equipment issues; but maybe his speech was edited or dubbed. The Soviets seemed to do things like that regularly; for example, leaders who later became unpopular with the regime were reputedly removed from historical photos with an 'airbrush' (this was before digital imagery) and from all other historical records. 3) At least one aspect of his speech sounds clearly like Soviet propaganda: He attributes a large part of his success to being in the 'governing class' in England; that is, Philby is blaming UK's the class system for their intelligence incompetence. A foundation of Soviet ideology was that they were a classless system, superior to the West where the masses were oppressed by the elite. It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.

feral 11y ago
>It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence. Why do you need handlers or propagandists to attribute this to? Couldn't this simply be what he believed? He was an ideologically motivated spy after all. Do you think it's implausible his position in the UK class system got him in, and protected him?
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Personally I think it more likely that Brits just don't like to be reminded of the fact that their society was built on a class system, and its not going away any time soon. It doesn't matter if the Soviets say it or not: Brits don't like to be reminded that their empire requires rather a lot of serfs in order to even get itself out of bed in the morning ..

signa11 11y ago

i remember reading an excellent book called "spycatcher" which details a first-hand account of peter-wright (employed by mi5) exposing kgb spies in the highest echelon of mi5.

PaulRobinson 11y ago
Spycatcher was banned in the UK on publication by Margaret Thatcher which a) immediately validated there was truth in its page and b) made it a huge best seller. It's actually a pretty dull book, I think, apart from a few fun stories like breaking into the building sites of embassies and pouring thousands of bugs into the wet concrete walls meaning the entire walls would test as "live" making the whole complex unusable for classified work. Interesting side-note about Spycatcher for geeks: In the book, Peter Wright talks about he "and Tony bugging and burgling their way across London in the 1960s". "Tony" was his engineer who installed bugs. His name was Tony Sale. You best know him, perhaps, as the founder of the Bletchley Park Trust. After his time with MI5 he decided to restore Bletchley Park and rebuild the machines there like Colossus, etc. I met him on a visit there in 1999, and I think I was the first person in many, many years who had asked him about his connections, because he seemed slightly taken aback that I knew he was an ex-colleague of Peter Wright's. Nice bloke. Liked Peter as a man, thought what he'd done with the book was potentially very, very dangerous.
- satori99 11y ago
  Another interesting factoid... The British government tried to stop publication of Spycatcher in Australia also, but was defeated in court by the man who is now our Prime Minister.
- Angostura 11y ago
  > a) immediately validated there was truth in its page Alternatively, it was simply a question of the fact that he had broken the agreement he had signed that prevents ex-intelligence officers from publishing memoirs without them going through official screening first.
  - 11y ago

yitchelle 11y ago

I read this book a few months back, and was amazed to how easy it was get to the top secret information. Good information as it was easy to read and to understand. http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby-Betrayal/dp/0804136653 http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby-Betrayal/dp/0...

arethuza 11y ago
His autobiography ("My Silent War") is worth reading - the process for getting into the intelligence services seemed pretty cursory - seemed to be pretty much lunch at a club to make sure he seemed like a decent chap...
fitzwatermellow 11y ago
Whilst we are compiling a bibliography, I'll add another suggestion: the excellent fictionalization of the Cambridge spies by John Banville, The Untouchable
piratebroadcast 11y ago
All of Ben's books are amazing. Check Agent ZigZag out. I've read it like 4 times. Such an amazing fun story. http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage-Betrayal-ebook/dp/B000VSW7SO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage-Betrayal-...
- jgalt212 11y ago
  Zig Zag was good, but if just starting with Ben Macintyre, I'd start with the Philby book. It's the better of the two. I've read both.
- yitchelle 11y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. Just bought it. At first I though it was fiction, but it is a true story.

DanBC 11y ago

Here's the BBC Radio programme about the tape: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv The BBC have had many interesting programmes about Philby and the Cambridge spies. It's really hard to search the BBC website to find these programmes, and many of them are no longer available to listen to. It's odd that the BBC missed the opportunity to have a meta page of all the Philby coverage, linking to the programmes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w or this one

mazuhl 11y ago
The BBC did have a really interesting viewer for all the meta data at http://open.bbc.co.uk http://open.bbc.co.uk - but that seems to have disappeared. http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/ http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/

petecooper 11y ago

Full-fat version for non-mobile devices: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc-lecture.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bb...

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

A quote from C. S. Lewis seems apropos: "We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."