Recent reading
Feb. 23rd, 2024 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxFinished Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal and just... WOW. Honestly, the wildly incompetent intelligence agency of John le Carré's The Looking Glass War makes a lot more sense now.
I had a passing familiarity with the history of the "Cambridge Five," but I hadn't realized that Philby was at one point in charge of of MI6's Soviet counterespionage, and so spent years basically playing chess with himself?! (Where the pieces were other people's lives, no less— speaking of The Looking Glass War, I found myself wondering whether the disastrous plan to recruit a Polish refugee for a mission in East Germany in that novel owed anything to the history of Operation Valuable.) Quoth Macintyre:
(OH, and THEN, at another point in his career: "Before leaving London, Philby had been told that if the opportunity arose, he could set himself up as a 'coat trailer,' spy parlance for an agent who seeks to be recruited by the enemy in order to turn double agent. Philby was 'given permission to play the full double game with the Russians.'")
Honestly, the class implications of this saga are wild— as I (only half jokingly) commented in my last post, the vetting process was basically "did his dad go to Eton?", and once MI5 figured out there was a mole in the British embassy in DC, they were "convinced the mole ... must be a local employee, a janitor or servant, even though the quality of the information Homer had supplied was high." (The mole, "Homer", was in fact Cambridge-educated diplomat Don MacLean.) Macintyre also points out the divide between the "middle class (and sometimes working class)" MI5 and "upper-middle class (and sometimes aristocratic)" MI6, and how that played into the agencies' fight over Philby once he fell under MI5's suspicion, while MI6 continued to back him up.
(He doesn't let MI5 go entirely un-dunked on, though: the members of "MI5's surveillance unit ... were expected to dress in trilby hats and raincoats and communicated with each other by hand signals. They stood on street corners, watching and trying to appear inconspicuous. They looked, in short, exactly like surveillance agents." Plus, apparently their surveillance of Philby was limited to a. London city limits and b. business hours, so you can imagine how that loophole worked out for everyone.)
YET ANOTHER thing that boggled my mind about all of this: when I was a spy-obsessed child, I had a poster from the International Spy Museum in DC that said "See Everything. Hear Everything. Say Nothing." and, apparently, everyone in this story failed step 3!!! There was a shockingly free flow of information between departments - and between the U.S. and UK intelligence agencies - through very, ah, informal channels (e.g., "spies only" cocktail parties and boozy lunches between friends).
I stopped taking notes on my impressions at about the 60% mark— when Philby was fired from MI6 (...before being brought back as an agent actually out in the field a few years later... *headdesk*)— but my main takeaway from the last third is 1. I totally buy that MI6 (in the form of Philby's friend Nicholas Elliot, who was sent to Beirut to get his confession) allowed him to defect to Moscow instead of hauling him back to England for a highly embarrassing (to them) trial, and 2. after reading Macintyre's pretty evenhanded, healthily skeptical account, it was interesting to get a sense of Elliot's biased version of events, as narrated to John le Carré in the 70s(?) and recounted by le Carré in the afterword. Cringey, but interesting.
I had a passing familiarity with the history of the "Cambridge Five," but I hadn't realized that Philby was at one point in charge of of MI6's Soviet counterespionage, and so spent years basically playing chess with himself?! (Where the pieces were other people's lives, no less— speaking of The Looking Glass War, I found myself wondering whether the disastrous plan to recruit a Polish refugee for a mission in East Germany in that novel owed anything to the history of Operation Valuable.) Quoth Macintyre:
Philby's life developed a pattern of duality, in which he consistently undermined his own work but never aroused suspicion. He made elaborate plans to combat Soviet intelligence and then immediately betrayed them to Soviet intelligence; he urged ever greater efforts to combat the communist threat and personified that threat; his own section worked smoothly, yet nothing quite succeeded.
(OH, and THEN, at another point in his career: "Before leaving London, Philby had been told that if the opportunity arose, he could set himself up as a 'coat trailer,' spy parlance for an agent who seeks to be recruited by the enemy in order to turn double agent. Philby was 'given permission to play the full double game with the Russians.'")
Honestly, the class implications of this saga are wild— as I (only half jokingly) commented in my last post, the vetting process was basically "did his dad go to Eton?", and once MI5 figured out there was a mole in the British embassy in DC, they were "convinced the mole ... must be a local employee, a janitor or servant, even though the quality of the information Homer had supplied was high." (The mole, "Homer", was in fact Cambridge-educated diplomat Don MacLean.) Macintyre also points out the divide between the "middle class (and sometimes working class)" MI5 and "upper-middle class (and sometimes aristocratic)" MI6, and how that played into the agencies' fight over Philby once he fell under MI5's suspicion, while MI6 continued to back him up.
(He doesn't let MI5 go entirely un-dunked on, though: the members of "MI5's surveillance unit ... were expected to dress in trilby hats and raincoats and communicated with each other by hand signals. They stood on street corners, watching and trying to appear inconspicuous. They looked, in short, exactly like surveillance agents." Plus, apparently their surveillance of Philby was limited to a. London city limits and b. business hours, so you can imagine how that loophole worked out for everyone.)
YET ANOTHER thing that boggled my mind about all of this: when I was a spy-obsessed child, I had a poster from the International Spy Museum in DC that said "See Everything. Hear Everything. Say Nothing." and, apparently, everyone in this story failed step 3!!! There was a shockingly free flow of information between departments - and between the U.S. and UK intelligence agencies - through very, ah, informal channels (e.g., "spies only" cocktail parties and boozy lunches between friends).
I stopped taking notes on my impressions at about the 60% mark— when Philby was fired from MI6 (...before being brought back as an agent actually out in the field a few years later... *headdesk*)— but my main takeaway from the last third is 1. I totally buy that MI6 (in the form of Philby's friend Nicholas Elliot, who was sent to Beirut to get his confession) allowed him to defect to Moscow instead of hauling him back to England for a highly embarrassing (to them) trial, and 2. after reading Macintyre's pretty evenhanded, healthily skeptical account, it was interesting to get a sense of Elliot's biased version of events, as narrated to John le Carré in the 70s(?) and recounted by le Carré in the afterword. Cringey, but interesting.
Floreat Etonia....
Date: 2024-02-24 01:00 pm (UTC)Re: Floreat Etonia....
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