A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

by Ben Macintyre

Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.

Durnford School in Dorset, a place with a tradition of brutality extreme even by the standards of British prep schools: every morning the boys were made to plunge naked into an unheated pool for the pleasure of the headmaster,

There was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape. Today such an institution would be illegal; in 1925 it was considered “character-forming.” Elliott left his prep school with the conviction that “nothing as unpleasant could ever recur,” an ingrained contempt for authority, and a hardy sense of humor.

Philby tasted the drug of deception as a youth and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life.

Otto’s real name, which Philby would not learn for decades, was Arnold Deutsch. He was the chief recruiter for Soviet intelligence in Britain, the principal architect of what would later become known as the Cambridge spy ring.

Deutsch was on the hunt for long-term, deep-cover, ideological spies who could blend invisibly into the British establishment, for Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence or left dormant forever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.

In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the “inner ring,” the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.

“Of all the passions,” wrote Lewis, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

Flora Solomon’s evidence confirmed that Philby had been a Soviet spy since the early 1930s. He had betrayed his country, his class, and his club; he had lied to MI5 and MI6, the CIA and the FBI, his family, friends, and colleagues; he had deceived everyone, egregiously, brilliantly, for more than thirty years. But no one had been betrayed more comprehensively than Nicholas Elliott.

the Great Philby Myth: the superspy who had bamboozled Britain, divulged her secrets and those of her allies for thirty years, and then escaped to Moscow in a final triumphant coup de théâtre, leaving the wrong-footed dupes of MI6 wringing their hands in dismay. That myth, occasionally spruced up by Russian propaganda and eagerly propagated by Philby himself, has held firm ever since.

But there were some to whom the story of Philby’s daring nighttime getaway did not quite ring true. “Philby was allowed to escape,” wrote Desmond Bristow. “Perhaps he was even encouraged. To have brought him back to England and convicted him as a traitor would have been even more embarrassing; and when they convicted him, could they really have hanged him?”

Far from being caught out by Philby’s defection, “the secret service had actively encouraged him to slip away,” wrote Modin. Many in the intelligence world believed that by leaving the door open to Moscow and then walking away, Elliott had deliberately forced Philby into exile. And they may have been right.