A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Master storyteller Ben Macintyre's most ambitious work to date brings to life the twentieth century's greatest spy story.

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War — while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby's best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.

But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow — and not just Elliott's words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott's unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him — until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.

Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre's best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.

"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

"Superb....Riveting reading." 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

"Macintyre is a superb writer, with an eye for the telling detail as fine as any novelist's...A Spy Among Friends is as suspenseful as any novel, too, as the clues tighten around Philby's guilt." Dallas Morning News

"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." David Ignatius, Washington Post

"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

"Vivid and fascinating...[Macintyre] succeeds admirably." Newsday

"A crisply written tale of a classic intelligence case that remains relevant more than 50 years later." USA Today

"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." The Huffington Post

"Working with colorful characters and an anything-can-happen attitude, Macintyre builds up a picture of an intelligence community chock-full of intrigue and betrayal, in which Philby was the undisputed king of lies...Entertaining and lively, Macintyre's account makes the best fictional thrillers seem tame." Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Gripping and as well-crafted as an episode of Smiley's People, full of cynical inevitability, secrets, lashings of whiskey and corpses." Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Ben Macintyre (Double Cross) offers a fresh look at master double agent Kim Philby....Fans of James Bond will enjoy this look into the era that inspired Ian Fleming's novels, but any suspense-loving student of human nature will be shocked and thrilled by this true narrative of deceit." Shelf Awareness (starred)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLSER - The true story of Kim Philby, the Cold War's most infamous spy, from the master espionage writer and author of The Spy and the Traitor.

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him--like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA's head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton--knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.

Every word uttered in confidence to Philby by his colleagues in the West made its way to Moscow, leading countless missions to their doom and subverting American and British attempts to subdue the Soviet threat. So how was this cunning double-agent finally exposed? In A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre expertly weaves the heart-pounding tale of how Philby almost got away with it all--and what happened when he was finally unmasked.

Based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, this is Ben Macintyre's epic telling of one of the greatest spy stories ever, a Cold War history that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

BEN MACINTYRE is writer-at-large and associate editor of the Times of London. He is the author of Agent Zigzag, The Man Who Would Be King, The Englishman's Daughter, The Napoleon of Crime, and Forgotten Fatherland. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Kate Muir, and their three children.