Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York: Crown, 2014), 384 pp., $27.00.

IT SHOULD be easy for the intelligence community to spot potential traitors early on, except for one problem. Many of the attributes that make for a potential traitor are the same ones that make for a successful agent, most notably a capacity for deception and the ability to lead two or more conflicting lives at the same time, a truly Freudian form of multitasking most normal people are incapable of. Anyone who has encountered practicing or retired spooks over the years—and as a native Washingtonian and three-time presidential aide I’ve certainly been exposed to my share—will be familiar with certain widely shared professional characteristics. Among these are a love of the mysterious for its own sake, a fascination with real or imagined conspiracies, the conviction that a straight line is almost never the shortest distance between a problem and a solution, and both a talent and a taste for juggling multiple identities—usually out of necessity, but sometimes for the sheer pleasure of it.

The exceptions to this ambiguous and often-conflicted mind-set—and fortunately there are many of them—are skilled espionage professionals with a secure sense of self, firm values and loyalty, and a willingness to serve their country in ways they may sometimes find distasteful, just as a good cop routinely must deal with sordid people and disgusting behavior while fighting crime.

Potential traitors, on the other hand, seem to be drawn to deceit for its own sake. Fooling those around them—usually including their own families, friends and loved ones—and being the secret sharers of forbidden knowledge gives them a much-yearned-for feeling of superiority. In the case of double agents such as the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, the desire to outshine distant, scornful and, in some cases, abusive fathers may have lent treason extra appeal: a symbolic act of patricide on a national scale. Such may have also been the case with Kim Philby, whose taste for betrayal and talent for lying made him perhaps the most successful double agent in modern British history. He has certainly been the most written about, with well-respected observers like Anthony Cave Brown and Patrick Seale, along with many others, weighing in at length on the subject. It is therefore understandable that, in A Spy Among Friends, British author-journalist Ben Macintyre set out to write “not another biography of Kim Philby” but instead a description of “a particular sort of friendship that played an important role in history, told in the form of a narrative. It is less about politics, ideology, and accountability than personality, character, and a very British relationship that has never been explored before.”

Herein lies both the strength and weakness of this generally sound and highly readable tale of friendship and betrayal. By trying to fit the story of Philby’s treachery into a neatly novelistic structure, the author occasionally lets art trump historical perspective. Philby’s story, as told by Macintyre, is all about friendship betrayed—especially the betrayal of Philby’s two most important professional friends, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott and the CIA’s James Angleton. Elliott, who might best be described as an armed, dangerous version of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, emerges as a thoroughly decent, delightful character in over his head. One of Macintyre’s more enjoyable passages describes the family background that predestined Elliott for high government service:

The Elliotts were part of the backbone of the empire; for generations, they had furnished military officers, senior clerics, lawyers, and colonial administrators who ensured that Britain continued to rule the waves—and much of the globe in between. One of Elliott’s grandfathers had been the lieutenant governor of Bengal; the other, a senior judge. Like many powerful English families, the Elliotts were also notable for their eccentricity. Nicholas’s great-uncle Edgar famously took a bet with another Indian Army officer that he could smoke his height in cheroots every day for three months, then smoked himself to death in two. Great-aunt Blanche was said to have been “crossed in love” at the age of twenty-six and thereafter took to her bed, where she remained for the next fifty years. Aunt Nancy firmly believed that Catholics were not fit to own pets since they did not believe animals had souls. The family also displayed a profound but frequently fatal fascination with mountain climbing. Nicholas’s uncle, the Reverend Julius Elliott, fell off the Matterhorn in 1869, shortly after meeting Gustave Flaubert, who declared him “the epitome of the English gentleman.”

“Eccentricity,” Macintyre concludes, “is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.” Even Philby, in an otherwise snide report to one of his early Soviet handlers, paid grudging tribute to “MR NICHOLAS ELLIOTT. 24, 5ft 9in. Brown hair, prominent lips, black glasses.” Philby called Elliott “ugly and rather pig-like to look at,” but also added, “Good brain, good sense of humor.”

Angleton, the other great betrayed friend of Philby’s career, was a loopy Anglophile. In Macintyre’s words, he was “the product of a romantic and unlikely marriage between Hugh Angleton, a soldier-turned-cash register salesman, and Carmen Mercedes Moreno, an uneducated, fiery, and exceptionally beautiful woman from Nogales, Arizona, with a mixture of Mexican and Apache blood.”

Born in Boise, Idaho, Angleton accompanied his parents to Italy, where his father ran the Milan office of the National Cash Register Company. He was then sent off to England for a “proper” public-school education that, according to Macintyre, left him with “courteous manners, a sense of fair play, an air of cultivated eccentricity, and a faint English accent that never left him. The boy from Idaho was already ‘more English than the English,’ a disguise he would wear, along with his Savile Row suits, for the rest of his life.”

Philby couldn’t have asked for two more ideal pushovers than Angleton and Elliott. Both were completely taken in by him despite the fact that, in most respects, they were competent, conscientious intelligence officers. They simply could not imagine the possibility that their trusted, respected friend and mentor was a traitor, especially one who had made fools of them both.

EMPHASIZING THE uniquely English aspects of Philby’s case, his taste for London club life, his superficial, pipe-smoking tweediness and the way he exploited upper-class solidarity, Macintyre tends to gloss over the more generic similarities Philby’s treason bears to the betrayals of other Cold War traitors. Those people came from a variety of social milieus, but were all motivated by the same mixture of vanity, innate deceitfulness, and pleasure derived from duping friends, colleagues and loved ones, all the while playing what they thought of as a brilliant solo game. Almost always, a large dose of megalomania was involved, along with the traitor’s conviction that he was a far smarter, more meritorious man than any of his colleagues or superiors. The social backdrop can vary, but the traitorous personality type—vain, capable of total detachment from normal emotional bonds and with no sense of accountability to a higher moral authority—is consistent. This is true whether the culprit is a supposedly devout Catholic attendee of daily mass like the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, an inconspicuous code clerk like the U.S. Navy’s John Anthony Walker, who successfully spied for the Soviets from 1968 to 1985, or a boozy, big-spending mediocrity like Aldrich Ames, a second-generation CIA hack who blew the covers—and thereby caused the deaths—of some of his agency’s most important intelligence assets behind the Iron Curtain. Philby was merely a more polished model.

Still, by concentrating on the intricacies of the old boys’ network that dominated British intelligence throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, Macintyre helps us to understand why it was so easy for Philby to get away with so much treason for so long. It also explains why far more inept British traitors like Guy Burgess (a roaring drunk) and Donald Maclean (a guilt-ridden and violent neurotic) long managed to escape detection. Ironically, the best cover Burgess had going for him was his own outrageous behavior; friends and foes alike could scarcely believe he was able to hold onto his day job, much less function as a double agent for the Soviets. Macintyre excels at showing us how and why such betrayals were possible in their particular time and place; it tells us less about the qualities of the individuals that attracted them to treason.

Once they chose their course, they could take advantage of the culture of privileged entitlement to gain free entry into the world they sought to betray. But why did they want to betray it? For generations, sons of the upper-middle class and gentry who went to the right schools and played cricket together had run not only British intelligence, but also the army, the navy, the Church of England, Parliament, the banking world, and the colonial and civil services. As members of that class, men like Philby were protected by an invisible coat of class armor. Their overwhelmingly loyal colleagues (and social peers) simply could not conceive of “one of their own” ever committing acts of base betrayal they themselves considered unthinkable. And the fact is that, overall, British espionage and counterespionage running on this unwritten honor code worked remarkably well throughout the heyday of the empire.

It was the very strength of the British ruling class—its ability to turn out successive generations of tough, resourceful and largely honorable soldiers and statesmen like the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, the elder and younger Pitts, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone and even an exotic transplant like the Jewish-born (but hastily christened) Benjamin Disraeli, along with legions of dim but dutiful upper-class twits—that left it prone to betrayal from within once old certainties and loyalties began to falter. If there was a measure of truth in Wellington’s apocryphal quote that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton, the world—and the confident worldview—that victory had represented began to dissolve a century later in the mud and slaughter of World War I. At war’s end, the superficial structure of Britain’s ruling class still stood and the empire it ruled over was larger than ever. But the unquestioning faith of the governing class in itself and its imperial mission had been shaken to the core. Leaders like Winston Churchill, old enough to remember Victorian glory at its height, remained true believers. But the generation that had served in the trenches, both as officers and privates, would never be quite so certain again. And a few of them—along with some of their younger siblings—would trade their blind faith in the old imperial order for blind faith in the heroic myth of the new Soviet order.

THERE IS no evidence that Kim Philby had a real working knowledge of Marxism-Leninism or that he even found it very interesting. But he seems to have viewed the Kremlin as an elect—the sanctum sanctorum of a new elite, an exclusive, secret circle that would one day rule the whole world. And, at an early age, he decided he wanted to join it. Recruited to Marxism at Cambridge and clandestinely married to an Austrian Communist he met on a visit to Vienna just after college, Philby’s gift for duplicity served him well. He won an award for bravery from Francisco Franco as a foreign correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War, though he secretly supported the Communist-backed Spanish loyalists.

Thanks to his Cambridge degree and his father, Harry St. John Philby—a distinguished if highly eccentric savant, Arabist and imperial adventurer with strong establishment connections—Kim had all of the social assets needed for entry into the pre–World War II British intelligence establishment. Once in, there was no stopping him. By the time World War II was over, Philby had been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime services—alongside a secret medal from the Soviets—and was “increasingly seen by his colleagues in British intelligence as a man marked out for great things.” His standing was best summed up by the historian and former intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper:

I looked around at the part-time stockbrokers and retired Indian policemen, the agreeable epicureans from the bars of White’s and Boodle’s, the jolly, conventional ex-Navy officers and the robust adventurers from the bucket shop; and then I looked at Philby. . . . He alone was real. I was convinced that he was destined to head the service.

But, then and later, judging what was “real” was never Trevor-Roper’s strong suit. In his later years, in return for a hefty retainer, he would “authenticate” a set of clumsily forged Hitler diaries, once more mistaking a fake for the real thing.

By the time Philby was finally exposed and fled to the Soviet Union in 1963, he had wrecked the lives of his second and third wives as well as the career and mental health of James Angleton. Even in Soviet exile he maintained his flair for betrayal:

Philby rekindled his friendship with Donald Maclean and his wife, Melinda, and the two exiled couples were naturally thrown together. Maclean spoke fluent Russian and had been given a job analyzing British foreign policy. He often worked late. Philby and Melinda started going to the opera and then on shopping trips together. In 1964 Eleanor [Philby’s third wife, who had accompanied him into exile, although she had played no part in his treason] returned to the United States to renew her passport and see her daughter [from a previous marriage]. In her absence Kim Philby and Melinda Maclean started an affair. It was a fitting liaison: Philby was secretly sleeping with the wife of an ideological comrade and cheating on his own wife, repeating once again the strange cycle of friendship and betrayal that defined his world.

It is comforting to know that by the time he died in a Moscow hospital on May 11, 1988, Philby must have realized that he had joined the wrong club and bet on the losing team. The Berlin Wall hadn’t come down yet, but the old Soviet order was crumbling all around him.

Yet it is just possible that, in his closing Moscow years, Kim Philby chalked up one more win for his side. In a 1986 conversation with John le Carré, himself an MI6 veteran, Nicholas Elliott, who had survived his friendship with Philby less singed than most, offered a number of useful insights into his erstwhile friend and betrayer, all recounted by le Carré in a highly amusing afterword to A Spy Among Friends. Speculating on what kind of advice Philby had given his Soviet hosts, Elliott was emphatic:

One of the things Philby has told them is to polish up their goons. Make ’em dress properly, smell less. Sophisticated. They’re a totally different-looking crowd these days. Smart as hell, smooth, first-class chaps. Philby’s work, that was, you bet your boots.

Who knows? Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation’s leading former KGB agent, may be the living embodiment of Kim Philby’s legacy of betrayal.

Aram Bakshian Jr. is a contributing editor to The National Interest and served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan.