A Monster Unmasked: Ben Macintyre's Look Back At Kim Philby's 'My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy'

Ben Macintyre, the London Times columnist and author of Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal, and A Spy Among Us: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a look back at British traitor Kim Philby's My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy on the 50th anniversary of the book's original publication.  

For many years after the publication of My Silent War, it was rumoured that the autobiography of Kim Philby had been ghostwritten by the KGB, and that the last published words of Britain’s most notorious spy were not his at all. The rumour was not true. No one but an upper-class, public school-educated, waspish and embittered English spook could have achieved the level of eloquent vitriol packed into the pages of this delightful book.

Written in 1968, five years after Philby boarded a Soviet freighter in Beirut and fled to Moscow, My Silent War is a blend of fact and fiction, part history and part propaganda, at times devastatingly honest and in others wholly mendacious. It tells the story of Philby’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, his meteoric rise through the ranks of MI6 and a 30-year career as a spy inside the British establishment, betraying his colleagues, friends, wives and family, and sending hundreds, perhaps thousands to their deaths.

He evinces a chilling insouciance over the anti-communist agents slaughtered in Albania as a direct consequence of his betrayal. “They knew the risk they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union . . . I have no regrets.”

… Philby began his espionage career as a true communist believer, but over time his motivations evolved: he became addicted to the adventure, the romance, the lying, the drug of infidelity; he insisted he was right because he could not bear to imagine he might have been wrong. Unlike many other British communist converts, he never admitted the brutal reality of the Stalinist state he served, even though, as a senior MI6 officer, he was uniquely placed to know the truth. He chose to ignore it. This is the credo of a fundamentalist, sublimely indifferent to the suffering and death he had caused.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-my-silent-war-the-autobiography-of-a-spy-by-kim-philby-a-monster-unmasked-ldxqqrrgf  

Next Up, 007 Sniffs The Undertaker’s Wind

Ben Macintyre, a London Times columnist and author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, and A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a clever and amusing column on what title the James Bond film producers will use for the next Bond film.

Daniel  Craig is to be paid $25 million for playing James Bond in the forthcoming film, which raises the 64,000-dollar question: what title to choose for 007’s next outing, his 25th?

The selection of a new Bond film title has become a familiar ritual of world culture that comes around every three or four years, surrounded by artificial mystery, simultaneously silly and commercially significant. It is also very tricky, because the titles are running out.

Ian Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and nine short stories. There are just four short stories left that have not been made into films, all of which came from arcane corners of the novelist’s brain.

Risico, a story in the 1960 collection For Your Eyes Only, is Italian for risk, or a Dutch word meaning peril as in “Je loopt het risico te vallen”: You run the risk of falling. It doesn’t quite have the ring of Skyfall.

The Hildebrand Rarity was first published in Playboy, and refers to a fictional species of fish hunted by the criminal tax dodger Milton Krest: “A unique member of the squirrelfish family . . . caught by Professor Hildebrand of the University of Witwatersrand off Chagrin Island in the Seychelles, April 1925.” As a film title, The Hildebrand Rarity might cause as much bafflement among Bond fans as Quantum of Solace.

… The film-makers will probably have to fall back on the newer species of fabricated Bond titles (nine of the last 12), which sound pithy, glamorous, dramatic, often contain a reference to death and usually mean nothing at all.

In the Piers Brosnan era, the titles veered close to self-parody, by eliding a death reference with a familiar catchphrase. After Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, and A View to a Kill, the possibilities seemed endless: Once Bitten Twice Dead? You Only Die Twice, Tomorrow? Shaken, Not Dead?

The title of A View to a Kill was so odd (and grammatically dubious) that scriptwriters felt obliged to make some sense of it during an exchange between the villain Zorin (Christopher Walken) and his henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones). Her: “What a View!” Him: “To a Kill.”

The philosophical-sounding and essentially meaningless Bond film title reached its finest expression with The World is Not Enough (the Bond family motto, apparently derived from Alexander the Great’s epitaph). With Skyfall, the franchise returned to the blunt, compound-word titles of Thunderball and Goldfinger.

Fleming himself struggled with titles. His second novel, Live and Let Die, was originally entitled The Undertaker’s Wind, a reference to the wind that blows across Jamaica (where Fleming wrote). He thought it sounded romantic and eerie. It actually sounds like a mortician with flatulence. If he had stuck to his guns, the book would probably have bombed, and there would be no James Bond as we know him.

Dr No was originally The Wound Man. Goldfinger started out as The Richest Man in the World. From a View to a Kill was first entitled The Rough with the Smooth. The working title of For Your Eyes Only was Man’s Work, which definitely would not go down well in Hollywood today. He also toyed with calling it Death Leaves an Echo, which is rather good.

Fleming found it particularly hard to settle on a title for his third novel, about an evil financier who threatens to destroy London with a £10 million rocket. He rejected Wide of the Mark, Mondays are Hell, Out of the Clear Sky, and The Inhuman Element, before finally settling on Moonraker.

The character of James Bond was a mixture of the various adventurers Fleming had encountered while working in naval intelligence: “a compound of the secret agents and commando types I met during the war”. In the same way, his titles were gathered, magpie-like, from whatever came to hand. Diamonds are Forever was a direct lift from the De Beers advertising campaign slogan dreamed up by copywriter Frances Gerety in 1947. “You only live twice” was a phrase coined by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/next-up-007-sniffs-the-undertaker-s-wind-q9zvj3rg8 

You can also read my Crime Beat interview with Ben Macintyre via the below link::

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/crime-beat-column-q-with-ben-macintye.html 

Even in Death, The Spy Kim Philby Serves The Kremlin’s Purposes

Andrew Higgins at the New York Times offers a piece on how Russia is honoring the British Cold War spy and traitor Kim Philby.

MOSCOW — Bereft of friends in Western capitals since its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia is celebrating the memory of the British K.G.B. spy Kim Philby, a stalwart supporter who stood by it through thick and thin – and spent the last 25 years of his life in Moscow, often drunk and miserable but still loyal.

Mr. Philby, a notorious double-agent who defected to Moscow in 1963 and died there in 1988, was recently honored with a portrait in a Russian state art gallery and is celebrated in a soon-to-be broadcast film on state television.

The adulation has now reached a new level with the opening of an exhibition in Moscow on the life and work of the best-known of the so-called Cambridge Five Soviet spies in Britain. It portrays Mr. Philby as an unwavering Russian patriot, and it includes the first public display of some of the more than 900 secret British documents he passed on to the K.G.B., the Soviet-era spy agency.

The burst of tributes to Mr. Philby reinforces an escalating campaign by the Kremlin to burnish the image of the K.G.B., the former employer of President Vladimir V. Putin and many of his senior officials, and to make loyalty to the state the bedrock of Russia’s resurgence as a great power.

Portraying Russia’s secret police officers as selfless public servants rather than lawless goons, however, has sometimes been an uphill struggle. Their public image took a big hit this week when Russian media reported that a Mercedes car driven by an officer in the Federal Security Service, the successor to the domestic branch of the K.G.B., had rammed a traffic police officer at high speed in central Moscow and killed him.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/world/europe/russia-kim-philby-spy-defector.html 

You can also read a review of Ben Macintyre's outstanding book on Kim Philby via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/a-spy-among-friends-kim-philby-and.html 

The Spy Files: How Kim Philby And Anthony Blunt Turned On Their Fellow 'Cambridge' Agents

Tom Whitehead and Tom Morgan at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on the notorious Cambridge spy ring.

Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt turned on their fellow “Cambridge” agents in a desperate attempt to deflect suspicion from themselves as the Soviet spy ring first began to be exposed, files reveal for the first time.

Philby came under immediate suspicion when his associates Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean suddenly fled to Russia in May 1951 as the net closed in on the latter as a Soviet mole.

Burgess had been sent by Philby to tip Maclean off but was not supposed to go with him to Russia and when he did it turned the spotlight on Philby, a senior MI6 agent.

But within days of their disappearance, and with doubts still lingering over Burgess, Philby wrote to the head of MI6 suggesting he had all “the essential requirements of an espionage agent”.

Similarly, Blunt went to see the deputy director general of MI5 on a fishing exercise to see what they knew of Maclean and also pointed the finger at Burgess.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11949108/kim-philby-anthony-blunt-cambridge-spies.html 

Note: To learn more about Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring I suggest you read Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. 

Kim Philby: A Traitor On Honeymoon

 

Guy Walters offers a piece in the British newspaper the Telegraph on newly published photos of British spy and traitor Kim Philby living in the Soviet Union.

At first glance, it looks like an official news photograph from yesteryear. The figure in the middle is perhaps a politician, visiting a dreary industrial complex, his secretary holding some flowers presented to her by the plant’s management.

But look closely again, especially at that central figure. Unlike the other men, he is not wearing a suit, but a jacket in Prince of Wales check. His smile is uncertain, and his features, softer than those of the burly men around him, suggest that he is a foreigner.
 

He most certainly was a long way from home, as the Bratsk Hydroelectric Station in Siberia is exactly 3,782 miles from London. When the picture was taken, in the summer of 1972, he had not been home for more than a decade, and at the age of 60, knew that he was unlikely ever to return.

The reason was quite simple: he was a traitor, the worst the United Kingdom has produced for the past century - perhaps the worst it has ever had. In his adopted home of the Soviet Union, he called himself Andrei Fedorovich Fyodorov, whereas the world knew him better by a name that continues both to repel and to fascinate – Kim Philby. These never before published pictures show him on honeymoon in Siberia with his Russian wife Rufina - and a couple of KGB minders.

“Glimpses of Philby’s life after defection are unusual, and are read like tea leaves by espionage historians,” says the spy writer and historian, Jeremy Duns. “These photos are a final glimpse of his ‘normal life’ behind the Iron Curtain before he went into a far darker place.”

You can read the rest of the piece and see the Philby photos via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11485222/Kim-Philby-A-traitor-on-honeymoon.html

You can also learn more about Philby by reading Andrew Lycett's Telegraph review of Ben Macintyre's outstanding book, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/ben-macintyres-spy-among-friends-kim.html 

Covert Inspiration: Sly Instances of Kim Philby On Film

Ben Macintyre, author of A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a look at the films based on Kim Philby at Word & Film.

Kim Philby, the most notorious and successful spy of modern times, has inspired myriad films for cinema and television. Some are broadly factual, others factual, and most others somewhere in between - which is appropriate, since the gray area between truth and untruth, reality and deception, is where Philby spent his entire life.

Philby's long and ongoing role in film is easy to explain, for his is the essential spy story: the man who appears, on the outside, to be the perfect English gentleman, but on the inside is someone else, playing for the other side, smiling and betraying. The moral uncertainty here is irresistible to dramatists, going all the way back to Shakespeare, who noted man's ability to "smile and smile and be a villain." Philby's very charm was his armor.

The Philby story, and its numerous spin-offs, enables filmmakers to ask the essential questions: Who do you trust? What is friendship? Is it possible to love your betrayer?

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wordandfilm.com/2014/07/covert-inspiration-sly-instances-kim-philby-film/

Kim Philby And the Other Cambridge University Soviet Spies Were Traitors With Blood On Their Hands

Dominic Sandbrook at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a response to playwright Alan Bennett's defense of the Cambridge Five spy ring.

One day in the late Eighties, during the dying years of Soviet communism, the spy novelist John le Carre was in Moscow for a literary reception.

In a quiet moment, a Russian journalist asked if he would like to come and meet one his fans. The admirer's name, he said, was Kim Philby - the most notorious traitor in modern British history, who had lived in Moscow since his defection in 1963.

Le Carre did not hesitate. He said no. Philby, he later explained, was 'a thoroughly bad lot, a naturally bent man'. He had lied to his friends, his family and his colleagues. He had betrayed his country to one of the cruelest regimes in the modern history. And he sent dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. 

For Le Carre, to shake hands with such a man would have been unconscionable. 

I thought of Le Carre yesterday when I read the playwright Alan Bennett's extraordinary defense of the Cambridge Five - Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt, as well as Philby himself.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2622003/DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-Philby-Co-traitors-blood-hands-For-Alan-Bennett-defend-utterly-grotesque.html

You can also read Ben Macintyre's new book about Kim Philby,  A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal.

Note: Although I enjoyed John le Carre's early spy thrillers, the later ones are far too anti-American and politically shrill for my taste. However, I have to say that I admire le Carre for his refusal to met Philby in Moscow.

Ben Macintyre Discusses His Book "A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal"

The Telegraph's web site offers a video interview with Ben Macintyre, author of a new book on the most notorious traitor and spy of the 20th Century, Kim Philby.

You can watch the video clip via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10719508/Ben-Macintyre-book-interview-A-Spy-Among-Friends.html