![]() ![]() ![]() Macintyre begins near the end, with a boozy Philby being confronted by a friend in intelligence, fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, whom he had betrayed but rather than take Philby to prison or put a bullet in him, by the old-fashioned code, he was essentially allowed to flee to Moscow. ![]() Philby may have been an unlikely prospect, given his upper-crust leanings, but a couple of then-fatal flaws involving his sexual orientation and still-fatal addiction to alcohol, to say nothing of his political convictions, put him in Stalin’s camp. The British intelligence agent was not alone, of course as practiced true-espionage writer Macintyre ( Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, 2012, etc.) notes, more than 200 American intelligence agents became Soviet agents during World War II-“Moscow had spies in the treasury, the State Department, the nuclear Manhattan Project, and the OSS”-and the Brits did their best to keep up on their end. Now pretty well forgotten, Kim Philby (1912-1988) was once a byname for the sort of man who would betray his country for a song. ![]() A tale of espionage, alcoholism, bad manners and the chivalrous code of spies-the real world of James Bond, that is, as played out by clerks and not superheroes. ![]()
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