Spies Like Us

Walter Isaacson’s review of A Spy Among Friends, the latest study of British double agent Kim Philby, is itself a study in meta-narrative. Early on, Isaacson tells us that author Ben Macintyre has no new “startling revelations” about Philby, who led a notorious ring of Cambridge-educated spies and distinguished himself as the best Soviet mole ever to penetrate the U.K.’s intelligence leadership. But the story reads like a novel, says Isaacson, with a nod to McIntyre’s impressive record of “nine previous histories chronicling intrigue and skulduggery.”

We learn from a footnote that Isaacson wrote biographies of Einstein, Kissinger, and Steve Jobs, the last credit immediately conjuring the iconic image of Silicon Valley’s most enigmatic figure staring pensively from the cover. Despite this impressive record, he stays out of Macintyre’s story, and this is how it should be, the reviewer as invisible force moving a resistible object.

Except Isaacson is one of those polymaths we love to read about. Currently CEO of the Aspen Institute, he has been chairman and CEO of CNN, and the managing editor of TIME magazine, making that publication’s 2012 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

This is good stuff.

Isaacson goes on to clarify Mcintyre’s theme, explaining that the narrative of Philby’s relationship with fellow Cantabrigian Nicholas Elliott runs deeper than your ordinary spy story, that those chosen to grace the playing fields of Eton learn early on “to shield themselves from vulnerability…to mask their feelings for one another with jokes, cricket-watching, drinking…”

Philby was one of The Cambridge Four, a group recruited by the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. Isaacson does not mention the feelings two of the other members had for each other. Anthony Blunt, who became Queen Elizabeth’s royal art advisor while passing secrets to the Russians, had an ongoing affair with Guy Burgess. This was one of two habits they picked up at university, the other being an unbridled commitment to Communism.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

The review ends with an anecdote about John LeCarre’s 1986 interview of Elliott, during which he asked if Elliott, a loyal member of the British intelligence group MI6, had ever considered having Philby killed: “To that Elliott gave a disapproving response. ‘My dear chap,’ he said. ‘One of us.’”

Isaacson’s tag line — “What does it really mean to be ‘one of us’?” — resonates, perhaps louder than intended. He will publish another book about Silicon Valley in October, a study of innovators in technology. It’s safe to say that his research uncovered at least one modern-day Kim Philby, an executive or academician freely passing digital secrets to a foreign power in the guise of his employ. The only question is, did he write about it?

(Originally published 7–26–2014)