a spy among friends ben macintyre review

This dramatisation is based on the 2015 book by Ben Macintyre. It included a fascinating interview with Philby’s widow, Rufina, who recalled a pathetically insecure old man fearful of letting her out of his sight: the traitor fearing betrayal, perhaps. The story was fairly comprehensively explored in The Spy Who Went Into the Cold, a documentary for Storyville in 2013. In this telling, both MI5 and the KGB train a searchlight into their mysterious quasi-bromance, with its opaque history of unplumbed motives and moot alliances. The prelude to his escape was a four-day grilling from his old Secret Intelligence Service friend and colleague Nicholas Elliott ( Damian Lewis).

The latest to try on the mask(s) is Guy Pearce in A Spy Among Friends (ITVX), which spins round Philby’s flit from Beirut in 1963 under the quivering nostrils of MI6. It must be quite a challenge for an actor to pick a way into such a slippery nullity. From every new angle glint more questions. Hunting for the real Philby among the false fronts and double lives is like wandering around a maze uncertain if you’re looking for the entrance or the exit. Like other enigmas – see also Albert Speer – the story of a third man with two paymasters and four wives can never be definitively told, the case never closed. In a sense the lid will never close over the coffin of England’s most notorious traitor. (You can watch the footage for yourself in Adam Curtis’s compendious forthcoming BBC series about the death rattle of communism.) The casket, in the Russian style, was open, enabling his widow to lean in for a final caress of that infamous poker face.

Nothing illustrated the length of the journey made by Kim Philby from West to East, from British mandarin to Soviet icon, than his funeral.

A spy among friends ben macintyre review