A Spy Among Friends

 A Spy Among Friends” (Six x 60min episodes, 2023, Nick Murphy) is an adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name, covering the uncovering of Kim Philby. I had seen a docudrama a few years ago with the same title, which I thought was excellently done, but, annoyingly, I failed to record it to DVD. So I can’t go back to compare the “drama” bit that coincides – the conversation between Philby and Elliott in Beirut before Philby runs away to Moscow.

I felt this to be a top-class drama. Of the lead characters, Anna Maxwell-Martin is superb as the (fictional) Lily Thomas, questioning Nicolas Elliot (Damian Lewis, whom I think has never been better) about what was *really* talked about Beirut. Guy Pearce wasn’t quite as top-notch as Philby, but it was a ridiculously difficult part to play. In the upper tier of the supporting characters was Adrian Edmondson as Sir Roger Hollis – head of MI5. A wonderful performance, I thought. Stephen Kunken as James Angleton just didn’t come across for me. Once again, Angleton is something of an enigma. But this portrayal didn’t really convince me of anything.

The plot covers two main narratives – the aftermath of Philby’s defection, and the years of friendship between Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby that consisted mainly of Philby pulling the wool over the eyes of the British establishment.

In the first narrative we see Philby escaping to Moscow and then trying to come to terms with it. Pearce attempts to give Philby some depth and some ambiguity, an effort I feel is doomed to failure (a point to which I shall return). Elliott, in his developing interrelationship with Lily Thomas from MI5, also has depth. But whereas Philby’s complexity concealed hidden shallowness, the layers of Elliott, gradually revealed by Lewis like a magician at a magic show, are all too real.

There were criticisms in some quarters that the fictional Lily Thomas, a stroppy lass from Durham who has the nerve to be married to a doctor who not only works for the NHS, but who is also black, was put in as (a) a sop to the “woke” brigade and (b) served to make it look as if the whole of MI5 and MI6 was an old boys’ club from Cambridge and the Establishment in general.

Now, the ‘black husband who works for the NHS, well, yes, it did feel a bit of the time to be a rather artificial addition. But the non-establishment “tough” woman battling against a system which she thought had failed because no-one would suspect a “chap like Philby”, was, I think, spot-on.

It so happens that I am at the moment reading the book “Guy Burgess, The Spy Who Knew Everyone” by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hilbert, and what becomes clear from the reading of this book, the watching of the ITV documentary that accompanied the last episode (which, TBH, I didn’t think was very good) and everything else I have read about the period in question, convinced me of two important things.

The first was that the “old boys network” was in fact deeper and wider than “A Spy Among Friends” indicates. And it was this colossal incompetence among the British “ruling class” that led to the four, five or six “moles” within the British system surviving so long.

That, in itself, was a disgrace. To come back to my feelings about Pearce’s depiction of Philby. One should have zero sympathy for Philby, He was not ambiguous as a character in the slightest. He was addicted to deception (Philby’s “misdirection to the end” is cleverly indicated in the final episode) and didn’t give a shit that he sent thousands to their deaths, including the entire network of potential sympathizers who were in the part of Europe taken over by Russia, and the Albanian nationalists who tried to “invade” their homeland, only to come up against a mass of Soviet weaponry the minute they were on Albanian soil. Philby sent all of these people to their deaths without ever expressing (or feeling) an iota of regret.

Of the others, Burgess was an upper class drunk who survived as long as he did only by pulling strings among his other establishment friends. Donald Maclean, perhaps the only one of the four well-known “villains” for whom I have the slightest midgen of respect, rose through the Foreign Office at least partly because of his education. Indeed, the upper echelons of the Civil Service at the time (particularly the Foreign Office) was almost an extension of Eton or, at a pinch, Harrow and Winchester. And finally there is Blunt, known about since 1963 and yet allowed to carry on.

So, we have a collection of spies (John Cairncross had been caught in the early 1950s but, like the loathsome Blunt, had continued to lie, claiming that cooperation with the Soviets stopped at the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War) who were known about by the establishment, and yet not one of them faced either the British or Amerrican justice systems. They didn’t face American justice because the Americans didn’t get hold of them. And they didn’t face British justice because the people in charge either let them escape, or convinced the people in charge that a prosecution would not be in the public interest.

What in fact they meant was that a prosecution would not be in their interest, because a defence barrister for Burgess or Philby would have been able to expose the gross incompetence of the people running the show, and the fact that this incompetence was compounded by an inability to believe that “one of us” could be spying for the Soviets. Philby, Burgess and Maclean were, I am sure, allowed to get away. In the case of Philby, he was indirectly encouraged to get away. With Blunt and Cairncross, it was swept under the carpet for 16 years in the case of Blunt and nearly 40 years in the case of Cairncross.

And there were probably others. The links between Burgess, Blunt and a number of establishment figures really look as if they went beyond networking and protection because he was “one of our chaps”. “Coincidentally”, the same names crop up again and again in terms of belonging to the same clubs, sharing the same address, being recommended for jobs or (in Burgess’s case) giving reasons why this dissolute drunk should not be sacked. 

After Blunt was exposed in a book that called him “Maurice”, and then by Private Eye, and finally by Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons, he continued to lie, claiming that he had stopped sending secrets to Russia in 1945. He was also (genuinely) surprised that the promise had hade been given in 1963 by his old mates in MI5 had been broken. He seriously thought that he would be able to live out his life in England in peace and as part of the Establishment until he died. Does that display stupidity or arrogance? More the latter, I think. The intrinsic belief that the alumni of the public school system and Oxford/Cambridge were really still in charge of things just never went away. You would have thought that he would have spotted that Margaret Thatcher was not cut from the same cloth as Alec Douglas-Home. (Blunt, by the way, claimed that Home had supported the suppression of the information that Blunt was a spy. In fact, Home was never told. The powers behind the throne (and the throne itself – the Queen *was* told) made sure that the prime minister was not.