A review of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and spying in the Twentieth Century, by Phillip Knightley. Edited to add: When following this link please note the concerns addressed by the next post. Heat and electronic intoxication may have prevented me from finding a better source for a review.

A short bio from the BBC site:

quote:

---

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was a senior officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) for ten years, but was actually an agent of the Soviet KGB. This gives him a claim to have been one of the most successful spies in the history of espionage.

Philby was the son of the famous Arabist St John Philby, and was born in India, where his father was serving as a magistrate. He was nicknamed Kim, after the hero of Kipling's novel, when he began speaking Punjabi before English. He was recruited to the KGB while still a student at Cambridge, and along with other KGB recruits - Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt - from the same university, eventually became infamous as a member of 'the Cambridge spy ring'.

He rose to be the SIS's liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and the FBI, before he fell under suspicion in 1951 and was recalled to London. There he successfully resisted interrogation. When the SIS refused to reinstate him, he went to the Lebanon as a freelance intelligence agent, under cover as a journalist.

In 1963 testimony from a Soviet defector clinched the case against Philby, and a fellow SIS officer went to Beirut to persuade him to confess to his work for the KGB. Instead, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter and fled to Moscow. There he had a miserable time at first, because the KGB was uncertain whether he was a British intelligence plant.

He was rehabilitated in the early 1980s, became a consultant to the KGB, lectured to young KGB officers and received various Soviet awards and honours. He wrote My Silent War, an account of his life as a KGB penetration agent, and appeared on Soviet television in a programme honouring the British author Graham Greene, his former wartime colleague in the SIS.

In 1988 Philby consented to a week-long interview with The Sunday Times, in which he justified his treachery to his native country by saying that when he made his commitment to the KGB, he believed that the western democracies were too weak to resist the rise of Fascism in Europe and that only the Soviet Union would be able to defeat it.

The release of KGB files after the end of the Cold War cast doubt on Philby's value to Moscow during the years he worked for the Soviet Union. It appeared that many senior KGB officers had discounted his information, arguing that it was 'too good to be true'. Philby never knew any of this because he died, happy and content with his fourth wife, a Russian, Rufina Pukhova, before the collapse of the Communist regime he loved.

---

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: blake 3:17 ]

Incidentally, I'd be leery about referring overmuch to the IHR website. As you can see on their main page, they tend to use scare quotes around the word Holocaust.

I read half and then skimmed t'other half, and while the guy's conclusions are ok, it's not going to turn anyone on to either Philby or Knightley, is it?

But I always love to revisit the story, Blake.

I haven't read this later book of Knightley's, but the Sunday Times Insight collaboration (1968) that 'lance refers to does recognize and treat seriously some issues of class -- ie, the famous four were not just Communists but also upper-class Brits, driven at least partly by what was to them the horror of the rise of the U.S., and even of creeping democracy at home in the UK.

So that contradiction is central to their story, and I've always felt that both Greene and Le Carre got it right.

I don't know how anyone is now assessing the spies' "success." But I am convinced that a lot of people died, blake -- Philby and the boys did betray agents in Eastern Europe who had gone to work in good faith for either the UK or the U.S., and those people died.

Philby and co. seem to have believed that their higher calling justified that. Reading about them, reading about people who could believe that, who could murder long-distance for that belief, cured me of ever wanting to delude myself that way.

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

quote:

---

...the famous four were not just Communists but also upper-class Brits...

---

Though at the time the book was published, it was only "the famous three." Anthony Blunt hadn't yet been exposed as the "fourth man" everyone had been speculating about for decades.

As for the "upper-class Brit" thing... if I remember right, the story in The Philby Conspiracy had it that the last words of St. John Philby, Kim's father, were "God, I'm bored."

*repeat*

[Edited because 'Guy Bennett,' while presumbably a lovely person with a number of attractive qualities, is not the peron I meant to reference.]

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: Tape_342 ]

Edit:

quote:

---

Guy Bennett's days at Eton-- and the wellsprings of his nonconformity-- are well portrayed in the Merchant/Ivory film Another Country. One of my favorites.

---

I'd forgotten that. You're right, excellent movie. But don't you mean Guy Burgess?

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: 'lance ]

quote:

---

Tape, I was already hooked on the story from reading your link (so Bennett is Burgess?), but then I slowly figured out that Colin is Colin Firth?!? Colin Firth young?!?

Oh, Tape. Do you realize that Colin Firth is going to be in this very city this week? Can you imagine how I have had to restrain self?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by 'lance:
I'd forgotten that. You're right, excellent movie. But don't you mean Guy Burgess?

---

But he is obviously meant to evoke memories of the real-life Burgess. Well: he does for me, anyway.

quote:

---

And don't you dare tell her, either.

---

No fear. Besides, they're filming another X-Men movie here. So she's been staking out Robson Square in hopes of seeing... Patrick Stewart.

quote:

---

No, no, Tape and 'lance: the name of the character in the movie is indeed Bennett. The movie is fiction, after all.
But he is obviously meant to evoke memories of the real-life Burgess. Well: he does for me, anyway.

But in the movie, he is Bennett.

---

Right, but... well I guess there were two ways of understanding the sentence "Guy Bennett's days at Eton ... are well portrayed in the Merchant/Ivory..."

Nemmine.

To the topic: Alan Bennett (huh) makes lots of references to the famous four in his book Writing Home, partly because he wrote a play about Blunt (Single Spies, I think). I'll look them up tonight.

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: 'lance ]

In The Sword and the Shield, a wide-ranging history of the KGB written from a stolen archive of documents, after the Cambridge lads were exposed KGB officers spent the rest of the organization's history looking in vain for a source that was so juicy. They reorganized the agency a dozen times trying to position it to foster spies like those, to no avail.

PS: If you get Firth, can I have Rupert Everett?

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: Tape_342 ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by 'lance:
Alan Bennett (huh) makes lots of references to the famous four in his book Writing Home, partly because he wrote a play about Blunt (Single Spies, I think).

---

quote:

---

PS: If you get Firth, can I have Rupert Everett?

---

Well, my first thought was Sure, because I'd never heard before of Rupert Everett. But then I ran him through google images.

quote:

---

I recall watching a movie on video, based on Bennett's play. I think the title of the movie was A Question of Attribution.

---

You're probably right, I'm going from memory. He definitely did a play called Single Spies, though. It might have been about Burgess.

quote:

---

Now. To figure out the right approach to Colin. Do you think that fainting in public is a touch too obvious? How about Jennifer Ehle period costume? (He had an affair with her, you know. I mean, you could just tell, couldn't you?)

---

Beats me, but mediaeval French costume might work (have you seen The Advocate? If not, see it).

Edit:

Now, see here, y'all. We're drifting (I know that's should really be a transitive verb, but I'm not at my best today) blake's perfectly good thread.

[ 13 September 2005: Message edited by: 'lance ]

quote:

---

But I always love to revisit the story, Blake.

---

What part do you love? While probably quite stupid, Philby made a devil's pact that he had to see and live through many major historical, familial, and personal crises.

His alcoholism and other eccentricities are not surprising. The tensions and contradictions must have been crushing.

Bill, if you're out there, this is George. Everything is forgiven.

quote:

---

(...well, almost everything.)

---

I was about to say.

quote:

---

Originally posted by blake 3:17:
Sorry for the crummy link. Knightley's book isn't all that great. just a decent overview of the idiocy of espionage. One of my favourite parts is about the CIA tailing the KGB in Tehran while the revolution is taking place.

What part do you love? While probably quite stupid, Philby made a devil's pact that he had to see and live through many major historical, familial, and personal crises.

His alcoholism and other eccentricities are not surprising. The tensions and contradictions must have been crushing.

Pravda on Philby's life in Moscow.

---

blake, sorry for the Le Carre games -- I just can't help it, and obviously a lot of others can't either. It's Tinker Tailor -- the book is just so brilliant, and then, as Le Carre himself admitted, the film is its equal.

But even before that, yes, I found the story compelling. Why? I don't know: I think because it really dates back to the interwar period, the thirties, a time of wildly swirling contradictions.

I mean, it is curious to see that the leading Communists of the day, some of them, were aristos, or at least the heirs to a dying imperial culture, reacting to a changing world sometimes out of sheer snobbery.

There is a history yet to be written that pins down all the ironies and contradictions, although I really do think that Greene and Le Carre have already given us the honest fictions.

quote:

---

Dang. Nobody has A Question of Attribution. Perhaps I'll try the Library. I must see that movie.

---

It might be something you'd have to order off the BBC website, if they do such things. (Bennett says somewhere that many of his TV plays were only broadcast once).

Question for obscurantist and skdadl: the Question of Attribution and Single Spies you saw, were they feature films, or TV plays?

Edit: sorry blake, promise to post something actually about Philby soonest.

[ 14 September 2005: Message edited by: 'lance ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by 'lance:
Question for obscurantist and skdadl: the Question of Attribution and Single Spies you saw, were they feature films, or TV plays?

---

I rented A Question of Attribution many years ago from the video store. It looks like it was made for television.

They had everything. Someone would drop a mention of a film like Bennett's in the Grope; I would phone those guys; and there it would be.

They are gone now, of course.

ronb, did you know that Le Carre himself was so smitten with Guinness's performances that he admitted, in a dedication in the last Smiley novel (remind me, someone), that he himself could no longer see his own character except as Guinness?

I think that is extraordinary, from a novelist. The menacing owl, indeed.

[ 14 September 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

quote:

---

Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution (BBC, tx. 20/10/1991) is a companion piece to his An Englishman Abroad (BBC, 29/11/1983), also directed by John Schlesinger. In 1988 the two were performed together as one-act plays under the overall title Single Spies, with Bennett himself playing ex-KGB spy Anthony Blunt.

---