I recently finished Ben Macintyre's much-recommended and compelling piece of history, “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal,” which focuses mostly on the friendship between Philby and MI6's Nicholas Elliott during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, as Britain fought World War II and then the Cold War, while Philby, a Soviet spy recruited at Cambridge, fought both war for the U.S.S.R.

First, this needs to be a movie, and soon, with Colin Firth as one of the two leads. The section in which Philby is stationed in Washington, D.C., and charming information out of compatriots from MI6, MI5, the CIA and the FBI at Harvey's Ladies' and Gentlemen's Oyster Saloon, while the information he's extracting leads to the deaths of numerous nationalists dropped in to combat communism at home, is already a heart-wrenching montage. Macintyre makes you see it: the drinking and laughter on the one hand, the sudden deaths on rocky cliffs on the other.

Second, you cringe a bit as you read the book, since our side is so badly duped. You think: How could the Soviets have been so much smarter than us?

Answer: They weren't. Macintyre doesn't say it outright, but the biggest blunder in this entire decades-long drama was a Soviet blunder.

That's saying something, by the way, since the West was completely schnookered here. Philby was so Etonian, so Cambridge, so properly British that no one suspected him. (Except for J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover suspected everyone.) And even after they suspected him—this is the beauty of it—and suspended him, and thought of prosecuting him, he was able, years later, to worm his way back into the fold. In the mid-'50s he became an MI6 agent again in Beirut, with a journalist cover. He was only finally “caught” for B.S. reasons. Flora Solomon (who created the welfare dept. at Marks & Spencer, and whose son founded Amnesty International in 1961) fingered him less because he tried to recruit her to the Soviet side at Cambridge in the 1930s than because, as a Zionist, she thought his reporting from Beirut was too pro-Arab. And down he went.

Even so, even in ths tragicomedy of errors, the Soviets committed the biggest error of all. 

By 1951, one of their agents, British diplomat Donald Maclean, had been fingered by the West as a Soviet spy, and to spirit him out of the country they used another British spy, Guy Burgess, who was, according to Macintryre, gay, a heavy drinker, and rarely diplomatic. Two for one, they thought. Bring in Maclean, whom the West was about to pounce on, and Burgess, who, given his lifestyle, could only last so long. 

The problem? Maclean had only tangential connection to Philby, their best spy. But Burgess had actually lived in Philby's house in D.C. So when Burgess defected with Maclean, all eyes turned inevitably toward Philby. 

Think of it. You had Philby stationed at the epicenter of western power, and being groomed for high rank in MI6. Some thought he might lead MI6 someday. He was a star. And the Soviets turned him into a suspect. And his career was never the same. 

BTW: If anyone knows a good book on the Venona code-breaking operation, let me know.