Macintyre said, ‘being able to explore
Kim Philby’s abandoned and derelict
apartment in Beirut was probably
the most atmospheric moment of the
research process. I stood on the balcony,
pitted with bullet holes from Lebanon’s
civil war, from which he signalled his
Soviet controller that he needed to flee.
The next day, he absconded to Moscow.’
Macintyre had no access to MI6’s files
about Philby, but he was able to speak
to more than a dozen current or former
intelligence officers. Although MI6 did
not help him in any material way, they
did not stop him. Surprisingly, he was
also able to talk to several former KGB
officers who were, he said, ‘pretty straight’
and keen to tell their side of the story.
The subjects of all these three books –
Eddie Chapman, Kim Philby and Oleg
Gordievsky – produced autobiographies.
But with their omissions, distortions,
inaccuracies and inventions, none of
these can compete with the true stories
of Ben Macintyre.BEAT THE BESTSELLERS
http://www.writers-online.co.uk APRIL 2020important material as he rose up the MI6
hierarchy. The focus of A Spy Among
Friends (2014) is Philby’s close friendship
with Nicholas Elliott, the MI6 officer
whose background and education were
strikingly similar to Philby’s.
Following the defections in 1951 of
Burgess and Maclean (Foreign Office
officials who had also been recruited
as Soviet agents while at Cambridge),
Philby was widely suspected of being the
Third Man who had tipped them off
about their imminent arrest. There was
no proof of his guilt, but in July 1951 he
was forced to resign from MI6. However,
in 1956 he was publicly exonerated and
resumed his earlier career in journalism,
working for the Observer and the
Economist in Beirut; at the same time he
was paid a retainer by MI6 and provided
them (and his Soviet controllers) with
ad hoc intelligence. In January 1963, he
was finally exposed as a Soviet agent. He
escaped from Beirut on a Russian ship
that took him to Odessa, and defected to
Moscow. Nicholas Elliott, his close friend,
was the MI6 officer who confronted
him with the evidence in Beirut.
According to Macintyre, a good many
intelligence officers in both London and
Moscow believe that Philby’s escape was
suspiciously easy and had been tacitly
encouraged by MI6.
The Spy and the Traitor
‘The best true spy story I have ever read,’
said John le Carré. He was talking about
Macintyre’s Cold War tale The Spy and
the Traitor (2018). Oleg Gordievsky
was a senior KGB officer who became a
double agent and for more than a decade
supplied Britain with a stream of high-
quality intelligence from deep inside the
Soviet system. He had grown up close
to the KGB (both his father and his
brother were KGB officers), but became
increasingly disillusioned with Soviet
communism, particularly after the Red
Army’s action in Czechoslovakia in 1968
which put an end to the Prague Spring.
As he rose up the KGB hierarchy
he took extraordinary risks, providing
his British handlers with increasingly
important material. The story culminates
in Gordievsky’s betrayal and his recall to
Moscow, followed by the activation of
an escape plan (code-named Operation
Pimlico), given no more than a 20%
chance of success by the MI5 officer
who devised it, which enabled him to
be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. The
bizarre signal to put this plan into action
was a plastic carrier bag printed with the
red Safeway logo. The gripping escape
is so out-of-this-world that Frederick
Forsyth has said ‘if any spy writer were to
put it in a novel it would not be believed’.How he writes
‘The history of intelligence is opening
up as never before, as more and more
secret material is released into the public
domain,’ says Macintyre. ‘Writing about
real espionage offers an extraordinary
backdrop for exploring all the concepts
that fascinate us in fiction: loyalty,
betrayal, friendship, politics, and love.’
In what he reads and writes, he likes
discretion and modesty, and has ‘an
affection for the stiff upper lip, the
emotion unvoiced, the desire undeclared’.
Detailed, painstaking research is at
the heart of Macintyre’s books. In 2001,
MI5 began the selective release to the
National Archives of previously classified
information that could not damage
national security or embarrass anyone still
living. These declassified archives include
hundreds of pages of documents relating
to Eddie Chapman, and these provided
Macintyre with much of the raw material
for Agent Zigzag. They included reports,
descriptions, diagrams, internal memos,
minutes, letters, photographs, transcripts
of interrogations and wireless intercepts.
These gave Macintyre information
not only about events and people in
the Chapman case, but also about the
minutiae of a spy’s life: Chapman’s
handlers set out to paint a complete
picture of the man, including his feelings,
hopes, fears and contradictions. For
Macintyre, this was a treasure trove of
high-quality material.
The second stage of Macintyre’s
preparation is to talk to as many
appurtenant people as possible. For Agent
Zigzag he interviewed and tapped into
the memories of dozens of people in
Britain, France, Germany and Norway
who had been touched, either directly or
indirectly, by Chapman’s exploits (some
of these sources are named, while others
wished to remain anonymous). For The
Spy and the Traitor, Macintyre made good
use of the extended interviews he was
able to have with Gordievsky.
When it came to A Spy Among Friends,41LISTEN
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