Descrizione
Price: 9,49€
(as of Sep 19, 2024 16:21:13 UTC – Details)
Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War.
Philby’s two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity; of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience; of an ideological battle waged by men with cut-glass accents and well-made suits in the comfortable clubs and restaurants of London and Washington; of male friendships forged, and then systematically betrayed.
With access to newly released MI5 files and previously unseen family papers, and with the cooperation of former officers of MI6 and the CIA, this definitive biography unlocks what is perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War.
ASIN : B00ID7N356
Editore : Bloomsbury Publishing; 1° edizione (3 marzo 2014)
Lingua : Inglese
Dimensioni file : 3252 KB
Da testo a voce : Abilitato
Screen Reader : Supportato
Miglioramenti tipografici : Abilitato
X-Ray : Abilitato
Word Wise : Abilitato
Memo : Su Kindle Scribe
Lunghezza opuscolo : 353 pagine
Giovanni –
Bellissimo libro.
Scrittura godibile, vocabolario ricco e ricostruzione minuziosa dei particolari. Acquistato usato su Amazon, prodotto in ottime condizioni.
Alvin –
Good read
Very well written and thorough. It was Very difficult to put the book down. Interesting history oh Philby and Elliot.
Anna C. –
Interesting story
I liked it. It is unputdownable.
Iacopo Papalini –
Enthralling
Written as a novel, this book tells a story no writer could imagine.The style is impeccable, the language rich and imaginative: the characters are rendered as the real people they are.Will read again sooner or later.
Dino Marino –
una storia di spie e di amici
l’autore descrive bene l’ambiente nel quale è nato questo famoso gruppo di spie che ha infiltrato il servizio ingleseben scritto fluido e pieno di notizie
Angelo Colombo –
insightful and rewarding
A beautiful book, detailed, well written and with vivid characters. A good read For not just modern history enthusiasts but For every reader looking For a lively picture of cold war spying game
Gianluca Carpiceci –
Interesting
The famous Philby story told from an interesting an unconventional angle; the devastating disaster this double-agent and double-man provoked around himself at human level, over and above the one he brought to the western intelligence world. Philby doomed in excess of 25 major intelligence operations and more than 400 agents; but he also reduced to ashes every relationship, even the deepest ones, with the people who surrounded him for a lifetime. The author tells this story i a very compelling way; what keeps me from assigning the 4th star is the fact the the book is somewhat long and lengthy in some of its parts, which makes the reading at times a bit hard.
Maria Letizia Costa –
A Spy among Friends
Un romanzo molto ben documentato e narrato con splendida ambientazione di quel periodo e la conoscenza della cultura “British”.Veramente da non perdere!
Anzelika Meyer –
Life of Kim Philby is a blessed material for a book. This historical novel reminds of an action movie or a spy blockbuster. Ben Macintyre doesnât use a sophisticated composition and presents facts almost in a chronological order. But the story he tells is magnetically terrifying. A brilliant English gentleman becomes a Soviet spy in 1930s and systematically betrays people who otherwise could have played an important role in the post-war Germany, or in the dissolution of the weakening of the USSR during the cold war, or in the balance of power in the Middle East after the foundation of the State Israel. Yet, because of Philby, these people were expunged without traces.Thanks to the research conducted by the author, the book contains a lot of little-known historical facts, colorful biographical details and curious observations. However, there is one question I couldnât answer to myself. How come that such a sharp-minded intelligence officer during 30 (!) years remained a sincere, convinced sympathizer of the Soviet Union?! How coming that having access to information gathered by the UK special services Philby didnât understand that the USSR is just one giant GULAG?!Probably Ben Macintyre didnât mean it, but his book left me with the impression that special services (and in particular MI6) are much less omniscient and competent than one used to think.
R C. –
The story is impressively researched in great detail covering the lives of Philby and the Cambridge five from the mid ’30’s to the mid ’70’s, a span that included seismic changes for the British security services, and of course the nation as a whole. Given that even the protagonists may not have truly recognized their parts and history is always viewed through the historian’s lens this may be as close to the ‘truth’ as we will ever get. Eloquent and moving I can not recommend Ben Macintyre’s book too highly.
Mateus L. R. –
Nascido na Ãndia quando essa ainda atendia por Ãndia britânica, Kim Philby foi um espião dos mais altos rankings da inteligência britânica. Não à toa, ele se tornou cavaleiro ao receber um OBE na década de 1940, com apenas 34 anos. Servindo ao MI6 por décadas, Philby chegou perto de se tornar o diretor da instituição. Problemas internos o fizeram se demitir do serviço de informações em 1951, quando este passava por forte investigação por parte de seus colegas. Somente nos anos 1960, foi confirmada a temerosa suspeita de que Philby havia sido, por todo esse tempo, um agente duplo que servia tanto à KGB quanto ao NKVD.Por décadas, ele comprometeu colegas, missões e supostos amigos, tornando-se um dos traidores mais famosos da história. “Para trair, você primeiro precisa pertencer. Eu nunca pertenci”, afirmou ele próximo de sua morte, em 1988. Sua trajetória inclui tragédias familiares e várias esposas. Sempre fiel à União Soviética, Philby passou seus últimos anos em Moscou, supostamente melancólico e desiludido â e embriagado. Repleto de medalhas (e sem arrependimentos), teve um funeral de herói. Ele fazia parte do cÃrculo hoje conhecido como Cambridge Five, cujos agentes duplos haviam sido recrutados ainda antes da Segunda Guerra Mundial.Para quem se interessa por espionagem, Guerra Fria ou pelos romances de John le Carré (que chegou a conhecer Philby), este livro de Ben Macintyre é riquÃssimo. Nele, pode-se verificar a maior contradição da vida de Kim Philby: como um sujeito tão ridiculamente inglês se comprometeu com uma causa e uma cultura conhecidas por ele de maneira idealizada, abstrata. Recomendo.
Pranav Vijayakumar –
An amazing book and the way the stories has been potrayed is beautiful. Each chapter ends in a cliffhanger. A must read
Lex –
CS Lewis talked about the quest to gain access to the âinner ringâ, something he was unable to do at Oxford due to the snobbery of the English establishment, and the embarrassment Lewis caused fellow academics by writing about the devil as though he were a real being.[i] As you gain entrance to one ring, you discover yet another further in which holds yet more influence. Every effort is made to progress to the inner rings. Entrance becomes more costly. You can forfeit your soul as you gain the world. Once inside each ring, you strengthen its walls so that it remains difficult for others to enter (one UK pastor was telling me of South African émigrés to England who, having scrambled to get British passports and residency, are now solidly and immovably pro-Brexit).Of course for outsiders like Lewis, slowly earning your way to an inner ring may not only take years but may turn out to be a hollow promise after all. But the nature of the old British establishment was that if you were born into the right family, went to the right school, had the right kind of accent and bearing, you could skip all those tawdry outer rings and accelerate right to the centre of things where commoners rarely, if ever, appear. The inner rings are inevitably smaller, and fewer people share the high-octane experience of access to key decisions and key information.What MI6, the UKâs secret intelligence organisation, hadnât bargained for was that once their trusted men were in the inner ring it was practically the only place they could let their guard down and share their experiences without fear of a snooping ear. And boy did they offload. Here were brothers, comrades, co-spies in a world where no one else knew their true work, not even their wives. And, from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, one man in particular â charming, intelligent, a veritable Bond â was picking them clean of every detail, every initiative, and every name.Entrance into the UK spy organisationâs inner rings was surprisingly easy for Kim Philby. He simply asked a friend of his fatherâs to recommend him. âI know their people!â was recommendation enough. In the 1940s the old boy network was considered as sound as a pound. A typical Eton old boy was as British as you could be. But it was at Cambridge that Philby first encountered the vision of a communist society. And it was an idealistic vision that held his loyalty for the remainder of his life. In fact he was so devoted to this ideal that he gave uncritical obedience to his KGB handlers from first to last. Philbyâs beliefs as a student were well known, but when the Soviets recruited him they advised him not to join the Communist Party but rather to appear to grow out of that youthful phase and adopt more right-wing views. He obeyed, and became the KGBâs most senior operative; one who infiltrated the British security system to the highest levels. Philby, the Eton and Cambridge old boy, who loved cricket and was a thoroughly good egg, was ushered into the inner ring, and became the most notorious spy of his generation. He was so thoroughly British that the British refused to doubt him, and the KGB refused to trust him.As Ben Macintyre describes in this highly readable account of Philbyâs adventures, he actually became head of the UKâs anti-Soviet division â an almost unbelievable feat. The most senior Soviet spy in Britain became the head of the Britainâs anti-Soviet operations. And the information Philby was sending to the Soviet Union was so thorough and so accurate that the KGB began to be suspicious of him and had him followed.After two other well-to-do Cambridge recruits were exposed as Soviet spies and defected, the spotlight fell (accurately) on Philby. He must have tipped them off. The CIA in America was certain of it. MI5 (British security service) and MI6 (British foreign intelligence service) had differing views on Philby. MI5 were convinced he had been a double-agent. MI6 thought those horrible people at MI5 were just slandering him, and had nothing concrete against him. And so, as an old boy truly in the security of a tightening inner ring, Philby was exonerated and declared to be so in Parliament by fellow-Etonian, Harold Macmillan. Incredibly, a few years later he was working for MI6 again.Of course, it all finally caught up with him, and he was probably (Macintyre, and others infer) allowed to escape to Moscow where he received by the Soviet authorities. It was hardly a heroâs welcome for a lifetime or risk and deceit. He was kept at arms length. He lived in a small flat, avidly reading through old cricket games in old copies of the Times when he was able to get them, desperate of news from home. A humbling isolated end. A Briton in exile.Philbyâs betrayal, not only of country, but of friends, was intensely difficult to process by those who were closest to him. They were left devastated by his defection when the watertight evidence was revealed. Weâre told Nicholas Elliot, in MI6, never fully recovered from the shock of it all. His closest friend was working for the Communists. He re-lived whole segments of his life with a new perspective. The realisation that he had spilled the beans on numerous activities which was relayed to the Soviet Union must have been unbearable to him. And the American James Angleton, another close friend, nearly destroyed the CIA through increasingly invasive internal witch-hunts prompted by the post-Philby paranoia.Suave, sophisticated, well educated, gracious, the quintessential British gentleman, Kim Philby deceived them all. And all for an ideal it seems he didnât care to review beyond his earlier infatuation with it. Somehow he looked past Stalinâs crimes and doggedly held on to a pristine ideal. He looked past the ruthless disappearance of KGB handlers who were suddenly under suspicion, and kept looking for the communist dream. He didnât live to see the fall of it all along with the Berlin Wall in 1989.As a result of his winnowing work he frustrated numerous cold-war operations, sent hundreds of agents to their deaths, and told a gazillion bare-faced lies, not least of which were his declarations of innocence in his motherâs flat before a crowd of reporters after Macmillanâs statement in the House of Commons. You can see footage of that and of him speaking in the USSR hereâMeet it is I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villainâ, said Hamlet. Macintyreâs superbly readable account of the secret world of high-class spies has certainly been one of my most engaging reads of this year, and is a subject which continues to fascinate. Surely itâs time for a film version.