A Spy Among Friends

I grew up on I Led Three Lives - a television series based on Herbert Philbrick. It was a series that my vague memory puts as a classic. In Wikipedia it describes the series: "It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s." In this book we go back to that era and find the most notorious of all spies - Kim Philby double agent who single-handedly turned the western spy agents into a joke. A Russian agent, Philby almost became the head of British spies. 

Here is the ultimate of spying, almost a parody of the parody I SPY in Mad magazine. So sophisticated were our spies that we could not figure out when someone in our own agency was causing the people we supported to be caught, captured, and killed by the Soviets.

It has to be an embarrassment to the families of the leading spies in the US and Britain and it is a good lesson for everyone in this clandestine game.

It is a fascinating story and well written.