
A Spy Among Friends
Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
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Narrated by:
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John Lee
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By:
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Ben Macintyre
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic true story of Kim Philby, the Cold War’s most infamous spy, from the “master storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle) and author of Prisoners of the Castle.
Now an MGM+ series starring Damian Lewis, Guy Pearce, and Anna Maxwell Martin
“[A Spy Among Friends] reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John le Carré, leavened with a dollop of P. G. Wodehouse.”—Walter Isaacson, New York Times Book Review
Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.
Every word uttered in confidence to Philby made its way to Moscow, sinking almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years and costing hundreds of lives. So how was this cunning double-agent finally exposed? In A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre expertly weaves the heart-pounding tale of how Philby almost got away with it all—and what happened when he was finally unmasked.
Based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files and told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, A Spy Among Friends is a fascinating portrait of a Cold War spy and the countrymen who remained willfully blind to his treachery.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Shelf Awareness
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Critic reviews
“Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship. . . . When devouring this thriller, I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel. . . . [Macintyre] takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era.”—Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
“A Spy Among Friends is the latest in Ben Macintyre’s series on twentieth-century espionage. All are superb, and A Spy Among Friends is no exception. Macintyre gives the familiar story of Philby new life.”—Malcolm Gladwell,The New Yorker
“Macintyre does here what he does best—tell a heck of a good story. A Spy Among Friends is hands down the most entertaining book I’ve reviewed this year.”—Boston Globe
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Agent Sonya
- Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe.
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Wanted to love it
- By Robert Bell on 09-30-20
By: Ben Macintyre
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Rogue Heroes
- The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.
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Those Who Dared, Won!
- By Matthew on 10-07-16
By: Ben Macintyre
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The Fourth Man
- The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin's Russia
- By: Robert Baer
- Narrated by: Robert Baer, Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of the Cold War, American intelligence caught three high-profile Russian spies: Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, and Robert Hanssen. However, rumors have long swirled of another mole, one perhaps more damaging than all the others combined. Perhaps the greatest traitor in American history, perhaps a Russian ruse to tear the CIA apart, or perhaps nothing more than a bogeyman, he is often referred to as the Fourth Man.
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A Who Done it without The Who Did it
- By Amazon Customer on 05-25-22
By: Robert Baer
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The Spy in Moscow Station
- A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat
- By: Eric Haseltine
- Narrated by: Eric Haseltine
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1970s, the National Security Agency still did not officially exist - those in the know referred to it dryly as the No Such Agency. So why, when NSA engineer Charles Gandy filed for a visa to visit Moscow, did the Russian Foreign Ministry assert with confidence that he was a spy? Outsmarting honey traps and encroaching deep enough into enemy territory to perform complicated technical investigations, Gandy accomplished his mission in Russia but discovered more than State and CIA wanted him to know.
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Dull Dull Dull
- By DVN on 09-02-19
By: Eric Haseltine
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In the Enemy's House
- The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation's military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage - the atomic bomb.
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Excellent non-fiction spy story
- By Katherine on 10-13-18
By: Howard Blum
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Circle of Treason
- CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed
- By: Sandra V. Grimes, Jeanne Vertefeuille
- Narrated by: Janet Metzger
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Circle of Treason is the first account written by CIA agents who were key members of the CIA team that conducted the intense "Ames Mole Hunt." Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille were two of the five principals of the CIA team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction.
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The hunt for a mole
- By Jean on 01-15-14
By: Sandra V. Grimes, and others
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The Billion Dollar Spy
- A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
- By: David E. Hoffman
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States.
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Compelling as historical thriller, character study
- By Mr. Pointy on 08-25-15
By: David E. Hoffman
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Stalin's Englishman
- Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
- By: Andrew Lownie
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating of "The Cambridge Spies" - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.
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The World's Worst Spy - But Interesting
- By Jose on 06-03-17
By: Andrew Lownie
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To Catch a Spy
- The Art of Counterintelligence
- By: James M. Olson
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the listener into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his 30-year career in the CIA.
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Horrible Narrator
- By NN on 10-01-19
By: James M. Olson
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Betrayal in Berlin
- The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation
- By: Steve Vogel
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Its code name was “Operation Gold”, a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries.
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Fascinating Book
- By Toni Bowes on 01-11-20
By: Steve Vogel
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Prisoners of the Castle
- An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape.
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Another chapter of history brought to life by a master
- By Steve on 09-28-22
By: Ben Macintyre
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Kim Philby
- The Unknown Story of the KGB's Master-Spy
- By: Tim Milne
- Narrated by: Liam Tobin
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor, a Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence. Philby joined Britain's secret service MI6 during the war and went on to head the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies before becoming the service's chief liaison officer with the CIA. He betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union.
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Not Quite What It Says On The Tin
- By M Chiampa on 10-31-18
By: Tim Milne
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Agent Zigzag
- A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
- By: Ben MacIntyre
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service.
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Is it a novel? Is it a newspaper article? No, its
- By Steven on 03-27-11
By: Ben MacIntyre
Finally a great read about Philby and his Friends.
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The incredible life of a spy
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Lots about relationships, little about espionage
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Fantastic
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Fascinating story!
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Entrancing!
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Very enjoyable book.
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Completely Unrelated: Be on the alert for John Lee's excellent Ronald Reagan impersonation. It's spot-on!
Fantastic exposition
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Great narrator, and even better sorry
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Almost too amazing to believe!
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