Spies and Traitors by Michael Holzman
The U.S. intelligence agency that became the CIA was born in World War II under British tutelage. Spies and Traitors focuses on how the CIA’s counter-intelligence director, James Jesus Angleton, was mentored by Britain’s ace of spies, Kim Philby. Angleton was a suspicious man, but the one person he never suspected was Philby—until his British counterpart defected to the Soviet Union. Philby was so highly placed in the British secret service, and so well connected to the CIA through Angleton, that he gave the Kremlin access to Western secrets through many years of the Cold War.
Author Michael Holzman makes occasional errors including—on several pages—calling the Soviet security agency, the NKVD, by its later name, the KGB, and tends to simplify the complexities into smooth contours. Spies and Traitors is nonetheless fascinating, as much a page turner as a good spy novel. Angleton and Philby were both patricians educated at the finest schools. The former accepted the status quo as he found it and the latter was a genuine convert to Communism, which he saw as leading the fight for a better world. Philby’s sympathies should have been suspect, but he passed easily in the clubby ranks of Britain’s establishment and was an actor of the highest caliber for maintaining is role as a man above suspicion.
