Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
Turning the Philby Case on Its Head
By Phillip Knightley
Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess
by S.J. Hamrick
Yale University Press, 297 pp., $29.95
Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.
Review, 4504 words
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