Young Philby: A Novel

By Robert Littell

One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board: an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with little more than the clothes on his back. The Englishman had used both hardcover and paperback edition of James Hilton's Lost Horizon for enciphering purposes (page, line and letter number) when he had communicated with his Soviet controllers. As the lights of Beirut vanished, he tried to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet Union. Would Moscow Centre welcome him into the Heart of Darkness as a senior Soviet intelligence officer? Would the Great Game the Englishman was so keen to play have a third act? For a spy, like a climber on a cliff, was there really no way out except up?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Duckworth Overlook
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780715644515

Robert Littell

Connoisseurs of the literary spy thriller have elevated Robert Littell to the genre's highest ranks - along with John le Carre, Len Deighton and Graham Greene. Littell's novels include The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, The October Circle, Mother Russia, The Amateur (which was made into a feature film), The Company, An Agent in Place and Walking Back the Cat. A former Newsweek journalist, Robert Littell is American, currently living in France.

Reviews for Young Philby

[maneekuhi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Littell has written many fine novels over the years. "The Company" is one of my all time favorites. "Young Philby" is another winner. It tells many stories of mole Kim Philby's early life with each chapter a memoir by an acquaintance with a slightly different POV. The question is raised, "Was Philby a double (agent)?" a triple? Arguments are made for each. And there is a very interesting defense put forth by one of KP's associates in answer to what attracted English students to the Communist Party in the 20's and 30's. A very good read.

[hagelstein_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fictionalized account of supposed British-Soviet double agent Harold "Kim" Philby and how he was recruited into both MI5 and the KGB. Littell supplies a twist near the end, and some supporting evidence to make it interesting.

[brianhostad · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good read, but the premise that's a triple agent is only revealed at the end and doesn't seem to tie in the book as written.

[mainecolonial · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kim Philby, one of the most famous spies of all time, was a member of the so-called Cambridge Spy Ring. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Philby all met while at Cambridge University and were recruited to become agents of the Soviets' NKVD security agency--which later became the KGB--in the 1930s. As was common for Cambridge graduates, they gained important places in British government. Burgess, Blunt and Philby joined the MI-5 and MI-6 intelligence services during WWII, and Maclean was in the Foreign Office.Burgess and Maclean defected to the USSR suddenly in 1951, and Philby, who was then head of his agency's Soviet section and had been chief liaison with the CIA, was suspected of having tipped them off that they were about to be arrested. Though Philby was forced to resign, he wasn't arrested. He became a journalist and continued his career until 1963, when he defected to the USSR, where he lived in Moscow until his death in 1988.More than the other members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, Philby has always been a figure who captured the imagination; possibly because he was so highly placed in the British government and was the top person in British intelligence responsible for combating Soviet spies, and also because some still believe he may have been not a double agent, but a triple agent (in other words, ultimately still working for British intelligence). Characters based on Philby have appeared in many works of fiction, including John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.Young Philby is a mix of fact and fiction, taking what is known of Philby's doings after Cambridge and filling in the gaps with what author Littell imagines of Philby's life and how he came to participate in the "great game" of espionage. Littell cleverly does this by having each chapter told by a different character in Philby's life, including his various NKVD handlers, his first wife, Litzi Friedman (who met him in Vienna in 1934, where both worked for the communists to combat the increasing tilt of the country to the right and toward the embrace of Hitler), Guy Burgess, and Evelyn Sinclair, the daughter of and secretary to the chief of British intelligence.Each narrator presents his or her own perspective on Philby in a way that is reminiscent of the fable about the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and then uses what he has perceived to describe what an elephant is. None of the men has perceived the entire truth and, among them, they draw wildly different conclusions about what an elephant is. What was Philby then? A romantic who fought for the proletariat in the streets of Vienna in the 1930s? A man who, having had his youthful fling, settles down to the conservatism of his class and upbringing? A consummately skilled player in the multi-level chess game of espionage?Littell takes all his narrators' accounts of Philby and makes his own intriguing case for what Philby really was. Along the way, he leads us on a whirlwind tour of street fighting in Vienna between communists and the forces of right-wing Chancellor Dollfuss, a journalist's beat during the Spanish Civil War, the gentlemen's-club atmosphere of British intelligence and the deadly dialectic of the NKVD as its operatives fell victim to Stalin's paranoia.Though I'm an avid reader of Cold War espionage books--fiction and nonfiction--I haven't read any of Littell's prior books, which include The Company: A Novel of the CIA, The Sisters and The Once and Future Spy. After reading Young Philby, that now seems like a regrettable oversight--and one that I will remedy as soon as possible. UPDATE: I've since listened to the audiobook of The Company and thought it was terrific. I recommend it for anyone who likes Cold War espionage and big, sprawling stories that span decades. Now I need to check out more of LIttell's books. I picked up The Stalin Epigram and that may be next.