The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby [FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Borovik, Genrikh

Published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachussets, 1994

About this Item

As new condition gold boards, blue spine, and gold spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped photographic and color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Preliminary Page Quote by Kim Philby; Introduction; A Few Words To The Reader; and Index. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates. "If a 'wilderness of mirrors' refers to the moral and spiritual vertigo of a spy's life, then Kim Philby had to be the king of that wilderness, and Genrikh Borovik's The Philby Files is an awfully good book about the man and succeeds in giving an intimate and plausible portrait not only of him, but of Moscow Center for whom Philby worked for more than five decades." - Norman Mailer. "Kim Philby's secret life is far stanger than any spy fiction. Its outline is well known. Recruited by the Soviet KGB at Cambridge in the 1930s, he made his way into the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), where, after a brilliant wartime career, he became head of its anti-Soviet section, then liaison officer in Washington with the CIA and FBI - revealing everything he learned along the way to his Moscow bosses. He was in the running to become "C," chief of the British secret service, where the damage he could have done would have been incalculable. But following the defection of his fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in 1951, Philby found himself under a hazy but persistent cloud of suspicion, and he himself eventaully fled in 1963, just steps ahead of capture. Before he died in Moscow in 1988, unrepentant and fulfilled, he had become a symbol in the West of Soviet-inspired treachery - an Englishman from a privileged background who had betrayed the entire free world. But, it emerges, this is only a glimpse of Philby's story. Genrikh Borovik, a distinguished Russian author and playwright, persuaded the KGB to allow him to interview Philby in depth. The outcome was five hudred pages of transcripts of tape-recorded meetings, during which they discussed and analyzed every aspect of Philby's life. When Philby died, his masters further allowed Borovik unprecedented access to his personal KGB file. The result is an entirely new portrait of Philby that reveals how much he had previously managed to conceal. And, perhaps of even greater significance, we at last have a picture of how the KGB recruited and ran its agents , and of a flaw at the heart of the service. This fascinating account of the man who was probably the most enigmatic spy in history poses questions of enormous importance about the world intelligence community and the morality and value of espionage." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. Seller Inventory # 008203

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master ...

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachussets

Publication Date: 1994

Binding: Hardcover

Illustrator: Aulicino, Bob (jacket design)

Condition: As New

Dust Jacket Condition: As New

Edition: 1st Edition