SPY AMONG FRIENDS - Continued

 SPY AMONG FRIENDS – Continued 

Photos of Kim Philby, Nicholas Elliot and the Spy Among Friends cover. 

After writing my first impressions of the first part of the new British TV series Spy Among Friends, I’ve seen two more installments and have learned a few things.

I’ve since learned that John Newman’s new book Uncovering Popov's Mole contains many more details on these subjects, and look forward to reading it.

 I thought I had read most of the classic works on Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring, and have to catch up by reading Newman’s book as well as the Ben MacIntyre's book the TV serial is based on.

I’ve also learned that the English literary giant Malcolm Muggeridge has a chapter devoted to Kim Philby in his autobiographical memoirs, and Muggeridge may have been reporting to Philby.

Muggeridge in turn, was a British agent who knew and probably was the MI6 case officer for German Barron Werner Von Albenslaben, who owned the Safari land hunting grounds in Africa and was with Dallas oilman D. H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), at the time of the assassination.

As one of the main issues brought to the forefront by this story is the use of journalists and writers as spies, I also recalled an article I wrote with John Judge many years ago that also delves into this subject in detail – “Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA,” that I will update presently.

[ Was Oswald Bottle-fed by NANA? | COPA   ]

The CIA’s use of journalists and media outlets was one of what they called “The Family Jewels,” along with the use of clergy, the mafia-CIA plots to kill Castro, and MKULTRA - the use of drugs and hypnosis to control subjects.

Not a new idea, the British often used journalists as spies and the media as a cover, and have been doing it for years, - generations.

Rudyard Kipling is a good place to start. Kipling was an adventurer who wrote marvelous stories about his travels, many about India when it was a British colony – “Jungle Book,” of which a dozen movies have been made, “The Man Who Would Be King,” that starred Michael Caine and Sean Connery and featured Kipling himself as a character, along with “Kim,” the story of the boy-spy who Kim Philby was named after.

The British literary circle included Muggeridge, Somerset Maugham (“The Razor’s Edge), Graham Green (“Our Man in Havana,”), Noel Coward, Cyril Connolly, and the brothers Fleming, Ian of 007 fame.

By the end of WWII the intelligence agencies didn’t just recruit reporters and writers, but went right to the top and made deals with the owners, publishers and broadcasters, as Carl Bernstein detailed in his landmark article in Rolling Stone magazine.

In the Spy Among Friends, it is quite curious how Ian Fleming is brought into the picture. Nicholas Elliot is seen entering a large indoor swimming pool room, where Fleming is monitoring a scuba diver at the bottom of the pool. When he surfaces and takes off his scuba gear and wet suit, he is dressed in a wrinkle free tuxedo, much like the seen in Goldfinger where Sean Connery blows up an oil refinery with a time bomb and is at a black tie party when it happens.

Ian Fleming and Nicholas Elliot were much closer associates than that, but Spy Among Friends is not Fleming’s story but Elliot’s, though there is another Fleming connection worth mentioning.  When the Philby and Cambridge spy ring was in the news, Fleming visited his wife in the hospital where she was having their son Casper, after wards paying his respects to an old friend, Whitney Straight.

Michael Stright’s older brother Whitney reflects the Whitney family’s fortune, who was a trans-continental playboy while a student at Cambridge – the first American to drive in a Grand Prix auto race, WWII pilot, and with his brother Michael, owned the American political commentary magazine The New Republic.

According to one of his official biographers, Fleming stopped to talk to Whitney Straight about Philby – and apparantly how the British MI-6 should deal with such a catastrophic disaster as having an enemy agent in their midst for so long.

Once Michael Straight came clean, the whole Cambridge cell was exposed, at first only to those in the inner-circle, like Elliot and Fleming, but eventually we all got to know the sored story.

And while all of Fleming’s official biographers who knew him and used to work with him say that he began to write the 007 spy novels on a whim, “to take his mind off his impending marriage,” I would contend that Fleming intended to portray the British Secret Service as he would like it perceived, and he began to write the 007 novels to boost the public’s view and the morale of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

While writing his novels over the course of his two months (January and February) in Jamaica, his first story Casino Royale, involves a women – Vesper Lynn, ostensibly an ally who it turns out, was a real snake who worked for the opposition, and is killed in the end. 

It’s also peculiar how he entwines the names and characters of people he knew into the stories, beginning with James Bond himself, the Philadelphia ornithologist, Cambridge Pitt Club member and author of the book “Birds of the West Indies,” from where Fleming took the name for his 007 hero. Bond’s boo, he said, was kept on his breakfast table, and James Bond seemed to be the simple and bland name for his secret agent.

Other characters in Fleming’s books include CIA philanthropic bursar Cummings Catherwood, who is portrayed as a villian, and Felix Leiter, whose cover as a jazz and classical musicologist was taken from Henry Pleasants, a former music critic for the Philadelphia Bulletin, New York and London Times.

Well, I await a copy of John Newman’s Uncovering Popov’s Mole that I will read and review, as well as Malcolm Muggeridge’s chapter on Philby in his autobio. I will update the article I did with John Judge on these topics – Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA - that I think clearly indicates the importance of the Kim Philby and the Spy Among Friends in the story of President Kennedy’s murder and how similar tradecrafts must be used to understand both.