Word: knightley
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...that ironically led Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan to proclaim him cleared of disloyalty -- Philby was allowed to go on working for MI6. Until he defected, he free- lanced for the service, which also helped him find employment as a journalist. In an interview last January with British Journalist Phillip Knightley, Philby claimed that his departure was engineered by Britain "because the last thing the British government wanted at that time was me in London, a security scandal and a sensational trial." He even retained the honor he had been awarded in 1946 -- Order of the British Empire -- for two years...
...Central Intelligence Agency, offspring of World War II's Office of Strategic Services, has its own clubby traditions. Knightley quotes Allen Dulles, who testified on agency staffing before a congressional committee in 1947. "I should think," said the future CIA director, "that a couple of dozen people throughout the United States could do it, two in New York, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco." Dulles felt that "scores rather than hundreds" could handle U.S. intelligence requirements abroad, and, he added, "If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well...
...Knightley estimates that the CIA now employs about 16,000 people. Add to that the million or more who are directly engaged in deception and analysis throughout the world, and the potential for chaos is enormous. As the author's survey of modern snooping illustrates with unrestrained relish, free- lancers, self-serving desk jockeys, double and triple agents turn espionage into what James J. Angleton, former chief of the CIA's counterintelligence division, called a "wilderness of mirrors...
...fairest of them all? Knightley's candidate is Kim Philby, the KGB's mole in British intelligence who set up the SIS's anti-Soviet division, coordinated activities with the CIA and so could convey details of the West's counterspy activity to the Kremlin. Philby, exposed by a KGB blunder, was able to escape to Moscow but not before he came within a hair of becoming "C," the chief of the SIS and, according to Knightley, "the most accomplished spy ever...
...general, however, the author holds the effectiveness of espionage to be overrated. Perhaps, but Knightley cannot prove this with lively anecdotes bounced from a wilderness of mirrors. He is more convincing when demonstrating that the gathering of secrets, and the spreading of lies, is one of the world's biggest growth industries...