Ben Macintyre writes true spy stories built from declassified files and the people who were there, and the screen has been adapting them since 2021. What crosses intact is the scene nobody could have invented. What comes with it is a great deal of explaining.
Fi1m perspective
A flat in Beirut, January 1963. Two men who have been friends for more than twenty years sit down together, and one of them has come to confront the other. In A Spy Among Friends (2022) that flat belongs to Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis, and it is the best thing in the six episodes. It was Ben Macintyre's room first. His 2014 book found it in the record, and nearly everything the series does well comes from his habit of not improving on what actually happened.
Macintyre was a journalist before he was anything else, a correspondent for The Times in New York, Paris and Washington and then a columnist, and his first books appeared in the early 1990s. From the mid-2000s he settled on true stories of espionage and deception, most of them British and most of them built from declassified files and the people who were there: Agent Zigzag (2007), Operation Mincemeat (2010), A Spy Among Friends (2014), Rogue Heroes (2016), The Spy and the Traitor (2018). His own account of the method is the clearest: "I never make anything up. But I do use novelistic techniques; create cliffhangers, set a clue going in chapter one, that won't be answered until chapter six." Since 2021 the screen has been working through the shelf. John Madden directed Operation Mincemeat (2021), Steven Knight made SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022–), and Alexander Cary wrote A Spy Among Friends for Nick Murphy to direct, with Macintyre usually on hand as executive producer or consultant, offering the history and accepting what drama does to it.
We have reviewed only the Philby series, and it shows both halves of the inheritance. The material is the kind nobody would dare invent: a traitor, his best friend, and a confrontation twenty years in the making. Pearce and Lewis play it as two men who have run out of lies to tell each other, and we sat forward every time the series put them in the same room. We noticed we had sat back again whenever it cut to London to have somebody explain what we had just watched. That is the other half. Macintyre's subjects arrive with a great deal of history attached, his books are generous with it, and his adapters have not yet learned that on screen the footnotes can go. Our verdict was that the series was handsome, patiently acted and about two hours longer than its story, and we have no reason to revise it.
The Spy and the Traitor is in development for television. It has a KGB officer working for MI6, which is to say a defector, a betrayal and, somewhere in the files Macintyre read, one room where everything was decided. We would like whoever makes it to find that room and stay in it.
Biography
Ben Macintyre is a British author and journalist. Born in Oxford on 25 December 1963, he is a columnist and associate editor at The Times newspaper.
He has written a series of books on espionage and twentieth-century history, including Operation Mincemeat, SAS Rogue Heroes and A Spy Among Friends. Several have been adapted for film and television; he is credited as creator of the 2022 series A Spy Among Friends.
