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Cover of The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East

The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East

by Fawaz A. Gerges

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Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. Philby's two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity; of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience; of an ideological battle waged by men with cut-glass accents and well-made suits in the comfortable clubs and restaurants of London and Washington; of male friendships forged, and then systematically betrayed.…

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"The Middle East looms large in the news at the moment, and there are a number of new books about it. The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East is by Fawaz Gerges, a professor at LSE, and represents more than a decade of work “trying to answer a recurring question posed by my students: Why has the Middle East reached this seeming low point after a century of state- and nation-building?” The book covers the region from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring and highlights the interaction of foreign intervention and domestic authoritarianism as the root cause of the problems."
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2025 · fivebooks.com