The Human Factor

"This is a really interesting book. Graham Greene briefly worked in MI6 during World War II in West Africa, if I remember rightly. His most famous spy book is Our Man in Havana , which is a great comedy and quite light—not as bleak as the books I’ve suggested. But The Human Factor is again—and perhaps this is a bit of a theme—quite a tragic book. It’s about a man who works for a secret service and is definitely not James Bond. Quite the contrary. He’s a quiet bureaucrat who commutes to work and is a family man. Elements of this man’s story are unusual. Specifically, his wife is a black South African at a time when the country was under apartheid. The story unfolds, and it’s about a mole hunt within the Secret Intelligence Service at a time, of course, when such things were very real and very visceral. The way in which this story draws specifically on real events is Graham Greene’s own relationship with Kim Philby, who was the great mole par excellence whom the Russians succeeded in inserting into British intelligence. Kim Philby was the greatest of ‘the Cambridge Five’ in terms of the amount of damage that he caused and the degree to which he achieved a high level within British intelligence. Later, after he had been exposed—that’s a long story and not relevant to this book—Philby defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Moscow and was given status by the Russian authorities, but without real trust. I think most people agree that his life was pretty miserable in Russia and that he missed home terribly. He would beg people to bring him marmalade and copies of the Times . He was always wanting to know about the cricket score. It’s a classic example of someone who devoted their life to the service of a foreign state, but when he was actually forced to live in that state, didn’t fit in at all. Graham Greene kept in touch with Philby after his defection. Philby was, by definition, a traitor. Had he come back to Britain, he would almost certainly have faced imprisonment, and he was certainly a disgraced person. Greene’s decision to stay in touch with him was quite controversial. It’s notable that John le Carré, who was of a similar generation, refused to meet Kim Philby when he was in Moscow."