[e3pi]

To Catch a Spy

What did more damage—Philby’s treachery or the subsequent obsession among spy officials with preventing future Philbys?

“What it comes to is that when you look at the whole period from 1944 to 1951, the entire Western intelligence effort, which was pretty big, was what you might call minus advantage,” the C.I.A. officer Miles Copeland, Jr.—himself a close friend of Philby’s—said. “We’d have been better off doing nothing.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/philby