A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  On 15 August, 111 Hurricane Squadron was scrambled to intercept a formation of Luftwaffe Messerschmitts that had crossed the Channel at Dungeness. In the ferocious, sky-sprawling dogfight that followed, one of the fiercest engagements in the Battle of Britain, seven of the German fighter-bombers were shot down. Basil Fisher’s plane was seen peeling away with smoke and flames streaming from the fuselage. He managed to bail out over the village of Sidlesham in West Sussex, with his parachute on fire. The cables burned through, and Elliott’s friend tumbled to earth. The pilotless Hurricane crashed into a barn. The body of Flying Officer Basil Fisher was found in Sidlesham pond. He was buried in the churchyard of the Berkshire village where he had been born.

  Elliott was quietly but utterly distraught. Like many upper-class Englishmen, he seldom spoke about his feelings, but in its taut, agonised understatement, his private epitaph for Basil Fisher said more than any number of emotive words. The mask of flippancy slipped. ‘Basil Fisher was killed in action. I felt this very deeply. He had been virtually a brother to me. This was the first time I had been hit by tragedy.’

  Elliott was still dazed by grief when, just a few weeks later, he met another new recruit to the secret world, a product of Westminster School, a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a man who would define the rest of his life: Harold Adrian Russell Philby, better known as Kim.

  See Notes on Chapter 1

  2

  Section V

  The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm’, that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother, and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink, and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity. ‘He was the sort of man who won worshippers,’ said one contemporary. ‘You didn’t just like him, admire him, agree with him; you worshipped him.’ A stutter, which came and went, added to his appeal, betraying an attractive glimmer of fragility. People waited on his words, for what his friend, the novelist Graham Greene, called his ‘halting stammered witticisms’.

  Kim Philby cut a dashing figure in wartime London. As The Times correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, reporting from the rebel Nationalist side, he had narrowly cheated death in late 1937 when a Republican shell landed near the car he was sitting in eating chocolates and drinking brandy, killing all the other three fellow war correspondents. Philby escaped with a minor head wound and a reputation for ‘great pluck’. General Franco himself had pinned a medal, the Red Cross of Military Merit, on the young war reporter.

  Philby had been one of only fifteen newspaper correspondents selected to join the British Expeditionary Force sent to France on the outbreak of the Second World War. From the continent, he wrote wry, distinctive despatches for The Times as he waited with the troops for the fighting to start: ‘Many express disappointment at the slow tempo of the overture to Armageddon. They expected danger, and they have found damp,’ he wrote. Philby continued reporting as the Germans advanced, and quit Amiens with the Panzers already rumbling into the city. He took a ship for England with such haste that he was forced to leave behind his luggage. His expenses claim for lost items became a Fleet Street legend: ‘Camel-hair overcoat (two years’ wear), fifteen guineas; Dunhill pipe (two years old, and all the better for it), one pound ten shillings.’ It is a measure of his reputation that The Times compensated its star correspondent for the loss of an old pipe. Philby was a fine journalist, but his ambitions lay elsewhere. He wanted to join MI6, but like every would-be spy he faced a conundrum: how do you join an organisation to which you cannot apply, because it does not formally exist?

  In the end, Philby’s entry into the secret services turned out to be as straightforward as that of Elliott, and by much the same informal route: he simply ‘dropped a few hints here and there’ among influential acquaintances, and waited for an invitation to join the club. The first indication that his signals had been picked up came on the train back to London after the retreat from France, when he found himself in a first-class compartment with a Sunday Express journalist named Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley. Marsden-Smedley was thirty-eight years old, a veteran of foreign wars, and as tough as teak. She had come under enemy fire on the Luxembourg border, and witnessed the German surge across the Siegfried Line. She knew people in the secret services, and was said to do a little spying on the side. Inevitably, she too was charmed by Philby. She did not beat about the bush.

  ‘A person like you has to be a fool to join the Army,’ she said. ‘You’re capable of doing a lot more to defeat Hitler.’

  Philby knew exactly what she was alluding to, and stammered that he ‘didn’t have any contacts in that world’.

  ‘We’ll figure something out,’ said Hester.

  Back in London, Philby was summoned to the office of the Foreign Editor of The Times, to be told that a Captain Leslie Sheridan of the ‘War Department’ had called, asking if Philby was available for ‘war work’ of an unspecified nature. Sheridan, the former night editor of the Daily Mirror, ran a section of MI6 known as ‘D/Q’, responsible for black propaganda and disseminating rumours.

  Two days later, Philby sat down to tea at St Ermin’s Hotel off St James’s Park, just a few hundred yards from MI6 headquarters at 54 Broadway, with another formidable woman: Sarah Algeria Marjorie Maxse, chief of staff for MI6’s Section D (the ‘D’ stood for ‘Destruction’) which specialised in covert paramilitary operations. Miss Marjorie Maxse was chief organisation officer for the Conservative Party, a role that apparently equipped her to identify people who would be good at spreading propaganda and blowing things up. Philby found her ‘intensely likeable’. She clearly liked him too, for two days later they met again, this time with Guy Burgess, a friend and Cambridge contemporary of Philby’s, who was already in MI6. ‘I began to show off, name-dropping shamelessly,’ wrote Philby. ‘It turned out I was wasting my time, since a decision had already been taken.’ MI5 had conducted a routine background check, and found ‘nothing recorded against’ him: young Philby was clean. Valentine Vivian, the deputy head of MI6, who had known Philby’s father when they were both colonial officials in India, was prepared to vouch personally for the new recruit, giving what may be the quintessential definition of Britain’s Old Boy network: ‘I was asked about him, and said I knew his people.’

  Philby resigned from The Times, and duly reported to a building near MI6 headquarters, where he was installed in an office with a blank sheaf of paper, a pencil and a telephone. He did nothing for two weeks, except read the papers and enjoy long, liquid lunches with Burgess. Philby was beginning to wonder if he had really joined MI6 or some strange, inactive offshoot, when he was assigned to Brickendonbury Hall, a secret school for spies deep in Hertfordshire where an oddball collection of émigré Czechs, Belgians, Norwegians, Dutchmen and Spaniards were being trained for covert operations. This unit would eventually be absorbed into the Special Operations Executive, SOE, the organisation created, in Winston Churchill’s words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by operating behind enemy lines. In its early days, the only thing the agents seemed likely to ignite was Brickendonbury Hall and the surrounding countryside. The resident explosives expert mounted a demonstration for visiting Czech intelligence officers, but set fire to a wood and nearly immolated the entire delegation. Philby was soon transferred to SOE itself, and then to another training school at Beaulieu in Hampshire, specialising in demolition, wireless communication and subversion. Philby gave lectures on propaganda for which, having been a journalist, he was considered suitably trained. He was champing at the bit, eager to join the real wartime intelligence battle. ‘I escaped to London whenever I could,’ he wrote. It w
as during one of these getaways that he encountered Nicholas Elliott.

  *

  Elliott could never recall exactly where their first meeting took place. Was it the bar in the heart of the MI6 building on Broadway, the most secret drinking hole in the world? Or perhaps it was at White’s, Elliott’s club. Or the Athenaeum, which was Philby’s. Perhaps Philby’s future wife, Aileen, a distant cousin of Elliott’s, brought them together. It was inevitable that they would meet eventually, for they were creatures of the same world, thrown together in important clandestine work, and remarkably alike, in both background and temperament. Claude Elliott and Philby’s father St John, a noted Arab scholar, explorer and writer, had been contemporaries and friends at Trinity College, and both sons had obediently followed in their academic footsteps – Philby, four years older, left Cambridge the year Elliott arrived. Both lived under the shadow of imposing but distant fathers, whose approval they longed for and never quite won. Both were children of the Empire: Kim Philby was born in the Punjab where his father was a colonial administrator; his mother was the daughter of a British official in the Rawalpindi Public Works Department. Elliott’s father had been born in Simla. Both had been brought up largely by nannies, and both were unmistakably moulded by their schooling: Elliott wore his Old Etonian tie with pride; Philby cherished his Westminster School scarf. And both concealed a certain shyness, Philby behind his impenetrable charm and fluctuating stammer, and Elliott with a barrage of jokes.

  They struck up a friendship at once. ‘In those days,’ wrote Elliott, ‘friendships were formed more quickly than in peacetime, particularly amongst those involved in confidential work.’ While Elliott helped to intercept enemy spies sent to Britain, Philby was preparing Allied saboteurs for insertion into occupied Europe. They found they had much to talk and joke about, within the snug confines of absolute secrecy.

  The void in Elliott’s life left by the death of Basil Fisher was filled by Philby. ‘He had an ability to inspire loyalty and affection,’ wrote Elliott. ‘He was one of those people who were instinctively liked but more rarely understood. For his friends he sought out the unconventional and the unusual. He did not bore and he did not pontificate.’ Before the war, Philby had joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organisation with pro-Nazi leanings, but now, like Elliott, he was committed to battling ‘the inherent evil of Nazism’. The two friends ‘very rarely discussed politics’, and spent more time debating ‘the English batting averages and watching the cricket from the Mound Stand at Lord’s’ – home to the Marylebone Cricket Club, the central citadel of cricket, of which Elliott was a member. Philby seemed to share Elliott’s firm but simple British loyalties, uncomplicated by ideology. ‘Indeed,’ wrote Elliott, ‘he did not strike me as a political animal.’ Philby was only twenty-eight when they met, but to Elliott he seemed older, matured by his experience of war zones, confident, competent and agreeably louche.

  MI6 enjoyed a reputation as the world’s most redoubtable intelligence agency, but in 1940 it was in a state of flux, rapidly reorganising under the pressure of war. Philby seemed to bring a new air of professionalism to the job. He was plainly ambitious, but hid his drive, as English manners required, behind a ‘pose of amiable, disengaged worldliness’.

  Hugh Trevor-Roper was another new recruit to wartime intelligence. One of the cleverest, and rudest, men in England, Trevor-Roper (later the historian Lord Dacre) had hardly a good word for any of his colleagues (‘by and large pretty stupid, some of them very stupid’). But Philby was different: ‘An exceptional person: exceptional by his virtues, for he seemed intelligent, sophisticated, even real.’ He appeared to know exactly where he was going. When Philby spoke about intelligence matters, Elliott thought he displayed impressive ‘clarity of mind’, but he was neither drily academic nor rule-bound: ‘He was much more a man of practice than of theory.’ Philby even dressed distinctively, eschewing both the Whitehall stiff collar with pinstripe and the military uniform to which, as a former war correspondent, he was entitled. Instead, he wore a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows, suede shoes and a cravat, and sometimes a coat of green fabric lined with bright red fox fur, a gift from his father who had received it from an Arab prince. This eye-catching outfit was topped off with a Homburg, and a smart, ebony-handled umbrella. Malcolm Muggeridge, another writer recruited to wartime intelligence, noted Philby’s unique sartorial swagger: ‘The old Secret Service professionals were given to spats and monocles long after they passed out of fashion,’ but the new intake of officers could be seen ‘slouching about in sweaters and grey flannel trousers, drinking in bars and cafés and low dives . . . boasting of their underworld acquaintances and liaisons. Philby may be taken as a prototype and was indeed, in the eyes of many of them, a model to be copied.’ Elliott began to dress like Philby. He even bought the same expensive umbrella from James Smith & Sons of Oxford Street, an umbrella that befitted an establishment man of the world, but one with panache.

  Through Philby, Elliott was introduced to a fraternity of ambitious, clever, hard-drinking intelligence officers, the ‘Young Turks’ of MI5 and MI6. This informal – almost entirely male – group often gathered, in off-duty hours, at the home of Tomás Harris, a wealthy, half-Spanish art dealer who worked in MI5, where he would play a central role in the great Double Cross deception as the case officer for double agent ‘Garbo’, Juan Garcia Pujol. Harris and his wife Hilda were generous hosts, and their Chelsea home, with its large wine cellar, became an open-house salon for spies. ‘You’d drop in to see who was around,’ Philby remembered. Here, in an ‘atmosphere of haute cuisine and grand vin’, might be found Philby’s friend Guy Burgess, extravagant in his homosexuality, frequently drunk, faintly malodorous and always supremely entertaining. Here too came their friend Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge art scholar now ensconced at the heart of MI5. Other regulars included Victor, Lord Rothschild, the aristocratic chief of counter-sabotage at MI5, and Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counter-intelligence whose diaries from the period offer an extraordinary glimpse into this private dining and drinking club within the secret world. From MI6 came Tim Milne, who had been at Westminster with Philby (and was the nephew of Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne), Richard Brooman-White, now head of MI6’s Iberian operations, and, of course, Nicholas Elliott. Hilda Harris served up sumptuous Spanish meals. Liddell, who had once contemplated a professional career as a musician, would sometimes pick up his cello. Burgess, usually accompanied by his latest rent boy, added scandalous unpredictability. And among them moved Philby, with his aura of smiling charm, holding forth on intelligence matters, provoking arguments (‘out of fun rather than malice’, Elliott insisted), and dispensing Harris’s fine wine in torrential quantities.

  Even by the heavy-drinking standards of wartime, the spies were spectacular boozers. Alcohol helped to blunt the stress of clandestine war, serving as both a lubricant and a bond, and the gentlemen’s clubs were able to obtain supplies for their members far beyond the reach of ordinary rationed folk. Dennis Wheatley, the novelist, who worked in the deception section of British intelligence, described a typical lunch with fellow officers: ‘To start with we always had two or three Pimm’s at a table in the bar, then a so-called “short-one” well-laced with absinthe . . . There would be smoked salmon or potted shrimps, then a Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and a Welsh rarebit to wind up with. Good red or white wine washed this down, and we ended with port or Kümmel.’ After this blowout, Wheatley tended to sneak off to bed ‘for an hour to sleep it off’, before returning to work.

  No one served (or consumed) alcohol with quite the same joie de vivre and determination as Kim Philby. ‘He was a formidable drinker,’ Elliott wrote, and held to the arcane theory that ‘serious drinkers should never take exercise or make sudden or violent movements’ since this would provoke a ‘violent headache’. Philby sucked down the drink, and poured it into others, as if on a mission.

  Elliott was flattered to find himself in such company, and relaxed. E
nglishmen are naturally reticent. Englishmen of Elliott’s class and character even more so. Members of the secret services were forbidden to tell their friends, wives, parents or children what they did, yet many were drawn to this closed clique, bound by shared secrets others must never know. In the civilian world, Elliott never breathed a word about his job. But inside the secular monastery that is MI6, and particularly at Harris’s raucous soirées, he was among people he could trust utterly, and speak to openly in a way that was impossible outside. ‘It was an organisation in which a large proportion of one’s colleagues, male and female, were personal friends,’ wrote Elliott. ‘A sort of convivial camaraderie prevailed, rather like a club, in which we all called each other by our first names, and saw a lot of one another outside the office.’

  The friendship between Philby and Elliott was not just one of shared interests and professional identity, but something deeper. Nick Elliott was friendly to all, but emotionally committed to few. The bond with Philby was unlike any other in his life. ‘They spoke the same language,’ Elliott’s son Mark recalls. ‘Kim was as close a friend as my father ever had.’ Elliott never openly expressed, or demonstrated, this affection. Like so much of importance in the masculine culture of the time, it was left unsaid. Elliott hero-worshipped Philby, but he also loved him, with a powerful male adoration that was unrequited, unsexual and unstated.

  Their relationship grew still closer when both were plucked from the outer reaches of British intelligence, and placed at the very centre, in Section V of MI6, the division devoted to counter-intelligence. MI5 was responsible for maintaining security, including the combating of enemy espionage, within the UK and British Empire. MI6 was responsible for gathering intelligence and running agents abroad. Within MI6, Section V played a specific and vital role: collecting information on enemy intelligence in foreign parts, by means of spies and defectors, and furnishing MI5 with advance warning of espionage threats to Britain. A vital link between Britain’s secret services, Section V’s task was to ‘negate, confuse, deceive, subvert, monitor or control the clandestine intelligence collection operations and agents of foreign governments or agencies’. Before the war, the section had devoted most of its energies to monitoring the spread of international communism and battling Soviet espionage; but as war progressed, it came to focus almost exclusively on the intelligence operations of the Axis powers. The Iberian Peninsula was a particular concern. Neutral Spain and Portugal stood on the frontline of the espionage war. Many of the German intelligence operations directed at Britain were launched from these two countries, and in 1941, MI6 began beefing up the Iberian operation. One evening Tommy Harris told Philby that the bosses were looking for someone ‘with a knowledge of Spain to take charge of the expanded sub-section’. Philby immediately expressed an interest; Harris spoke to Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend, the chief of MI6’s Iberian operations; Brooman-White spoke to the head of MI6. ‘The Old Boy network began to operate,’ as Philby put it, and within days he was summoned to see the head of Section V.