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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