A Spy Among Friends Read Online Free PDF

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 was during one of these getaways that he encountered Nicholas Elliott.
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    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