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Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The true story of Kim Philby, the Cold War's most infamous spy, from the master espionage writer and author of The Spy and the Traitor.
Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him--like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA's head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton--knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.
Every word uttered in confidence to Philby by his colleagues in the West made its way to Moscow, leading countless missions to their doom and subverting American and British attempts to subdue the Soviet threat. So how was this cunning double-agent finally exposed? In A Spy Among Friends , Ben Macintyre expertly weaves the heart-pounding tale of how Philby almost got away with it all--and what happened when he was finally unmasked.
Based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, this is Ben Macintyre's epic telling of one of the greatest spy stories ever, a Cold War history that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Author Notes
Ben Macintyre is writer-at-large and associate editor of the Times of London. He is the author of several books including Agent Zigzag, The Man Who Would Be King, The Englishman's Daughter, The Napoleon of Crime, Forgotten Fatherland, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Macintyre's latest biography chronicles the adventures of British intelligence officer Kim Philby, who secretly spied for the Soviet Union throughout most of his career. These events have inspired a host of fictional espionage thrillers, but Mac-intyre offers new context to address the forces that shaped Philby's betrayal of his country. Veteran reader Lee effectively shifts between expository passages and dialogue. Philby's career makes for an engrossing narrative, with accounts of double-crosses and triple-crosses, and Lee's performance brings out the human element in the action-packed plot. His rendering of eccentric CIA counterintelligence leader James Jesus Angleton-an American with strong British ties and sensibilities-is especially memorable. Building to the climactic confrontation between Philby and his best friend and colleague, Nicholas Elliott, Lee's delivery of the spy vs. spy banter evokes the essence of Cold War tension. A Crown hardcover. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN DEVOURING THIS THRILLER about Kim Philby, the high-level British spymaster who turned out to be a Russian mole, I had to keep reminding myself that it was not a novel. It reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming or John le Carré, all of whom make appearances, leavened by a dollop of P.G. Wodehouse. But, in fact, "A Spy Among Friends" is a solidly researched true story. The London journalist Ben Macintyre, who has written nine previous histories chronicling intrigue and skulduggery, takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era. And like one of his raffish characters relaxing around the bar at White's, that venerable clubhouse of England's old boys' network, he is able to play the role of an amusing raconteur who can cloak psychological and sociological insights with dry humor. The story of Philby and his fellow Cambridge University double agents has been told many times, most notably by Phillip Knightley and Anthony Cave Brown, as well as by Philby himself and two of his four wives. Macintyre, who draws on these and other published sources, was not able to pry open any archives or uncover startling new revelations. Instead, he came up with a captivating framing device: telling the tale through Philby's relationship with Nicholas Elliott, a fellow Cambridge-educated spy who was, or thought he was, Philby's trusted friend. In doing so Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship: Why does it exist, what causes people to seek it and how do we know when it's real? The world of upper-crust young Englishmen provides a rugged yet rewarding terrain for such an exploration. Taught on the playing fields of Eton to shield themselves from vulnerability, they mask their feelings for one another with jokes, cricket-watching, drinking and "a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty." Macintyre also takes on a related subject: the tribal loyalties of the inbred social class, on the fraying fringe of Britain's aristocracy, that nurtured such friendships, both real and feigned, and created the boys' club that populated its foreign, colonial and intelligence services. Members harbored, Macintyre writes, "a shared set of assumptions about the world and their privileged place in it." While watching the races at Ascot one day, Nick Elliott mentioned to a diplomat friend of his father, who was the headmaster of Eton, that he would like to be a spy. "I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy," the diplomat replied, and Elliott was soon ensconced at MI6, Britain's counterpart to the C.I.A. Kim Philby had the same desire, and he was recommended by the deputy head of MI6, Valentine Vivian, who had served as a colonial official with Philby's father. Even though the younger Philby had dabbled in Communist circles while at Cambridge, there was little vetting other than Vivian's asking Philby's father about it over drinks at their club. "Oh, that was all schoolboy nonsense," the elder Philby replied. So Vivian had him hired. "I was asked about him and said I knew his people." Elliott not only became Philby's friend, he began to worship him "with a powerful male adoration that was unrequited, unsexual and unstated." He even bought the same expensive umbrella that Philby liked to sport. What he did not know was that Philby was a double agent working for Russia. That meant he had a different angle on their friendship. "Nicholas Elliott was a rising star in the service and a valued friend," Macintyre writes, "and no one understood the value of friendship better than Kim Philby." One of us. That was Philby's deep cover, and Macintyre recounts in ways both amusing and appalling how powerful a cover it was. Even as his betrayals doomed colleagues and potential Soviet defectors to their deaths, no one in his circle suspected him, and he rose to be MI6's Washington-based liaison with the C.I.A. There he became friends, in the Philbyesque sense of that word, with another excessively fascinating character in this book, James Jesus Angleton, who was rising in the ranks of the C.I.A. "Angleton was a little like one of the rare orchids he would later cultivate," Macintyre writes, "alluring to some but faintly sinister to those who preferred simpler flora." He was obsessed with rooting out spies and moles, but he missed the biggest one in his midst, indeed became enamored of him. Just as Elliott took to carrying around the same umbrella as Philby, Angleton wore the same homburg hat. Like almost every character in this book, Philby and Angleton were ferocious and competitive drinkers. They would meet at a clublike Washington saloon and oyster bar, Harvey's, and match each other drink for drink. As they exchanged confidences, Angleton was at a deadly disadvantage: He didn't know that Philby wasn't on his team. An undercurrent of Macintyre's book is the sense that, for those living a duplicitous life, alcohol was a tool of the trade and a psychological necessity. Philby's Cambridge colleagues in the ring of Russian double agents, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, were also world-class drinkers. At one point a drunken Maclean, then in Cairo, smashed up the apartment of two embassy secretaries and ripped up their underwear. Yet he was soon promoted to head the American desk at the British Foreign Office. "Even drunken, unhinged knicker shredding, it seemed, was no bar to advancement in the British diplomatic service if one was the 'right sort,'" Macintyre writes. Through decrypted Russian messages, the British finally discovered, in 1951, that Maclean was a spy. Among the first people MI6 informed was Philby, its top man in Washington. Philby dispatched Burgess, who happened to be living with him as a houseguest, back to England to warn Maclean. They both quickly defected to Moscow. Though Philby was able to feign shock when told the news, his closeness to the Cambridge defectors finally made him a target of suspicion. Once again, class lines were drawn. The old boys' network of MI6, led by Elliott, rallied to Philby's defense. But MI5, the British domestic service akin to the F.B.I., was filled with rough-and-tumble cops and constables who did not have the same reverence for toffs whose parents had known one another at Eton. The evidence against Philby was circumstantial and not enough to have him arrested, but he was quietly eased out of the intelligence ranks. It was amazing that Philby had risen so far and been undetected for so long. But in 1954 something even more astonishing happened. His connections began a quiet campaign to rehabilitate him. It was led by Elliott and Angleton, who that year became chief of the C.I.A.'s counterintelligence division. Philby held a press conference to deny that he had been a spy. When Edwin Newman of NBC asked about his friendship with Burgess, Philby gave his one honest answer: "On the subject of friendship, I'd prefer to say as little as possible, because it's very complicated." Philby was allowed to return to the fold of MI6, albeit as a lower-level agent, and was sent to spy-infested Beirut under the cover of being a journalist. He was soon reunited with Elliott, who became MI6's station chief there. "Kim Philby's return to British intelligence displayed the old boys' network running at its smoothest: A word in an ear, a nod, a drink with one of the chaps at the club and the machinery kicked in." Just as smoothly, Philby also resumed being a double agent serving Moscow. Why did Philby betray his country, club mates, class and friends? He later insisted that it was because of his higher loyalty to the Communist ideal. "I left the university with the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism," he said. Yet there's no evidence that Philby ever read Marx, had any interest in ideology or harbored burning sympathies for the plight of exploited classes. Macintyre emphasizes a more psychological factor: "Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce." That thrill seemed to be ingrained at an early age. "Philby tasted the drug of deception as a youth and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life." Underlying this explanation was a deep-seated urge familiar to many biographers: a desire to come to terms with a father. St. John Philby, an adventurous colonial service officer who helped both the British intelligence services and the Saudi king navigate the murky politics of the Middle East, "was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth." In 1960, on his way back to Saudi Arabia from England, where he had gone to watch a Lord's cricket test match, he stopped in Beirut to visit his son. Elliott threw a drunken lunch party for the Philbys and friends. St. John Philby, Elliott later wrote, "left at teatime, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of the embassy staff in a nightclub, had a heart attack and died." His last words were, "God, I'm bored." Kim Philby buried his father (who had become a Muslim) with full Islamic rites, then went on a drinking binge that lasted for days. Philby's mooring began to slip after his father's death and, inevitably, his past caught up with him again. By 1962, enough evidence had accumulated that even Elliott became convinced his friend was a mole. He insisted that he be the one allowed to confront Philby and try to extract a confession. "Inside he was crushed," Macintyre writes. "He wanted to look Philby in the eye one last time. He wanted to understand." Macintyre's book climaxes with a psychological duel over tea, cloaked by a veneer of gentility, which led to some subsequent meetings and a partial confession from Philby. But instead of arranging an arrest or abduction or assassination, Elliott told his erstwhile friend that he was going to Africa for a few days before the process of interrogation resumed. On his own in Beirut, Philby immediately contacted his Russian handlers, who whisked him on a freighter to Moscow, where he lived the rest of his life in exile. Why did Elliott let Philby escape? At first it seemed as if he and the British intelligence service were bumbling fools. But Macintyre offers a different theory, one made plausible by his book's narrative. After extracting Philby's confession, Elliott may have intentionally left the door open for him to flee. Perhaps he even nudged him to do so. The old boys' network had nothing to gain from further revelations or a public trial. It also probably had no stomach for punishing one of its own. At first Philby reveled in the fact that he had escaped. It was only after a few months in Moscow that it dawned on him that he may have been pushed. He smuggled Elliott a letter suggesting that they secretly meet in a place like Helsinki to clear things up. "Our last transactions were so strange that I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade." Elliott rejected him with a cold, blunt response. One new piece of evidence comes from the former spy John le Carré, who tackled the Philby case in his novel "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." Le Carré interviewed Elliott in 1986 and resurrected his notes to write an afterword for this book. He asked Elliott whether he and his MI6 colleagues ever considered having Philby dragooned back to London. "Nobody wanted him in London, old boy," Elliott replied. Le Carré followed up: "Could you have him killed?" To that Elliott gave a disapproving response. "My dear chap," he said. "One of us." That neatly encapsulates the underlying theme of this book, one Macintyre explores with both insight and humor. What does it really mean to be "one of us"? Even as Philby's betrayals doomed colleagues to their deaths, no one in his circle suspected him. WALTER ISAACSON, chief executive of the Aspen Institute, has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. His latest book, to be published in October, is "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution." By Mark Mazzetti THE GOOD SPY The Life and Death of Robert Ames By Kai Bird Illustrated. 430 pp. Crown Publishers. $26. GOOD HUNTING An American Spymaster's Story By Jack Devine with Vernon Loeb Illustrated. 324 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/FSG. $27. BEFORE THE DEAD ENDS and the false dawns, before the latest revenge killings and Secretary of State John Kerry's quixotic shuttle diplomacy, there were people who believed that a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible. One of them was a quiet American named Robert Ames, the subject of Kai Bird's textured and absorbing book "The Good Spy." Ames was not only a spy but, as the title says, a good one. However, what exactly does that mean? He recruited few significant foreign agents to work for the C.I.A., falling short in what some inside the spy agency consider the true measure of a clandestine officer. The mission to which he devoted the bulk of his energies - maneuvering in the shadows to broker a Middle East peace deal - is, shall we say, unfinished. Instead, as Bird artfully demonstrates, Ames was a good spy because he was a good listener, and "he listened with a plain sense of human empathy." During the 1960s and 70s, the Robert Ames Listening Tour played in Dhahran, Beirut, Sana, Tehran and other lesser cities throughout the Middle East. Ames died in 1983, along with 62 others, when a truck filled with explosives slammed into the American Embassy in Beirut. Bird, the son of a Foreign Service officer who as a child was Ames's neighbor in Dharan, has made a career writing impressively about American diplomatic history; he is also the co-author, with Martin J. Sherwin, of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But a biographer's skills are tested when the material is thin, as seems to be the case with Ames's early life in a working-class section of Philadelphia, which Bird sketches with generalities and clichés. The reader learns that Ames was a "steady, solid character" and a "serious young man." On the basketball court he was "always a team player." By the end of the first chapter, I feared I was embarking on an account of Beaver Cleaver's adventures in Arabia. But the book quickly becomes a rich, nuanced portrait of a man who, in the C.I.A.'s term, had "a high tolerance for ambiguity." It is this trait that led Ames to develop a deep relationship - even a friendship - with Ali Hassan Salameh, the P.L.O.'s jet-setting, womanizing intelligence chief, whom the Israelis called "the Red Prince." That relationship forms the narrative spine of much of the book, and Bird's patient, detailed exposition of how the two men came to rely on each other is one of the best accounts we have of how espionage really works. It was a thorny arrangement. Salameh had a role in terrorist attacks launched by Black September, the Palestinian group most famous for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the Mossad believed Salameh himself was a chief planner of the operation. Bird says the evidence tying Salameh to Munich is murky, but Salameh was certainly involved in other Black September operations. "You sup with the Devil," one spy put it, "but you use a long spoon." Ames saw an opportunity for a back channel to Yasir Arafat, and hoped that the secret relationship might help nudge the P.L.O. toward a deal with the Israelis. Salameh never went on the C.I.A.'s payroll, refusing to become an official "agent" for the spy service. Bird recounts how this led to grumbling inside the C.I.A. that Ames had difficulty closing the deal, but Ames knew that Salameh would consider it a betrayal to his cause to take money from Americans. Yet this also left Salameh unprotected. When the Mossad asked the C.I.A. whether Salameh was an American agent, Langley faced a dilemma. If the answer was yes, the Mossad would have spared Salameh's life. But the Israelis would also have demanded that the Americans share the intelligence Salameh was providing. The C.I.A. said nothing, and Salameh was killed in early 1979 in Beirut when a Mossad officer detonated a bomb hidden inside a Volkswagen. Ames met his end four years later, an event that Bird recounts in heartbreaking detail. He sifts through the evidence in an attempt to determine who bore responsibility for the bombing, a case that for the most part remains unsolved, but ends on a curious note: Bird believes that a commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ali Reza Asgari, played a central role in the bombing, and that Asgari may have later cut a deal with the C.I.A. to give up intelligence about Iran's nuclear program. Bird says that Asgari is now living in the United States. The C.I.A. has denied this assertion, but Bird has done a solid job investigating the episode. The puzzling part is that Bird clearly wants the reader to feel outrage that the C.I.A. may have brokered a deal with someone who had American blood on his hands - at the end of a book about a man who understood that such deals are part of the spying game. Nobody's hands are clean - and nobody knew that better than Robert Ames. SOME MONTHS BEFORE Ames's death, the C.I.A. had begun planning to escalate a secret operation in a different corner of the Muslim world, the effort to arm rebel fighters to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan. What had originally been envisioned as low-grade harassment would grow to be the largest covert action of the Cold War, and contributed to thousands of Soviet military deaths. Not long after Jack Devine took over the C.I.A.'s Afghan Task Force, in early 1986, the Reagan administration decided to introduce a powerful new weapon into the conflict: American Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopter gunships. In "Good Hunting," Devine spins some fascinating yarns about his time running the covert Afghan war, from negotiating with the Pentagon for the Stingers to haggling over the price of AK-47s with Egyptian officials to buying mules from the Chinese. He also devotes considerable attention to his involvement in the story of Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer turned Soviet spy with whom he crossed paths frequently throughout his career. The interactions between the two men over several decades illuminate how the C.I.A. has always been a small, closed society. But the book suffers from the same problems that cripple so many spy memoirs. First, there's the empty bragging. The chapter that recounts Devine's ascent to a leadership job at Langley is titled "Raising the Bar," and the book is marbled with phrases like "It's fair to say I can put a tail on someone just about anywhere in the world faster than most spy agencies," and "My job was to make decisions, and the consequences were always significant, so the pressure was high." Then there's Devine's depiction of nearly every C.I.A. officer he ever worked with as bright, resourceful and patriotic. In the author's telling, the C.I.A. is Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average and there's scarcely a dolt in the entire organization. Like many former spies, Devine is critical of intelligence reforms implemented after the 9/11 attacks, including the creation of a director of national intelligence - which Devine laments has "diminished" the C.I.A.'s role. That certainly was the concern at Langley when the position was created in 2005, but the opposite has occurred. The C.I.A. has only gained in power and influence, especially during the Obama administration. The spy agency is now in charge of America's many secret wars abroad. Just ask John Brennan, President Obama's top White House counterterrorism adviser during the first term, who has had his pick of assignments in the second term. He's now running the show at Langley. MARK MAZZETTI, a national security reporter for The Times, is the author of "The Way of the Knife : The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth."
Guardian Review
In an interview in Moscow in 1988, Kim Philby was adamant: "I don't like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it." Bad he may have felt, but he never faltered. Not only did he condemn many people, perhaps hundreds, to cruel and ignominious deaths, he also clandestinely manipulated some of the leading figures in western security services for decades. It is easy to sympathise with the wounded bafflement of the people who were close to him, such as his MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott and the CIA chief James Jesus Angleton, both of whom he took in, chewed on, and spat out with not a moment's hesitation or, for all his protestations, real remorse. Ben Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller, concentrating on Philby's friendship with and betrayal of Elliott and Angleton. His account of the verbal duel between Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963 is worthy of John le Carre at his best. John Banville - John Banville In an interview in Moscow in 1988, Kim Philby was adamant: "I don't like deceiving people, especially friends, and contrary to what others think, I feel very badly about it." Bad he may have felt, but he never faltered. - John Banville.
Kirkus Review
A tale of espionage, alcoholism, bad manners and the chivalrous code of spiesthe real world of James Bond, that is, as played out by clerks and not superheroes.Now pretty well forgotten, Kim Philby (1912-1988) was once a byname for the sort of man who would betray his country for a song. The British intelligence agent was not alone, of course; as practiced true-espionage writer Macintyre (Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, 2012, etc.) notes, more than 200 American intelligence agents became Soviet agents during World War II"Moscow had spies in the treasury, the State Department, the nuclear Manhattan Project, and the OSS"and the Brits did their best to keep up on their end. Philby may have been an unlikely prospect, given his upper-crust leanings, but a couple of then-fatal flaws involving his sexual orientation and still-fatal addiction to alcohol, to say nothing of his political convictions, put him in Stalin's camp. Macintyre begins near the end, with a boozy Philby being confronted by a friend in intelligence, fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, whom he had betrayed; but rather than take Philby to prison or put a bullet in him, by the old-fashioned code, he was essentially allowed to flee to Moscow. Writing in his afterword, John Le Carr recalls asking Elliott, with whom he worked in MI6, about Philby's deceptions"it quickly became clear that he wanted to draw me in, to make me marvelto make me share his awe and frustration at the enormity of what had been done to him." For all Philby's charm ("that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality"), modern readers will still find it difficult to imagine a world of gentlemanly spy-versus-spy games all these hysterical years later.Gripping and as well-crafted as an episode of Smiley's People, full of cynical inevitability, secrets, lashings of whiskey and corpses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Macintyre (Double Cross) recounts the life of Kim Philby, a British intelligence officer and double agent for the Soviet Union before, during, and after the World War II. His biography appears alongside that of Nicholas Elliott, an agent and a close friend of Philby's. An important theme running through this work is how mid-century British intelligence behaved more like a British social club than a professional agency. Family and educational background played significant roles in determining who served as agents and their advancement through the bureaus. Philby's personal charm allowed him to pass information to the Soviets without detection, an activity that cost the lives of thousands of men and women at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets. The revelation of Philby's activities caused a major rift within British intelligence and embarrassed the British political establishment. It also soured relations between British and American intelligence agencies. This spy novel-like audiobook includes an afterword by John le Carre. Reader John Lee does an excellent job. VERDICT Listeners with an interest in espionage will enjoy this fascinating work.-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Apprentice Spy One moment Nicholas Elliott was at Ascot Racecourse, watching the favorite, Quashed, come romping home at 7-2, and the next, rather to his own surprise, he was a spy. The date was June 15, 1939, three months before the outbreak of the deadliest conflict in history. He was twenty-two. It happened over a glass of champagne. John Nicholas Rede Elliott's father, Sir Claude Aurelius Elliott, OBE, was headmaster of Eton (England's grandest public school), a noted mountaineer, and a central pillar of the British establishment. Sir Claude knew everybody who was anybody and nobody who wasn't somebody, and among the many important men he knew was Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to His Majesty's government, who had close links to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, the agency responsible for intelligence gathering abroad. Nicholas Elliott arranged to meet "Van" at Ascot and, over drinks, mentioned that he thought he might like to join the intelligence service. Sir Robert Vansittart smiled and replied: "I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy." "So that was that," Elliott wrote many years later. The old boys' recruitment network had worked perfectly. Nicholas Elliott was not obviously cut out to be a spy. His academic record was undistinguished. He knew little about the complexities of international politics, let alone the dextrous and dangerous game being played by MI6 in the run-up to war. Indeed, he knew nothing whatsoever about espionage, but he thought spying sounded exciting and important and exclusive. Elliott was self-confident as only a well-bred, well-heeled young Etonian, newly graduated from Cambridge University, with all the right social connections, can be. He was born to rule (though he would never have expressed that belief so indelicately), and membership in the most selective club in Britain seemed like a good place to start doing so. The Elliotts were part of the backbone of the empire; for generations, they had furnished military officers, senior clerics, lawyers, and colonial administrators who ensured that Britain continued to rule the waves--and much of the globe in between. One of Nicholas Elliott's grandfathers had been the lieutenant governor of Bengal; the other, a senior judge. Like many powerful English families, the Elliotts were also notable for their eccentricity. Nicholas's great-uncle Edgar famously took a bet with another Indian Army officer that he could smoke his height in cheroots every day for three months, then smoked himself to death in two. Great-aunt Blanche was said to have been "crossed in love" at the age of twenty-six and thereafter took to her bed, where she remained for the next fifty years. Aunt Nancy firmly believed that Catholics were not fit to own pets since they did not believe animals had souls. The family also displayed a profound but frequently fatal fascination with mountain climbing. Nicholas's uncle, the Reverend Julius Elliott, fell off the Matterhorn in 1869, shortly after meeting Gustave Flaubert, who declared him "the epitome of the English gentleman." Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity. Towering over Nicholas's childhood was his father, Claude, a man of immovable Victorian principles and ferocious prejudices. Claude loathed music, which gave him indigestion, despised all forms of heating as "effete," and believed that "when dealing with foreigners the best plan was to shout at them in English." Before becoming headmaster of Eton, Claude Elliott had taught history at Cambridge University, despite an ingrained distrust of academics and an aversion to intellectual conversation. The long university vacations gave him plenty of time for mountain climbing. He might have become the most celebrated climber of his generation, but for a kneecap broken by a fall in the Lake District, which prevented him from joining Mallory's Everest expedition. A dominating figure physically and psychologically, Claude was nicknamed "the Emperor" by the boys at Eton. Nicholas regarded his father with awed reverence; in return, Claude alternately ignored or teased his only child, believing, like many fathers of his time and class, that displaying affection would make his son "soft" and quite possibly homosexual. Nicholas grew up convinced that "Claude was highly embarrassed by my very existence." His mother avoided all intimate topics of conversation, according to her only son, including "God, Disease and Below the Waist." The young Elliott was therefore brought up by a succession of nannies and then shunted off to Durnford School in Dorset, a place with a tradition of brutality extreme even by the standards of British prep schools: every morning the boys were made to plunge naked into an unheated pool for the pleasure of the headmaster, whose wife liked to read improving literature out loud in the evenings with her legs stretched out over two small boys while a third tickled the soles of her feet. There was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape. Today such an institution would be illegal; in 1925 it was considered "character-forming." Elliott left his prep school with the conviction that "nothing as unpleasant could ever recur," an ingrained contempt for authority, and a hardy sense of humor. Eton seemed like a paradise after the "sheer hell" of Durnford, and having his father as headmaster posed no particular problem for Nicholas, since Claude continued to pretend he wasn't there. Highly intelligent, cheerful, and lazy, the young Elliott did just enough work to get by: "The increased legibility of his handwriting only serves to reveal the inadequacy of his ability to spell," noted one report. He was elected to his first club, Pop, the Eton institution reserved for the most popular boys in the school. It was at Eton that Elliott discovered a talent for making friends. In later life he would look back on this as his most important skill, the foundation of his career. Basil Fisher was Elliott's first and closest friend. A glamorous figure with an impeccable academic and sporting record, Fisher was captain of the First XI, the chairman of Pop, and son of a bona fide war hero, Basil senior having been killed by a Turkish sniper at Gaza in 1917. The two friends shared every meal, spent their holidays together, and occasionally slipped into the headmaster's house, when Claude was at dinner, to play billiards. Photographs from the time show them arm in arm, beaming happily. Perhaps there was a sexual element to their relationship, but probably not. Hitherto, Elliott had loved only his nanny, "Ducky Bit" (her real name is lost to history). He worshipped Basil Fisher. In the autumn of 1935 the two friends went up to Cambridge. Naturally, Elliott went to Trinity, his father's old college. On his first day at the university, he visited the writer and poet Robert Gittings, an acquaintance of his father, to ask a question that had been troubling him: "How hard should I work, and at what?" Gittings was a shrewd judge of character. As Elliott remembered: "He strongly advised me to use my three years at Cambridge to enjoy myself in the interval before the next war"--advice that Elliott followed to the letter. He played cricket, punted, drove around Cambridge in a Hillman Minx, and attended and gave some very good parties. He read a lot of spy novels. On weekends he went shooting or to the races at Newmarket. Cambridge in the 1930s boiled with ideological conflict; Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish civil war would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme Right and extreme Left fought it out in university rooms and on the streets. But the fervid political atmosphere simply passed Elliott by. He was far too busy having fun. He seldom opened a book and emerged after three years with many friends and a third-class degree, a result he considered "a triumph over the examiners." Nicholas Elliott left Cambridge with every social and educational advantage and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. But beneath a complacent and conventional exterior and the "languid, upper-class manner" lay a more complex personality, an adventurer with a streak of subversion. Claude Elliott's Victorian rigidity had instilled in his son a deep aversion to rules. "I could never be a good soldier because I am insufficiently amenable to discipline," he reflected. When told to do something, he tended to "obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about." He was tough--the brutality of Durnford had seen to that--but also sensitive, bruised by a lonely childhood. Like many Englishmen, he concealed his shyness behind a defensive barrage of jokes. Another paternal legacy was the conviction that he was physically unattractive; Claude had once told him he was "plug ugly," and he grew up believing it. Certainly Elliott was not classically handsome, with his gangly frame, thin face, and thick-rimmed glasses, but he had poise, a barely concealed air of mischief, and a resolute cheerfulness that women were instantly drawn to. It took him many years to conclude that he "was no more or less odd to look at than a reasonable proportion of my fellow creatures." Alongside a natural conservatism he had inherited the family propensity for eccentricity. He was no snob. He could strike up a conversation with anyone from any walk of life. He did not believe in God or Marx or capitalism; he had faith in King, country, class, and club (White's Club, in his case, the gentleman's club in St James's). But above all he believed in friendship. In the summer of 1938 Basil Fisher took a job in the City, while Elliott wondered idly what to do with himself. The old boys soon solved that. Elliott was playing in a cricket match at Eton that summer when, during the tea interval, he was approached by Sir Nevile Bland, a senior diplomat and family friend, who tactfully observed that Elliott's father was concerned by his son's "inability to get down to a solid job of work." (Sir Claude preferred to speak to his son through emissaries.) Sir Nevile explained that he had recently been appointed Britain's minister at The Hague, in the Netherlands. Would Nicholas like to accompany him as honorary attaché? Elliott said he would like that very much, despite having no idea what an honorary attaché might actually do. "There was no serious vetting procedure," Elliott later wrote. "Nevile simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew me and had been at Eton with my father." Before leaving, Elliott underwent a code training course at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott's first tutor in secrecy was a double agent. Elliott arrived at The Hague in his Hillman Minx in the middle of November 1938 and reported to the legation. After dinner, Sir Nevile offered him a warning--"in the diplomatic service it is a sackable offense to sleep with the wife of a colleague"--and some advice--"I suggest you should do as I do and not light your cigar until you have started your third glass of port." Elliott's duties were hardly onerous--a little light bag carrying for the minister, some coding and decoding in the wireless room, and attendance at formal dinners. Elliott had been in the Netherlands only four months when he got his first taste of clandestine work and an "opportunity to see the German war machine at first hand." One evening, over dinner, he fell into conversation with a young naval officer named Glyn Hearson, the assistant naval attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Commander Hearson confided that he was on a special mission to spy on the port of Hamburg, where the Germans were believed to be developing midget submarines. After a few more glasses, Hearson asked Elliott if he would care to join him. Elliott thought this a splendid idea. Sir Nevile gave his approval. Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg's port by climbing over the wall. "We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour" taking photographs, Elliott recalled, before "returning to safety and a stiff drink." Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, "a singularly foolhardy exploit." But it had been most enjoyable and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits. April 20, 1939, was Hitler's fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organized by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronized sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Fuhrer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle involving fifty thousand German troops, hundreds of tanks, and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France, and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler's march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. "The Fuhrer is feted like no other mortal has ever been," gushed Goebbels in his diary. Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. "Mason-Mac" was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. The general remarked under his breath to Elliott that Hitler was well within rifle range: "I am tempted to take advantage of this," he muttered, adding that he could "pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking." Elliott "strongly urged him to take a pot shot." Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down. Elliott returned to The Hague with two newly minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs and that the best way of contributing to this end would be to become a spy. "My mind was easily made up." A day at Ascot, a glass of fizz with Sir Robert Vansittart, and a meeting with an important person in Whitehall did the rest. Elliott returned to The Hague still officially an honorary attaché but in reality, with Sir Nevile Bland's blessing, a new recruit to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. Outwardly his diplomatic life continued as before; secretly he began his novitiate in the strange religion of British intelligence. Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office mandarin who smoothed Elliott's way into MI6, ran what was, in effect, a private intelligence agency outside the official orbit of government but with close links to both MI6 and MI5, the Security Service. Vansittart was a fierce opponent of appeasement, convinced that Germany would start another war "just as soon as it feels strong enough." His network of spies gathered copious intelligence on Nazi intentions, with which he tried (and failed) to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the looming confrontation. One of his earliest and most colorful informants was Jona von Ustinov, a German journalist and fierce secret opponent of Nazism. Ustinov was universally known as "Klop," Russian slang for bedbug, a nickname that derived from his rotund appearance, of which he was, oddly, intensely proud. Ustinov's father was a Russian-born army officer; his mother was half Ethiopian and half Jewish; his son, born in 1921, was Peter Ustinov, the great comic actor and writer. Klop Ustinov had served in the German army during the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, before taking up a post with the German Press Agency in London. He lost his job in 1935 when the German authorities, suspicious of his exotically mixed heritage, demanded proof of his Aryanism. That same year he was recruited as a British agent, code-named "U35." Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanor. He was "the best and most ingenious operator I had the honor to work with," declared Dick White, his case officer, who would go on to head both MI5 and MI6. Excerpted from A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
