A Spy Among Friends

In the 1930s, Britain's MI6 recruited its officers through an informal network of elite schools, exclusive clubs, and personal connections. Two young men who entered this world through those channels, Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby, forged a friendship that would shape Cold War espionage with catastrophic consequences.

Elliott, the son of the headmaster of Eton, secured his place in MI6 through a conversation at the Ascot races in 1939. Stationed in the Netherlands, he witnessed the Venlo incident, in which two MI6 officers were captured by the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, after being lured into a meeting with supposed anti-Hitler conspirators. After evacuating to London in 1940, he lost his closest friend, fighter pilot Basil Fisher, in the Battle of Britain. Still grieving, Elliott met Philby, a charming, stuttering former war correspondent who had recently joined MI6. The two were remarkably alike: both products of elite schools and Cambridge, both sons of imposing yet emotionally distant fathers. Elliott developed an intense admiration for Philby that his son Mark later described as the closest bond his father ever had.

What Elliott did not know was that Philby had been a Soviet spy since 1934. As a Cambridge student radicalized by the rise of fascism, Philby traveled to Vienna, married Litzi Kohlman, an Austrian communist activist, and was recruited by Arnold Deutsch, the chief Soviet intelligence recruiter in Britain. Deutsch instructed him to sever all communist ties, adopt a right-wing persona, and infiltrate the British establishment. Philby became a Times correspondent covering Franco's forces in Spain and helped recruit fellow Cambridge graduates Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess into what became known as the Cambridge spy ring.

Both men were assigned to Section V, MI6's counterintelligence division in St Albans, where they worked in a tight-knit community that socialized freely and shared secrets openly. Philby copied every file he could access and passed the contents to his Soviet handlers, including a description of Elliott as "ugly and rather pig-like to look at" but possessing a "good brain" (34).

Posted to Istanbul in 1942, Elliott orchestrated his greatest coup the following year: the defection of Erich Vermehren, a young anti-Nazi German intelligence officer, and his wife Elisabeth. The defection led Hitler to abolish the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Philby assisted with the debriefing in London, where the Vermehrens provided a list of Catholic anti-Nazi activists who could anchor a postwar anticommunist German leadership. Philby passed this list to Moscow, and Soviet forces subsequently liquidated everyone on it.

In 1944, Philby engineered his appointment as head of Section IX, the new MI6 division for combating Soviet espionage. That same year, a Soviet intelligence officer named Konstantin Volkov tried to defect in Istanbul, offering the names of hundreds of Soviet agents, including one running "a section of the British counter-espionage service in London" (98). Philby recognized the threat, alerted Moscow, and stalled the British response. Volkov and his wife were seized, taken to Moscow, and executed.

After the war, Philby was posted to Washington in 1949 as MI6's liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He developed a close friendship with James Jesus Angleton, a rising CIA counterintelligence officer, extracting intelligence over near-daily lunches. He also oversaw Operation Valuable, an Anglo-American plan to infiltrate anticommunist guerrillas into Albania and overthrow its dictator, Enver Hoxha. Philby passed the coordinates of every insertion to Moscow. Between one hundred and two hundred Albanian fighters were killed, and thousands more relatives and associates were arrested or executed.

Meanwhile, the Venona project, a top-secret American effort to decrypt Soviet intelligence messages, was closing in on a spy code-named "Homer" inside the British embassy. Philby knew Homer was Donald Maclean. When Maclean was identified in 1951, Philby arranged for Burgess to return from Washington to London and warn him. On May 25, Burgess and Maclean fled together to Moscow.

Suspicion fell on Philby. MI5's Dick White subjected him to interrogation and became convinced he was lying, while CIA officer Bill Harvey wrote a memo concluding Philby was a Soviet spy. MI6 closed ranks, and Elliott defended Philby with absolute conviction, insisting his friend was the victim of a witch hunt. Forced to resign, Philby avoided prosecution for lack of evidence and spent four years in limbo, drinking heavily, sustained by Elliott's financial support. In 1955, when Labour MP Marcus Lipton named Philby in Parliament as the "third man," Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan declared there was "no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country" (193). Philby held a press conference denying all charges with such composure that the footage is still used by MI6 as a training tool.

Elliott then arranged Philby's return to intelligence work, sending him to Beirut under journalistic cover for the Observer and the Economist. When a Soviet intelligence officer approached him there, Philby could have ended his double life; instead, he resumed active espionage for the KGB, the Soviet state security and intelligence service. His first wife, Aileen, died alone in 1957, her health broken by alcohol use and neglect. Philby married Eleanor Brewer, an American he had been seeing in Beirut.

In 1960, Elliott arrived as MI6 station chief in Beirut, reuniting with Philby and putting him to intensive use as an intelligence source. Everything Elliott shared was passed to the KGB. Philby's drinking grew worse, and the 1961 arrest of George Blake, another Soviet spy within MI6, left him terrified of exposure.

The break came in 1962 when Flora Solomon, a Marks & Spencer executive who had introduced Philby to Aileen decades earlier, told Victor Rothschild, who had close ties to British intelligence, that Philby had tried to recruit her as a Soviet spy in 1935. This was the first direct evidence linking Philby to Soviet recruitment. Dick White, now head of MI6, approved a plan to confront Philby in Beirut and offer immunity in exchange for a full confession. Elliott demanded to lead the confrontation.

On January 12, 1963, Philby arrived at a bugged apartment expecting to meet Peter Lunn, the MI6 station chief, and found Elliott instead. Over several days, Elliott presented the evidence, offered a deal, and erupted in fury: "I once looked up to you, Kim. My God, how I despise you now" (259). Philby produced a partial written confession admitting to Soviet espionage but limiting the timeframe and withholding names.

Elliott then departed without placing Philby under any surveillance. On January 23, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter under a false identity and sailed for Odessa. Whether Elliott's failure to monitor Philby was incompetence or a deliberate maneuver to avoid a catastrophic public trial remains the central mystery. Soviet handler Yuri Modin believed "the secret service had actively encouraged him to slip away" (277).

In Moscow, Philby was welcomed but never fully trusted. He married a fourth time, gave lectures to KGB recruits, and died in 1988. Angleton, shattered by the betrayal, launched a destructive mole hunt within the CIA before being forced out in 1974. Elliott retired from MI6 in 1968, spending the rest of his life wondering how someone so similar to him could have been so different. He died in 1994, leaving a memoir titled Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella, a reference to an expensive umbrella he once bought in imitation of his closest friend and worst enemy.