Read Online A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre - Free Book Online

for ever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.
    Philby’s introduction to Deutsch appears to have been arranged by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian communist friend of Litzi’s. Born Edith Suschitzky, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese publisher, Edith married an English doctor and fellow communist named Alexander Tudor-Hart, and moved to England in 1930, where she worked as a photographer and part-time talent-scout for the NKVD, under the remarkably unimaginative codename ‘Edith’. She had been under MI5 surveillance since 1931 but not, fatefully, on the day she led Philby to meet Deutsch in Regent’s Park.
    Philby was just the sort of recruit Deutsch was looking for. He was ambitious, well connected and devoted to the cause, but unobtrusively: unlike others, Philby had never made his radical views obvious. He sought a career in diplomacy, journalism or the civil service, all excellent perches for a spy. Deutsch was also under the impression that St John Philby was an agent of British intelligence, with access to important secret material.
    At their second meeting, Deutsch asked Philby if he was willing to act as an undercover agent for the communist cause. Philby did not hesitate: ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force,’ he wrote. That was a most telling remark: the attraction of this new role lay in its exclusivity. In some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring. ‘Of all the passions,’ wrote Lewis, ‘the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’
    ‘My future looked romantic,’ Philby wrote. Deutsch laid out a vision of that future: Philby and Litzi must break off all communist contacts; rather than join the party, he should establish a new political image as a right-winger, even a Nazi-sympathiser. He must become, to all outward appearances, a conventional member of the very class he was committed to opposing. ‘By background, education, appearance and manners you are an intellectual, a bourgeois. You have a marvellous career ahead of you. A bourgeois career,’ Deutsch told him. ‘The anti-fascist movement needs people who can enter into the bourgeoisie.’ Hidden inside the establishment, Philby could aid the revolution in a ‘real and palpable way’. Deutsch began to instruct Philby on the rudiments of tradecraft: how to arrange a meeting; where to leave messages; how to detect if his telephone was bugged; how to spot a tail, and how to lose one. He presented Philby with a new Minox subminiature camera, and taught him how to copy documents. Philby memorised Deutsch’s lessons ‘like poetry’. His double life had begun.
    Deutsch gave Philby the affectionate codename ‘Sonny’ (Söhnchen in German), and reported his catch to the London rezident , the regional control officer of the NKVD (the predecessor organisation to the KGB), who passed on the news to Moscow Centre, the Soviet intelligence headquarters: ‘We have recruited the son of an Anglo agent, advisor to Ibn-Saud, Philby.’ Moscow was impressed: ‘What are his prospects for a diplomatic career? Are they realistic? Will he choose his own path or will his father “suggest” he meet someone and discuss it? That would be good.’ Deutsch instructed his new