Brown began his reporting career in Luton and Bristol before moving to Fleet Street in the mid-1950s where he joined the "Daily Mail". During the late 1950s he covered the Hungarian uprising (in 1956) and the Algerian War of Independence. In 1958 he was awarded Reporter of the Year. Brown secured the first Western interview with Egyptian president, Gamel Abdel Nasser, and was a frequent drinking companion of Kim Philby in the Middle East prior to the latter's 1963 defection to the Soviet Union. He also interviewed the dissident Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, who at the time was under surveillance, in 1959. He subsequently smuggled two of Pasternak's poems back to the UK, one of which was immediately published in the "Daily Mail".