The Soviet Network

 

Richard Norton-Taylor

The Soviet Network

Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire

By Antonia Senior

Hodder & Stoughton 496pp £25

 

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war.

Churchill and Roosevelt sold the pass at their Yalta summit in February 1945 by accepting that eastern and central Europe would come under Soviet political control. But Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow. This included information about partisans and individuals hostile to the Soviet Union, and about how much support they would get from the Western allies. In Ukraine, Senior notes, Britain backed the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, as well as partisans ‘riddled with fascists’ guilty of their own atrocities.

Senior acknowledges that only a fraction of the thousands of documents that reached Moscow from the British spies has surfaced, newly declassified files emerging randomly from time to time in the National Archives. Even so, there is enough evidence to show that intelligence the spies passed on about those opposed to Soviet communism was ‘priceless to Moscow in its bid to assert political control in eastern and central Europe’. The partisans’ fight for an independent future is a moment in Europe’s history that ‘has been forgotten in the West’. It was a time, Senior says, during which the Cambridge spies ‘poured the greatest secrets of the last months of the war into Soviet ears’, as a ‘ruthless [Russian] counterintelligence organisation followed the Red Army to Berlin’.

The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’ More than once she describes the spies as part of a ‘chapocracy’: an establishment whose complacency and incompetence protected spies who dined and drank in the same clubs and were part of the same social network. 

The Cambridge Five, Senior suggests, were blinded by ideology. And MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office were blinded by prejudice: files have already revealed how those at the top simply could not believe that Cambridge graduates would betray their country. Such an attitude was perhaps father to the thought. The Whitehall establishment was terrified of the damage to their reputation and the reaction in Washington if the truth came out. Better to keep the growing evidence and their suspicions under wraps. 

Although Senior states that ‘there was never enough evidence to charge any’ of the Cambridge spies, the reality was not so simple. Declassified files reveal that the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was told in March 1952 that there was insufficient evidence – in spite of months of investigation, phone taps and interviews to prosecute Burgess and Maclean – even if they were to come home from Moscow (they had defected in 1951). The files also reveal that the Foreign Office told Sir Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador in Moscow: ‘Defection is not, of course, a crime in English law.’ Another Foreign Office official told his boss, Sir Harold Caccia, in 1962: ‘We certainly don’t want either [Burgess or Maclean] to return.’ MI5 was so anxious that Burgess, unhappy in Moscow, might try and come back to Britain that the agency encouraged Blunt, whose Soviet affiliation was still unknown, to write to Burgess. ‘What the outcome of the trial would be is of course a matter of speculation,’ Blunt wrote in 1959, ‘but on the way the whole story would be raked up again and many of your friends would certainly be called as witnesses, and mud slung in all directions.’

In 1964, Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, overseeing the royal art collection, secretly confessed to spying for Moscow after hard evidence emerged against him in the United States. The Queen was not officially told until 1973, when she was said to have responded ‘calmly and without surprise’. Blunt was publicly outed as a wartime Soviet agent in 1979.

The flight of Burgess and Maclean threw suspicion on Philby. Another declassified file shows that Sir William Strang, the Foreign Office’s most senior official, told his Whitehall colleagues in December 1952: ‘If we want to avoid embarrassment, the best course would be to let him slip away.’ In January 1963, MI6 sent Philby’s former close colleague Nicholas Elliott to Beirut, where Philby was working for The Observer and The Economist. Elliott was to confront Philby with new evidence that he had been spying for the Russians and offer him immunity from prosecution in return for a confession. After telegramming Philby’s confession back to London, Elliott left Beirut, handing over the job of questioning Philby to the MI6 local head of station, Peter Lunn. A few days later Philby vanished, only to turn up on board a Soviet ship.

Questions remain about the circumstances surrounding Philby’s decision finally to defect – or, to use Strang’s term, ‘slip away’. Why, Senior asks, is there no record that any of the questions MI5 sent out were actually put to Philby? Why was no one watching Philby in the days before he disappeared? The official file on Lunn has not been released and even his file number has been redacted. What is there to hide? 

The continuing suppression or destruction of files, in London and Moscow, suggests we have not heard the last of the Cambridge spies. We may never be able to answer fully the question the author poses in her conclusion: ‘Whom exactly did the spies betray to Stalin?’ But we can answer much more now thanks to her valuable, thought-provoking book. And we have a much clearer answer to her second question: ‘What was the human cost of their ideological purity?’

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