The later drafts of this book were slashed, binned, rethought, intensified and given exactitude during the intellectually sumptuous months when I was a visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2016. There is no toadying in my co-dedication of the book to the Warden and Fellows: in their college my thoughts ‘began to burnish, sprout, and swell’; my work was invigorated by their vital ideas and unstinting stimuli; my debt to them is fathomless. It is invidious, perhaps, to mention individuals, but sitting in the Codrington Library, a few yards from the figure of Dmitri Levitin, crouched over his sources like a jaguar ready to spring on luscious prey, inspired me to read and read, and to read yet more, and to organize, clarify and revise. My college mentor, the Junior Dean George Woudhuysen, was unfailingly considerate: he managed the remarkable task of being both youthful and protectively avuncular; he mixed gravity with glee, and wielded the gentlest of prods. Without William Waldegrave it would have been impossible to write this book: the moral courage and good sense of his initiative as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1992 to declassify tranches of documents held by MI5, and to release them in the National Archives, were indispensable. I have followed reading recommendations, ideas, factual leads and corrections of nuance provided by John Drury, Gabriel Gorodetsky, Jane Humphries, Jonathan Katz, Dmitri Levitin, Avner Offer, Nicholas Rodger, Judith Scheele, Stephen Smith, Sir Keith Thomas and Sir John Vickers. The generosity of mind and disciplined creative ideas of Francesco Ademollo, Sarah Beaver, Margaret Bent, Edel Bhreathnach, Francis Brown, Clare Bucknell, Vince Crawford, Wolfgang Ernst, Sir Noel Malcolm, Jesse Norman, Philipp Northaft, Erik Panzer, Catriona Seth, Péter-Dániel Szántó, Frederick Wilmot-Smith and Andrew Wynn Owen were more enlivening and suggestive than they can know.
The intense scrutiny given to my manuscript by its copy-editor, Peter James, was stupendous, and saved me from mortifying blunders. The technical experience and intuitions of Christopher Phipps corrected many anomalies and slips found while he compiled the index. I am beholden to Iain Hunt for his help with illustrations and much else. Henry Hemming has been generous in advising on illustrations, and Valerie Lippay has kindly agreed to the use of the photograph of her mother Olga Gray. Gill Bennett and Cécile Fabre sacrificed their valuable time to read draft chapters of the book, and made supportive suggestions for improvements. I am grateful for further ideas, facts, corrections and references to the Reverend William C. Beaver, Lady Bullard, Jeremy Catto, Patric Dickinson (Clarenceux King of Arms), Minoo Dinshaw, Sir Brian Harrison, Ivo Hesmondhalgh, Sheila Markham, Tom Perrin, Timothy Pleydell-Bouverie, Basil Postan, Otto Saumarez Smith, James Southern, James Stourton, † Giles Waterfield and Michael Wheeler. Roy Foster, Lady Antonia Fraser, Flora Fraser, Munro Price, Stuart Proffitt, Andrew Roberts, John Saumarez Smith and Charles Sebag-Montefiore have prompted me to read books that have informed my own.
Notions that are developed in this book were first tested in papers given to the Algae group at the Athenaeum (led by Dan Cohn-Sherbok), the S. G. Gardiner Society at Christ Church, Oxford (at the invitation of Joshua Hillis), the Modern History Seminar at St John’s College, Oxford (convened by Joshua Bennett, Sam Brewitt-Taylor, Matthew Grimley and Sîan Pooley), the Visiting Fellows’ seminar at All Souls (organized by Marco Gentile and Cecilia Heyes), the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute (where Hilary Laurie is the impresario), the Oriel Colloquium on Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies (mustered by Liam Gearon), and the British Studies seminar at the University of Texas at Austin (at which Wm. Roger Louis is the presiding genius). The Master and Fellows of Selwyn College, Cambridge, where I stayed during my Cambridge research, have my gratitude for their hospitality and companionship.
Miranda Carter, Ted Harrison and Andrew Lownie are longstanding friends: their books on Blunt, Philby and Burgess have been models for me. Lownie moreover has shown princely generosity in sending me references and scanned documents. Geoff Andrews and Martin Pearce are newer acquaintances, who at our meetings and in their biographies of James Klugmann and Maurice Oldfield have given me welcome pointers. When Nicola Lacey’s biography of H. L. A. Hart was first published, I read it for pleasure: returning to it after almost twenty years, the enjoyment was undiminished; it remains a model of lucidity and balance which I have tried to emulate. My reliance at surface level and deep below on the works of Sir Christopher Andrew, Jonathan Haslam, Victor Madeira, Kevin Quinlan and Stephen Smith is comprehensive. The influence of the writings of David Burke and Nigel West pervade several chapters.
I thank the archivists and document-fetchers at the following institutions: All Souls College, Oxford (papers of John Sparrow); Balliol College, Oxford (papers of Sir Harold Nicolson); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (papers of Lady Asquith of Yarnbury, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lord Brand, Lord Inverchapel, Sir Patrick Reilly, Anthony Sampson, Lord Sherfield, Viscount Simon, Lord Somervell of Harrow, the Earl of Stockton, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, Earl Winterton and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans); the British Library (papers of Anthony Blunt); Cambridge University Library (the papers of Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, Andrew Boyle, the Marquess of Crewe, Joseph Needham, Sir Michael Postan, Viscount Templewood and Vickers Ltd); Christ Church, Oxford (papers of Lord Bradwell and Lord Dacre of Glanton); Churchill College, Cambridge (papers of Sir Alexander Cadogan and Sir Eric Phipps); Durham Cathedral Library (papers of Herbert Hensley Henson); House of Lords Record Office (papers of Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Patrick Hannon); Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (papers of Maurice Cranston, Kay Dick and Francis King); King’s College, Cambridge (papers of Lord Annan, Lord Keynes and Joan Robinson); the National Archives, Kew (papers of the Foreign Office, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, MI5, the Premier’s Office and the Ministry of Supply); the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (papers of Lord Butler of Saffron Walden and Maurice Dobb); and Worcester College, Oxford (papers of Sir John Masterman, and college records). The amenities of the London Library, Cambridge University Library and the Codrington Library at All Souls were invaluable to my delving in secondary material.
For allowing me to quote from the Dacre papers at Christ Church, I thank Professor Blair Worden and the Literary Estate of Lord Dacre of Glanton. Extracts from the Cadogan and Phipps journals are reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge. Quotations from the unpublished diaries of Harold Macmillan are by consent of the Harold Macmillan Book Trust. Unpublished Annan and Keynes material appears by courtesy of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge. I thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge for their agreement to my use of archival material from the Wren Library. Jane Reilly has kindly agreed to my quotations from the unpublished papers of her father Sir Patrick Reilly, and Cathy Rosenberg has likewise enabled me to quote from a letter of her uncle Francis King.
This book was completed before the publication in 2017 of five books on which I would otherwise have drawn: Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Allen Lane); Mihir Bose, Silver: The Spy Who Fooled the Nazis (Fonthill); Helen Fry, The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre (Yale); Hamish MacGibbon, Maverick Spy: Stalin’s Super-Agent in World War II (Tauris); and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (Allen Lane).
When I started to write Enemies Within, Rory Allan of Christ Church was the ideal reader in my head whom I had to keep amused. This dashing, glamorous and valiant young sprite seemed pleased in the last weeks of his life to know that he would be the primary dedicatee. Jenny Davenport and Christopher Phipps scoffed at my sillier provisional ideas, challenged my lazier assumptions, warned when the tone of my drafts was too testy and sustained me with their calm and merry sanity. For the umpteenth time I thank them.