The Spies: Tom and Guy in Moscow
Britain’s spy networks were far more effectively hidden by upper-class connections than by the homosexual inclinations of a few of Moscow’s men. The full story of the Cambridge spies does not belong here but to the thirties and the divided loyalties of the anti-fascists. The tale of how a cluster of rebellious former public schoolboys came to believe that the fight against poverty and Hitler required their allegiance to the bloodthirsty regime of Stalinist Russia, and then how they infiltrated the British intelligence and diplomatic services before and during the Second World War, is well known. The sons of a diplomat, a naval officer, an Anglican clergyman and a cabinet minister, they were about as traditionalist and patriotic in their upbringing as it was possible to be. They remained quintessentially English afterwards too. The Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg visited one of them, Guy Burgess, a few years after he had dramatically defected with Donald Maclean. (And it was dramatic: Maclean’s pregnant wife had just cooked a special ham for dinner at their home near Churchill’s country house, when Burgess arrived and raced him off to Southampton for the overnight ferry to St Malo.) In Moscow, Driberg found Burgess outside a hotel, ‘his bird-bright ragamuffin face…tanned by the Caucasian sun’. Burgess explained his job involved trying to get the Russians to translate and publish the novels of E.M. Forster. In his flat Burgess strummed the Eton boating song on his piano and proudly showed that his suit still had a stitched badge reading ‘Messrs Tom Brown of Eton, High Street, Tailors’. The Moscow defectors would die there, mildly regretful but entirely unrepentant, while two further traitors, Sir Antony Blunt, who became Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and the economist John Cairncross, privately confessed and were left unexposed and unpunished for much of their lives.
Did they matter, really? They did. Between them British traitors helped the Soviet Union acquire nuclear weapons earlier than would otherwise have happened, passed huge amounts of information to Stalin’s secret police, were directly responsible for the deaths of scores of British and other Western agents at the hands of the KGB and, in Philby’s case, managed to stymie an American attempt to create an uprising in Albania, so keeping that wretched country under the heel of one of the most primitive tyrannies of modern times. Their story has been made ‘glamorous’ by the gilded associations of pre-war Cambridge, and the idealism of being anti-Nazi when part of the British Establishment were not. Films and countless books, some by the spies themselves, have romanticized them. Yet the consequences of their spying were squalid and dangerous. Nor were they actually the most successful spies – less ‘glamorous’ characters such as Alan Nunn May, a scientist, and Fuchs, were more important. It was the Dutch-born George Blake, who escaped from occupied Holland at the age of twenty, joined the Royal Navy, was recruited by MI6 and captured by the Communists in Korea, who probably caused most damage. He had been shocked, he later said, by the effects of American bombing of Korean villages and passed the names of 400 British-controlled agents in Germany to the Russians, with predictable consequences for many of them. Some think he was brainwashed. Blake was caught and in 1961 was given a prison sentence of forty-two years, which remains the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. He, of course, was not a dapper and well-connected Old Etonian with friends to tip him off.
What is it about the British and spying? Other Western nations had their post-war spying scandals, particularly the Americans and the West Germans. But nowhere was quite so gripped as Britain by the actions of Soviet agents. Class and sex are undeniably part of the answer. But there is another half-buried theme – British anti-Americanism. Philby claimed all his life that he was a British patriot who felt that the country was simply allied with the wrong side. Another student in the same Cambridge college as Philby at the same time (though they never knew one another) was Enoch Powell who came to much the same conclusion a few years later. This anti-Americanism was something which could bring together patriotic right-wingers and left-wingers in a common cause. Washington was constantly warning London about intelligence lapses and the possibility of traitors. But even when Russian defectors brought descriptions of Maclean and Philby to MI5, they were languidly dismissed; unless there were even more traitors, even higher in the system (and Philby was close to the top) then disdain and smugness must have been to blame for the grotesque failures of security.
Once traitors were discovered there was then a national case for not making too much of it because of the angry reaction from the American intelligence services, on whom Britain relied very heavily. Politicians were obliged to explain or failed to explain, the defections and the rising suspicions of third and fourth and then fifth men still uncovered. Macmillan, as Foreign Secretary in 1955, was obliged to knock down the idea that Philby might be a Russian spy who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean four years earlier (he was, of course, and had). Later, after yet more spies had been uncovered, Macmillan was told by an excited Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 that the organization had arrested Vassall. Macmillan seemed dejected at the news and when Hollis said he didn’t seem very pleased, replied: ‘No, I’m not pleased at all. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’ Macmillan, by now Prime Minister, lamented that there would be a great public trial, the security services would be blamed, and ‘there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the Government will probably fall. Why the devil did you “catch” him?’ More concerned about harassing the press, Macmillan got two scalps when journalists refused to give their sources for allegations concerning Vassall and were briefly imprisoned. It was not surprising that people suspected an Establishment cover-up by chaps who belonged to the same clubs and did not like their dirty washing flapping in public.