Were the Cambridge Spies just a Noisy Diversion from the Real Operation?

The famous Cambridge Spies – two of whom are once again exposed as unreliable drunks in accounts from the interesting Mitrokhin Archives published today - are, in my view a complete diversion, and one of the KGB’s most successful operations precisely because they are a diversion.

 

On and on we go about these louche old boozers. National Treasure Alan Bennett even managed to write a sympathetic and much-praised play about one of them which still seems to me to be quite revolting. How would a sympathetic TV play about defectors to the Third Reich  – such as John Amery or ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce (yes, I know his British nationality is open to question) – have gone down with the critics,  who laughed along with a drama that made Guy Burgess likeable, highighted his isolation and loneliness etc, and rather skated around the minor fact that he took the side of a monstrous, murderous secret-police tyranny?  I’m told that John Amery and William Joyce both had redeeming features, but so what, given whose side they took? And wasn’t there a stupid BBC series about the Cambridge lot, which was needlessly kind to their supposedly tortured consciences?

 

I greatly doubt that Philby, Burgess and Maclean ever supplied much that was of any real use to the KGB, or even that they provided anything that the KGB hadn’t already got from someone else. It may be that their main KGB purpose was to provide noisy cover for the real (and discreet)  spies and traitors who remain undetected to this day.

 

They did love showing them off. When I was in Moscow at the end of the Communist era, it was clear that the KGB loved parading them . I and other British reporters were actually invited into the KGB Club, a brown, high-ceilinged marble annexe to the Lubiyanka, for the unveiling of a Philby exhibit in the KGB museum, which I suspect had been created solely for us.  

 

They also displayed to us the special, ultra-macabre funeral wreath which had been wrought for the KGB’s founder, the sinister Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was fashioned out of bayonets and was rather like the Iron Throne in ‘Game of Thrones’, made of swords. Philby was buried prominently in a fashionable elite Moscow cemetery. They even put his corrupt face on a (rather low value)  postage stamp . I sent several letters stamped with twenty or so of these portraits of Philby to friends in England who foolishly didn’t keep them. I still wish I’d held on to them for myself. They would have made a good wallpaper pattern or perhaps a mug design.  I suspect that the less –trumpeted, soberer Melita Norwood,  ‘The Spy who came in from the Co-op’ , and the nuclear spies Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, between them did far more damage.

 

But more interesting even than these are the scores, probably hundreds of agents who, by my guess,  worked throughout the British establishment for long undetected decades. They weren’t so much spies as people who made sure that the interests of Communism and of revolution were constantly served, in the civil service, in the military, in politics, in the academy, why, perhaps even in the Church and presumably in the broadcasting, newspaper and publishing industries.  Evelyn Waugh hints at their prevalence and power in wartime Britain in his autobiographical ‘Men at Arms’ series, most especially the final volume ‘Unconditional Surrender’.  One shadowy but prominent establishment character in that book always reminds me so strongly of Anthony Blunt that I sometimes wonder if Waugh knew about him all along.

 

We know from Peter Hennessy’s book 'The Secret State’ that Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, told Communist students in Cambridge (in the late 1940s) *not* to join the CPGB but to work themselves into positions of influence in the establishment.  We can assume that he made similar speeches in other places.  This one happens to have been picked up. It often seems to me that this might well explain the near-suicidal policies adopted and followed by this country in the subsequent 70 years, that they were actually being directed by KGB agents. But what did they all do after 1990? Become Eurocommunists and join New Labour?