Just before Christmas in 1961, a KGB major named Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the West after turning up unannounced at the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki. He came bearing secrets, revealing to his slightly bewildered hosts that Western intelligence agencies had been penetrated for decades by rather excellent Soviet spies. At the center of this effort was a network of British communist sympathizers who’d attended Cambridge University during the 1930s and had subsequently attained prominence within the organs of British statecraft. All these years later, it is still hard to know the full extent of their treachery. What is certain is that throughout the corridors of power in London and Washington, the eyes and ears of comrade Stalin were everywhere. So total was his access to information that, in the years following World War II, when the former allies were sliding toward confrontation, the Soviet leader was reading the correspondence between the British prime minister and the U.S. president in real time.
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In Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire, Antonia Senior reveals how this extensive subterfuge came to be. Senior has produced a beautifully written retelling of the Cambridge Five saga and the tortured epoch in which they carried out their work. She skillfully reconstructs the port- and gin-soaked clubs of St. James’s, drunken dinner parties in London and Washington, and the innocuous drop sites where thousands of carefully photographed pages of state secrets were transmitted via microfilm to Soviet handlers. Bolstered by newly released files from the MI5 archives, this isn’t quite a definitive history, but it is a meticulous character study of the Five and their bright, duplicitous, slowly unraveling lives. Special attention is given to the victims of their treason, particularly that of Kim Philby: the thousands of Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Albanians, and others sent to their deaths on doomed infiltration missions behind the Iron Curtain.
The defection of Golitsyn led to the final unmasking of Philby, a suave, highly competent, and popular former intelligence officer who sat at the center of the Cambridge Five intelligence network. Then living in Beirut as a correspondent for the Observer and the Economist, he slinked aboard a Soviet ship, thus completing his long journey to Moscow.
Philby, while fresh out of Trinity College, Cambridge, had been recruited in 1934 at the age of 22 by the NKVD spymaster Arnold Deutsch. Deutsch, an “illegal” resident in London, seems to have noted the surging communism in British university life. His formula was to recruit credentialed graduates, implore them to distance themselves from communism so as not to preclude a career within the British state, and test their loyalty until they could be firmly trusted. They would be mined for information as their careers progressed. During long sessions held on a bench in Regent’s Park, “a meeting of two men of faith,” the pair discussed Marxist theory in depth. Philby ultimately agreed to become his spy.
Philby also provided Deutsch with a list of promising young communists to target for recruitment. These included Guy Burgess, “a perpetual student who consistently fell just short of the academic greatness predicted by himself and occasionally others,” Donald Maclean, a Scotsman and “an interloper in the social class to which he appeared to belong,” who would produce the best intelligence out of the Five, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, the least competent and most isolated member. These were deeply religious men who eschewed their native church in favor of dialectical materialism. As Senior notes, “at the root of the Five’s politics, and especially Maclean’s, was a belief in internationalism.” But this worldview also assumed the exceptionalism of Britain, as ironic as it might seem.
Cambridge University was a stormy place when the Five converged there as young idealists. It was utterly haunted by the ghosts of World War I, which had claimed an inordinate number of its graduates barely a decade prior. Looming over student life, especially once the Great Depression took hold, was a clash between the newer, post-heroic vision of the Marxists and the traditional, honor-bound conservatives, known as “hearties” and comprised largely of rowers and rugby players. These young men were aware of how profoundly their world had changed and fielded conflicting visions of what to do about it. In pitched battles across Cambridge, “the hearties and the Reds” would come to blows over such ceremonies as the laying of a wreath at a war memorial. The leftward shift at Cambridge was evidenced by an influential secret society called the Apostles, of which Blunt, Burgess, and Cairncross were members. So too had been the economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1928, there had been only one Marxist in the club. By 1933, it was the dominant ideology.
The question at the heart of this book, and every other work about the Five, of which there are many, is: Why did they do it? They were not particularly Russophile. Burgess, for one, seemed to rather despise Moscow, describing it as “just a Balkan town.” And Maclean, exiled in the Soviet capital after his treachery came to light, desperately longed to return to the country he’d betrayed his entire adult life. Philby, in particular, espoused a revealing chauvinism. In describing the Eastern European saboteurs he had betrayed to Moscow, Philby said that “we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that these agents were just down from the trees.”
These men were not aristocrats, as one Soviet handler had mistaken. They belonged to a “mezzanine class,” relatively close to the top, but a discernibly separate caste. In short, they belonged to the class that built and maintained the empire — Philby was born in India, to one of Britain’s most prominent Arabists — and empire-building is precisely what they did throughout their lives, albeit on behalf of the Soviet empire, rather than their native Britain or the transcendent, internationalist empire of their youthful Marxist ideals.
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The idealism animating the Five in their youth ultimately faded. The Trotskyists and internationalists who filled the ranks of Soviet intelligence at the beginning of the 1930s were brutally purged by the end of the decade. The Spanish Civil War had revealed to Stalin not only the virulence of fascism but the dangerous rifts within communism itself. Meanwhile, Stalin rejected the internationalism of the Communist International by making himself a red Tsar, building an oppressive empire that orbited around Moscow. An essential step in doing so was finding a temporary rapprochement with Adolf Hitler, codified by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Even when the prospect of sharing intelligence could have strengthened the hated Nazi Germany, the Five never balked at doing so.
Philby, Burgess, Cairncross, Blunt, and Maclean were extreme people. They replicated this across their work, their drinking, and their politics. Each was possessed with an enormous intellect and an intense religiosity, which they applied to their espionage with brutal effect. In communism, they had found a framework for navigating the unsettled world around them, though what began as an effort to strengthen the world revolution ultimately fed the far more earthly ambitions of Stalin. By the time they found themselves positioned to shape the balance of power, the revolution was stillborn. All that was left was blind loyalty to a rival empire.
Carson Becker is an American writer.
