Will we ever tire of the Cambridge spies? Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – and to a lesser extent John Caincross, the fifth man in the circle – are names as familiar to us now as certain brands of detergent or the line-up of the Beatles. To compliment the countless books, dramas and documentaries about them, this week the national archives declassified MI5 files on the subject. They cover Philby’s recruitment and subsequent flight to Moscow, as well as the Queen’s nine-year unawareness that Blunt (who worked for Buckingham Palace) had confessed to his past as a Soviet agent. It seems that whatever we think of Burgess, Maclean and co. – whether we see them as despicable traitors or as a juicy, albeit sinister, part of post-war history – we’re endlessly enthralled by their story.
Philby may have stuck it hard and fast to the motherland, but the umbilical cord still tugged away at him
Part of it is surely the complexity of the characters involved. The womanising, whisky-drinking Philby, rising through the ranks of MI6 to become the most successful penetration agent in history; BBC producer and diplomat Guy Burgess, promiscuously gay, given to buffoonish indiscretions, but described by KGB handler Yuri Modin as ‘extremely conscientious…a naturally gifted analyst… a great pro’. The tormented Donald Maclean (head of the American department at the Foreign Office, and forever linked with Burgess in the public mind) was said to be haunted by the ghost of his dead Presbyterian father and, after a drink too many, would confess his espionage to a disbelieving all-and-sundry. At the very centre of the establishment was Sir Anthony Blunt, Poussin expert, director of the Courtauld Institute and surveyor of the Queen’s pictures – until, unmasked by Thatcher in 1979, he had all honours ripped from him.
How should we react to this treachery? Graham Greene and John Le Carré, who both wrote books based on the Philby affair (The Human Factor in Greene’s case, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in Le Carré’s) disagreed bitterly about their central character. Writing an introduction to Philby’s memoir My Silent War, Greene, who worked for Philby and knew him personally, was highly complimentary: ‘No one could have been a better chief than Kim Philby… He had all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to us… In Philby’s own eyes he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit.’
Meanwhile, Le Carré was utterly damning: ‘Philby has no home, no women, no faith. Behind the inbred upper-class arrogance, the taste for adventure, lies the self-hate of a vain misfit for whom nothing will ever be worthy of his loyalty. In the last instance, Philby is driven by the incurable drug of deceit itself.’ As head of anti-Soviet operations at SIS, he had – as Le Carré pointed out – sent numerous British-supported agents to their deaths.
Yet most writers on the Cambridge spies – most readers and audiences too – have inhabited the grey zone between these poles. Julian Mitchell in 1981 gave us the play Another Country, his imagination of Guy Burgess’s (here ‘Guy Bennett’) time at Eton, suggesting his desire to get one over the establishment came from humiliations sustained at public school.
Alan Bennett, two years later, wrote An Englishman Abroad about Burgess – trapped in Moscow, plaguing visiting actress Coral Browne (who played herself in the TV version) with requests for garments from Jermyn Street and Savile Row and desperate for news from a home he yearns for. He’s also aware of the shock he and his coterie of public school agents have given the establishment: ‘How can he be a spy? He goes to my tailor!’
Both An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, Bennett’s companion-play about Blunt, were as full of laughs as they were of drama. They were broadly sympathetic towards their subjects, whom the playwright seemed to view more as witty, divided men in a quandary of their own making than as outright blackguards.
More flintily clear-sighted is John Banville’s 1997 The Untouchable, his arch and exquisite novel (essential reading) based on the Blunt affair. Speaking of the book’s genesis, when he watched the disgraced Sir Anthony being grilled by the press on TV, Banville is revealing:
As he surveyed his interrogators, the tiniest smile of amusement and disdain flickered for a second across those famously bloodless lips. For me, in that smile was contained all of Blunt’s character, and in that moment was conceived the character of Victor Maskell, protagonist and first-person narrator of my novel.
When truth is stranger than fiction, though, perhaps the first beeline you should make is for the tangible facts. Watch, if you haven’t, the black and white press interview with Philby, in which, denying espionage, he actually places his tongue in his cheek. Or the interview from Russia with Burgess – unearthed, to great excitement, just a few years ago. There’s the memoir by Philby’s misled and abandoned third wife Eleanor – in which she generously described him as ‘a tender, intelligent and sentimental husband… He betrayed many people, me among them. But men are not always masters of their fate’. Or the account of Philby’s fourth marriage by his widow Rufina in her book The Private Life of Kim Philby, where she gives a telling account of his daily routine in Moscow:
On the dot of 7 a.m. he would listen to the BBC, sitting by his old ‘Festival’ radio in the living room… In the morning, as he swigged his second or third glass of tea, he would make himself a piece of toast, which he ate with butter and jam; his favourite was Oxford Coarse Cut Orange Marmalade…
Philby himself admitted that he missed ‘the Times obits, the funny letters, the court circular and the crossword’. Along with his fellow spies, he may have stuck it hard and fast to the motherland, but the umbilical cord still tugged away at him. This wouldn’t have surprised Alan Bennett, who saw betrayal of England as the most quintessentially English trait of all:
An ironic attitude towards one’s country and a scepticism about one’s heritage is a part of that heritage. And so, by extension, is the decision to betray it. It is irony activated.
Perhaps this is why we go on finding the Cambridge spies so compelling, that they have something profound to tell us about ourselves. Is it because we all have secrets, suspicions and disloyalties, hidden hatreds and guilty loves, which the spies simply took and ran with? ‘He betrayed his country,’ writes Graham Greene of Philby. ‘Yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?’
If Greene’s words seem to skim over the Cambridge spies’ crimes – the murdered agents, the speechless friends, a shocked British public and the embassies and government agencies from which assumptions of loyalty were gone for good – he is right about one thing. English history, the history of any country, is littered with conspiracies, deceptions and betrayals. Few have given rise to such an endlessly compelling sub-genre – seeming to contain multitudes – as our very own Cambridge spies.
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