Lawfare Daily: The Costs (and Cultural Cachet) of the Cambridge Spies

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Antonia Senior: So absolutely everything that the Americans are doing on and off, admittedly, between 1944 and 1951 to try and penetrate the Soviet world, Philby is betraying to the Russians.

Michael Feinberg: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Michael Feinberg, senior editor of Lawfare, here today with Antonia Senior, whose new book on the history of the Cambridge spy ring, Stalin’s Apostles, comes out in the United States at the end of this month.

Antonia Senior: They’d offered Philby this deal, which they will then subsequently offer to Burgess and Cairncross for immunity if he confesses. So then what they’ve got is a confession, but a pledge of immunity and a man roaming about drunk who everybody knows was a Soviet spy, but they’re not doing anything about.

Michael Feinberg: Today, we talk about the history of the spy ring, how they were recruited, how they were unmasked, and their lasting effect on the culture of espionage.

[Main Podcast]

So we’re going to talk quite a bit both about the substance of your book, which is the recruitment, spying, and eventual downfall of what is colloquially become known as the Cambridge spy ring, as well as how the five individuals involved have been portrayed both in prior historical works and biographies, but also in cultural media, novels, films, plays, miniseries of at least one of which I’m aware.

But before we begin, can you give the briefest of overviews just in terms of sort of bare bone facts of who were the Cambridge Five and what did they do? Just so our listeners who may not be as entranced long-term about this story as you and I are will have an idea what we’re talking about.

Antonia Senior: Sure. So broadly, they are five young men who know each other at Cambridge University in the early 1930s when there is an outbreak of communist fervor amongst very well-heeled, very kind of upper class young men and women across Britain in response to basically the idea that the World War I has bequeathed them a terrible universe, the Great Depression has added to that, and there’s the rise of fascism in Europe.

And these things combine along with, I argue, a kind of social contagion, a sort of sense of, you know, youthful exuberance to create an environment where quite a lot of people are quite communist. Now, in 1934, an Austrian illegal who is kind of like a freelance operator for Russian intelligence arrives in Britain.

His name is Arnold Deutsch, and he has a plan, and it does really seem to have been Arnold Deutsch’s plan to take advantage of this kind of, you know, cultural moment and recruit well-placed young men mainly, well, primarily, and watch them rise up through the British establishment and then glean secrets from them for the advancement of the revolution.

So Arnold Deutsch, through Austrian communist circles, meets a young Cambridge graduate called Kim Philby. He’s the first to be recruited. Kim Philby gives Arnold Deutsch a list of other likely recruitees. Top of that list is Donald Maclean, another friend of his from Cambridge who’s just been brought into the British Foreign Office.

So for the Soviets, this is a fantastic coup. Bottom of Kim Philby’s list is Guy Burgess, who is a brilliantly intellectual communist, but a kind of very flaky character, which is why he’s at the bottom of Kim Philby’s list. Guy Burgess badgers his way in once he realizes that his friends are behaving oddly.

And then through Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, who’s a bit older and a bit more kind of respected, is brought into that environment. And then finally, Burgess and Blunt between them bring in a spiky young Scotsman called John Cairncross. And they’re interested in Cairncross not really because they like him.

They don’t. He doesn’t really fit. But he has just also been accepted into the British Foreign Office. So as far as they’re concerned, you know, he’s a good recruit. So that’s the five of them in the early ‘30s. Between them, they basically—in different, in sort of fits and spurts at different times are differently useful to Soviet intelligence, but broadly they kind of work their way up different branches of the British government.

And by the middle to the end period of the war, basically the Soviets have oversight of the most secret parts of British government and right into Washington as well because the two of them end up in Washington too. So they are, I think, unparalleled in the history of intelligence in the access they have to secrets, in the volume of incredible information that they supply.

They’re working for Soviet intelligence effectively for 17 years overall, and it’s an incredible treasure trove that they offer to Stalin.

Michael Feinberg: Just for the benefit of our American listeners, I do want to point out that their influence was not just deleterious on the British intelligence establishment, but Kim Philby at least had a pretty outsized influence on the then nascent Central Intelligence Agency.

I believe he was the one who during World War II essentially taught an American named James Jesus Angleton, who was on detail from what was then the OSS, Philby taught him the nuts and bolts of counterintelligence. And Angleton himself rose to be the head of counterintelligence within the United States, and once Philby was unmasked, it really undid Angleton’s psyche as well.

Antonia Senior: Yeah, Angleton often gets a lot of grief for this, for his sort of unraveling after Philby defects. But, you know, from his point of view, his mentor, his friend, the man who taught him absolutely everything about how to counter Soviet intelligence turns out to have been a Soviet spy the entire time. I mean, I think it’s enough to send anybody completely loopy, to be honest.

I think it’s a miracle he didn’t go further down the kind of rabbit hole. But yes, so this is very much an American story as well as a British story. In 1944, Donald Maclean is posted to the Washington Embassy, and from there for the next few years, he is giving the Soviets everything from nuclear intelligence to the personal correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill.

That’s going straight to Stalin’s desk from Donald Maclean. Philby not only works with very closely with American intelligence towards the end of the war, and as you say, trains Angleton, he is then appointed in 1949 the liaison between British and American intelligence over all their operations to send men over the Iron Curtain.

So absolutely everything that the Americans are doing on and off, admittedly, between 1944 and 1951 to try and penetrate the Soviet world, Philby is betraying to the Russians—

Michael Feinberg: And we should be clear, by the time he reaches the pinnacle of his career, he’s actually running the anti-Soviet desk, anti-Soviet section at MI6.

So this is not somebody who is largely a minor functionary. He actually gets very close to the top of the hierarchy of British intelligence.

Antonia Senior: Yeah. So in 1944, they, MI6, who previously, like the Americans, have been a bit squeamish about spying on the Soviets on the basis that the Soviets were our allies, they begin to realize that they’ve got a Soviet problem, and MI6 set up a counterintelligence unit to try and counter the Soviets.

And the man picked to lead that in 1944 is Kim Philby, the Soviet spy, which is, you know, breathtaking really. So all of those early, all of those early inroads into trying to kind of get to grips with what the Soviets were up to across Europe were compromised by Philby. And then in 1949, he l- he, he moves to Washington to be the man in Washington liaising with the FBI, the CIA, and the British.

So when he defects, it is ruinous to the British-American relationship for a long time. It is, you know, deeply embarrassing for everybody, and more importantly, it is, you know, the reason why so many young men who were sent by the British and the Americans on incredibly perilous missions across Europe were sent straight to their deaths or to be captured and used in sort of duplicitous Soviet games against the West.

So yeah, I mean, we, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the extent to which Philby compromised and betrayed British and American int- intelligence in this period, and I think it’s almost unparalleled. And Donald Maclean doing exactly the same thing, you know, from within the embassy. So both diplom- in terms of diplomacy and in terms of intelligence, everything the British and the Americans are doing in this crucial early part of the Cold War, you know, the, and the end of World War II is basically visible to Stalin.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. So let’s stick with Philby for a second ‘cause I wanna hammer home a point you just made, which is These are not just intelligence secrets or position papers that Philby is betraying. He is directly responsible for probably dozens of people who end up murdered by the Soviet Union.

There’s a would-be defector in Turkey who... And he functionally delays assisting the individual so the Soviets can swoop in first and kidnap him basically and take them to, take him back to Moscow. There’s a series of famous partisan missions into Albania where most of the individuals are rounded up and shot within hours of landing.

Are there any others that, that potential readers of your book should also be aware of?

Antonia Senior: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s not just Albania. So the Albanian mission is quite late to the party. The British are sending people into Poland, into Ukraine, into Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, anywhere. They basically come to understand in 1944, and there’s a document paper where they outlay their thinking.

And because all the MI6 files are restricted still, the only reason we know about this positioning paper is ‘cause somebody found it in the KGB archives ‘cause Kim Philby had given it to the KGB. So there’s a positioning paper that just basically says there is literally no point us trying to send men into Russia, right?

We can’t penetrate Russia. What we can penetrate is the kind of restless underbelly of Stalin’s new empire. We can go to the Baltics, we can go to Ukraine, we can go to Poland, because in these countries there already exists resistance. You know, there are partisans all over Eastern and Central Europe who were fighting desperate battles to have their own agency at the end of the war.

Now, some of those partisans are compromised because during the terrible period of, you know, the Second World War, a lot... we’re talking about countries that were invaded by the Soviets as part of the Nazi-Soviet pact, then inv- invaded by the Nazis after the Stalin and Hitler stopped being allies and fell out, and then re-invaded by the Soviets as part of their lib- you know, their liberation of Europe.

It was a liberation that didn’t end for another sort of, you know, 50 years. So there were missions across Eastern and Central Europe. Philby was betraying all of them. Some of this has been slightly downplayed because the Soviet counterintelligence was very good, right? So they were penetrating these partisan groups, they were penetrating, you know, the, all the expat communities which the British and the Americans were recruiting from.

But I spent a lot of time in the... Using Lithuanian KGB files and the Albanian Sigurimi files, and I had a researcher helping me in Poland as well And it became obvious to me that the only reason that Soviet counterintelligence could be so effective was because Philby was on the other side. So they knew what was working and they could keep doing it.

Because if you, what they did was they played these radio games where they were sending, they were setting up sort of fake organizations and sending radio messages back to the West saying, everything’s brilliant. It’s all working. Send more money, send more men, send more arms. But the one time I found in the Albanian files where they were trying to play that kind of radio game on their own before they had Soviet help and therefore, you know, Philby on the other side, they didn’t know if the poor tortured man sitting there on the radio sending these messages back, they don’t know if he’s infiltrating secret codes to let the other side know this is all a sham.

They need eyes on the other side, right, to know that the Americans and British believe that these messages are being sent with sincerity. So this is what happens. It’s a combination of incredibly effective Soviet counterintelligence on the ground and Philby giving them everything that he can, scuppering all the individual missions that he can, but also providing general intelligence that these radio games are working.

Michael Feinberg: So let’s continue focusing on Philby before we get to the other four, because I’m interested in how he’s been portrayed in the decades since he defected and then later died in the Soviet Union. And the initial studies of him, despite the roster of individuals he had killed, whom we just discussed, the early studies of him are actually somewhat, if not outright sympathetic, somewhat romanticized.

I’m thinking in particular, Phillip Knightley writes a book called “The Master Spy” that almost has Philby seeing around corners in a way I don’t think he did in real life. Graham Greene sort of becomes a soft apologist for Philby after his defection. John le Carré, who is certainly not sympathetic to Philby.

Philby actually gave up le Carré’s real identity when he himself was in the intelligence services. But le Carré turns him into the character of Bill Haydon in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” who, while still the villain of the book, is this very polished, refined, intelligent manipulator of people. And Philby gets through his afterlife with this sort of sheen of glamour on him.

For me, that reaches its apotheosis in what I would just outright say is an execrable BBC miniseries about the Cambridge Five, where he is portrayed almost as this human rights activist who only becomes a communist because he can’t think of another way to fight fascism. Why is that? Why initially, and we’ll discuss when things change, but why initially is he treated with such kid gloves by both biographers and authors?

Antonia Senior: I think there’s a few things going on. One is that he is charming, handsome, manipulative and quite glamorous. I mean, he just is. There’s a very famous moment in the 1950s where everybody knows that Kim Philby is a spy. There is even at the beginning of early 1952, there is a sort of semi-official government kind of stricture on Philby, which is shared with the Americans, which says, we know this man is a spy, do not employ him.

We just cannot prove it, right? So he spends the ‘50s slightly adrift and then rumors start about him and he gives a press conference, which you can see in its entirety on YouTube, in which he’s utterly convincing. He’s incredibly handsome. He’s so charming. He’s got just the right amount of self-deprecation.

And you can see why people who knew him were both taken in by him and sort of horrified when it turned out that the man that they knew didn’t really exist. He was a chameleon, Philby, right? He could be whatever you wanted him to be in, you know, if it was useful to him. He was a stone cold, heartless narcissist as well.

But he was charming. Now, the other reason I think is the kind of people that you’ve picked up on who slightly lionize Philby are, if you will forgive me, themselves, you know, involved in, I guess, the game of intelligence. So in my book, I actually argue that in terms of secrets given to Stalin, Donald Maclean was probably more consequential.

But Donald Maclean was not an intelligence officer. He was a diplomat mole. It’s less, I guess, cool. It’s less glamorous. It’s less of interest to people who have worked in that gray world. And the thing about that gray world, the world of intelligence, where you have spies and double agents and people working in the shadows, is it’s precisely it’s kind of moral chewiness, which means that people come back to it in fiction, in film, in, you know, in all sorts of media.

So somebody who plays the game well, which Philby does Is kind of, you know, ripe for glamorization. I think the other thing that’s going on, which is true about all five of them, is that their crimes began to be seen as sort of victimless, as if the thing that they betrayed most was the British class system, which most of us in Britain, and probably in America, think is a thing that maybe didn’t deserve protecting, right?

So it’s like a heist on the establishment, which everybody thinks is quite cool. And the second thing is I think your position on all of them depends a little bit on where you stand on the issue of the morality of betraying one’s country, right?

Michael Feinberg: You have the famous E.M. Forster quote, you know, “Forced to choose between betraying a friend and betraying a country, I would hope I would have the courage to betray my country.”

And then you have the famous Oxford Union debate in the years leading up to World War II, where they, by a large majority, resolve this house will not fight for king and country.

Antonia Senior: 100%. And Graham Greene, who you mentioned, you know, he writes the for- forewords to Philby’s very mendacious memoir, and in that foreword, he says exactly that.

Something like... I can’t remember the exact words, but something like, “Yes, he betrayed his country, but who has not betrayed something more important,” right? So how you feel about betraying your country was almost like a kind of culture war thing before we invented the words culture war, right? And so I think for a long time, that wasn’t seen by the kind of, I don’t know, the literati, if you like, the people writing the books and the memoirs and the novels, as being that big a deal, especially when the enemy was fascism.

But as I go to some lengths to prove in my book, you know, this idea that they were anti-fascist heroes was a very carefully crafted mythology that they created themselves after they were found out. There is much evidence that actually, yeah, I mean, the anti-fascism was part of it, but the real motivating thing was a dedicated commitment to international revolution, and the fact that was going to be bloody and unpleasant for people caught up in it was part of the point.

It was not, you know, it was not a problem for them.

Michael Feinberg: So I want to make one observation and then one provocation to gently push back against one of your assumptions. The observation, just as a historical note, this press conference that Philby gives to try and clear his own name is, within intelligence circles, within people who do this stuff for a living, absolutely famous.

I myself had to watch it almost ad nauseam in a number of advanced courses I took on running counterintelligence operations and counterespionage investigations because it is such a perfect set piece of how devious a traitor can actually be and still come off as sort of somebody you would want to hang out with, to use the awful American term.

It’s like somebody you’d want to sit down and have a beer with. But I want to push back against one notion, a- and it’s not just yours, it’s something that appears in most of the literature. This notion that, of Philby being the sort of epitome of a certain British class or a certain subgroup of culture, because his familial background is actually really interesting.

His father, St John Philby, is a British diplomat who, to use like Chatham House speak, that is probably offensive these days, sort of goes native in the Middle East. To the point where there’s o- one of the earliest biographies about Philby actually theorizes that there’s almost this, like, genetic defect, an inherited inclination to betrayal.

The book is called “Treason in the Blood.” A- and that, like, Philby almost lived this deterministic lifestyle. So given his father’s own weird path, should we really be holding him up as the model of the sort of Eton or Harrow to Oxbridge to, you know, Whitehall that he’s historically been portrayed as?

Antonia Senior: I actually think you’re completely right about that.

I think it’s been really oversimplified, this idea that they were kind of a bunch of poshos protected by another bunch of poshos betraying another bunch of poshos. I think it’s all very one-dimensional, ‘cause what is actually the case is that they come from not the top bit of British society, but one slightly underneath.

They are destined to sort of basically run the empire, but a lot of them come from families that are quite left-wing. So in fact, when they’re looking to rebel, the only place they’ve got to go is further left. When Philby is a young man, his father is a socialist, which is really unusual. He’s also, as you say, kind of incredibly eccentric, and within the British establishment, he’s considered sort of slightly beyond the pale, actually.

Then what happens is that he becomes so enamored of his kind of pro-Arabist position that he becomes a wild anti-Semite, and actually ends up running as a fascist in a British election and being imprisoned as a fascist by the British government. And when Philby is brought into British intelligence There’s this kind of famous lunch, right, where the head of MI6 takes Philby and his father to lunch and says to Philby’s father, “When Philby goes to the loo, I hear he was a bit of a commie.

Has he got over it?” And his, Philby Senior said, “Yes, he’s got over it.” And that’s kind of considered this terrible source of evidence of a British establishment stitch-up. But actually, if you read behind the scenes of that lunch, what’s actually happening is Philby’s already been working in a smaller capacity for kind of SOE, kind of training people in sabotage.

And Valentine Vivian and a, and another kind of couple of the older members of British Intelligence are worried that Philby Senior’s appalling behavior and fascist tendencies are gonna scupper his promising, lovely, young son, right? So they bring him in almost as a sort of reaction against the horrors of his father.

So, so the story is much more complicated. Now, in terms of this idea of Philby inheriting treason from his father, obviously it’s nonsense, right? I do think ... I’m quite wary of kind of being an amateur psychologist. I f- I find it annoying, and I’m not a psychologist, but I do think there is something obviously peculiarly narcissistic and stone cold about Philby Senior, and there is something peculiarly narcissistic and stone cold about Philby Junior.

You know, that that’s the inheritability thing. But yeah, I think this sort of this assumption that it’s like, you know, the kind of posho parents bringing in their sons and ... it doesn’t quite work. Donald Maclean’s father, for example, is a liberal politician. He’s a left-wing politician, and he, and his grandfather is a, like a poor, you know, peasant I guess, for want of a better word.

One they would have used at the time. You know, Anthony Blunt’s parents are not well off. Anthony Blunt’s father’s a minister. You know, John Cairncross is not ... He comes from kind of a lower middle-class family. And Guy Burgess, you know, he has this very bizarre thing where he tells this story that his father was a naval officer, and Guy Burgess tells a story that he witnessed his father’s heart attack ‘cause he came running in and find, found his mother and father in the middle of a, you know, a certain act, a marital act, and his father had died in the middle of it.

Now, this may or not b- not be true, but, you know, it’s interesting that this is the story Burgess tells. These are not sort of, you know, normal embedded golf club members. Do you know what I mean? They’re slightly out there.

Michael Feinberg: All right. So one thing that’s interesting to me is Philby gets all the press.

The first books about the Cambridge spies almost exclusively focus on Philby. It’s not really, I think in the mid to late ‘90s, we finally get a full-length biography of Anthony Blunt by Miranda Carter. Of five or six years ago, there was the first full-length biography of Guy Burgess called “Stalin’s Englishman.”

Why does he get the fame? Because I’ll be honest, I’ve always thought Blunt was a much more fascinating character. You know, Anthony Blunt is actually a legitimate art historian. I own his monograph on Nicolas Poussin more for historical reasons than because I care what he has to say about, you know, Et in Arcadia Ego or A Dance to the Music of Time.

But, you know, he’s the keeper of the Queen’s pictures. He ends up heading the Courtauld Institute, which is essentially probably the most renowned art history facility in the world. He actually is the polished, genteel person that so many people think the others are, but he gets so little press and coverage compared to Philby and Maclean, Burgess, and Cairncross.

So why does Philby get the limelight?

Antonia Senior: So I think it’s partly because there’s that whole thing in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s where the press is, like, slightly onto it. Did he, didn’t he? Did he, didn’t he? Right? And there’s noth- oh, you know, I’m a former journalist, occasional still journalist, and there’s nothing that journalists love more than a story that keeps giving, right?

But keeps giving in a sort of, you know, piecemeal way. So I think there was that, and then also the ongoing mystery of whether or not his defection from Beirut in the ‘60s was, you know, facilitated by the British government. And I think, so that’s another fascinating thing. I also think it’s also what I was saying before about him being a player of the game.

So if you’re the type of person who’s drawn to these kind of stories, you’re quite often interested in the game, you know? Whereas Blunt, on the surface, you know, plays the game for a bit during the war and then sort of disappears off to, into respectability. Now, this isn’t actually what happened at all, and I think you’re right, Blunt is an absolutely fascinating figure who’s been utterly underwritten.

And I think, you know, why did the, why does he get a bit of a pass? You know, there’s this almost like an idea that a man who loves paintings can’t be all bad . You know, he can’t be a stone-cold murderer. And Miranda Carter’s biography of him, which is a brilliant biography and I love it, I’m not decrying it, but she’s as interested in his art history as in his spying.

So that sort of, you know- again and is also quite sympathetic to his sort of anti-fascist posturing which I think is sort of nonsense so I think yeah there’s much more to be said about Anthony Blunt I agree that the focus on Philby is slightly distracting from the others because they’re equally as fascinating I mean one of the problems obviously of writing a book about all five of them is that you know each of them has taken and can take full-length biographies on their own and I’m trying to kind of tell their story as a whole and it’s quite difficult and I think the one who gets quite a lot of attention actually is Guy Burgess and I think as a agent he’s probably the least useful and the least interesting I mean he has periods where he’s very useful to the Soviets definitely but as a whole he’s too he’s so busy getting fired from all his day jobs that he’s quite often not that useful but we’re fascinated by Burgess because of his flamboyant homosexuality his flamboyant love life and also there’s something very interesting about the way that the attention on the Cambridge Five and their sexuality has told us something in the kind of intervening period about where we are socially with that so yeah I mean it’s so interesting the way that these stories have echoed since the defections

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, it’s funny.

I’ve always thought of Guy Burgess as if Sebastian Flyte from “Brideshead Revisited” had somehow become a spy. That’s functionally Guy Burgess. Like it’s difficult for him to stay sober for any length of time. His handlers are constantly worried through some social faux pas or moral misstep.

He’s going to blow everything up. And that actually does occur while he’s in America. There’s a sort of famous dinner at Philby’s house, I believe, where Burgess tells the wife of William Harvey, who’s this American intelligence figure who moved between the FBI and CIA. Burgess says, would you like me to do a sketch of your wife?

And he does. And it ends up being this near pornographically insulting lewd cartoon that just totally ruins the dinner and earns Burgess the enmity of who then is one of the main spy hunters in the United States. And it ultimately does come back to bite him. And I suppose this is as good a point as any to ask the question.

Like you said, I think at the beginning of this, we have about 17 years of spying. But the first downfall is when Burgess and McLean defect to the Soviet Union. It’s interesting. Maclean, I’m gonna ask you to elaborate on this, but Maclean sort of has what we would nowadays call, I don’t wanna say a psychotic break, but almost a nervous breakdown where there’s no choice but to exfiltrate him back to the Soviet Union.

And Burgess, against everybody’s advice, goes with him. Can you tell us that story a little bit more in depth?

Antonia Senior: Yeah. The Burgess bit is a very weird and slightly under-explained bit. But basically what happens is towards the end of his last posting in Cairo, Donald Maclean has a b- breakdown. He and a friend break into an American woman’s flat, they trash the place, they’re found in bed giggling and chewing on a bone of mutton, and he’s sent home in disgrace to recover, and he’s an alcoholic.

But one of the things that’s pushing him into this sort of breakdown is the knowledge that in Washington they are leading an investigation into a spy in the Washington Embassy that they know was there because the Americans are running a top-secret program called VENONA that is reading telegrams that were going from Washington to Moscow, right?

So Donald Maclean, by this period, begins to know that he’s in trouble, that the net is closing, right? In Washington, they’ve got a working party within the British Embassy trying to work out who this spy is, and it’s cl- you know, they’re eliminating names all the time. And one of the people in that investigation into who is this spy is Kim Philby, unbelievably.

So they’re quite well-informed that the net is closing, and Donald Maclean is sort of slightly losing his marbles. Now, what then happens is in May 1951, which is 75 years ago from when we’re recording... Actually, tomorrow, it, we, it’s, we’re recording this on the 14th of May, tomorrow’s the 15th of May, and that is the day on which Burgess, having come home from America, fully briefed by Kim Philby on the state of the investigation, goes into Don Maclean’s office in the foreign office, arranges to, to meet him for lunch, and then at that lunch breaks the news that British intelligence know it was him, they’re watching him, they’re tailing him, they are planning to bring him in for investigation and questioning at any moment.

The Soviets meanwhile are kind of, you know, panicking. MI5 watchers watch Donald Maclean come reeling out of that meeting with Donal- with Guy Burgess, and he gets absolutely wasted. The other complicating factor is that his wife Melinda is pregnant, and she’s going to give birth in early June. So everybody’s panicking, “What are we gonna do?”

So they decide, Soviet intelligence decide that he should be offered a way out. I mean, they don’t initially know how to do it. Their first idea is to send a submarine to the coast of Britain. But Donald Maclean is a wreck. He’s a complete mess. He’s an alcoholic. He can’t think straight. He’s losing his mind.

Amazingly, we can see this in the MI5 watches report. We can watch him staggering from pub to pub. I mean, he’s in a terrible state. So there is some... Yuri Modin, who is the Russian handler who’s managing at th- this time, basically says that Burgess was ordered by the Soviet resident in London, a n- a man code named Korovin.

Burgess was ordered to kind of get Maclean off, you know, out of the country and to the continent, and to the Iron Curtain, and then probably he could slip back in. But it all seems very odd. You know, what are the chances of that actually being able to happen? You know, so, so I think Burgess was also s- massively struggling.

He’d been f- he was about to be fired from the foreign office. He had no career, no job. He was losing friends. He was a kind of shabby alcoholic mess, too. So, you know, maybe perhaps these bo- he wasn’t thinking straight, but it’s all very complicated and murky about why he went. And to cut a very long and absolutely fascinating story short, on the 25th of May 1951, the two of them take a boat across the channel and the next thing you know they turn up behind the Iron Curtain.

Michael Feinberg: And famously are miserable once they get there. At least Burgess, I mean, he has innumerable quotes about missing being able to follow cricket and have access to his Savile Row tailors that he prefers.

Antonia Senior: Yeah, this is true. And actually, so there was a massive dump of MI5 files in January last year, which I was lucky enough to see before I finished the book.

And there’s an amazing detail in that, that in the mid-1950s, Burgess decides he hates Moscow so much, he wants to come home, right? So he starts making noises he’s gonna come home. And MI5 counterintelligence are horrified because, you know, one of the big themes of of the latter stage of my book is about how har- and you will know this better than anyone, how hard counterintelligence is.

How do you prove spying? How do you prove it in a court of law when your main evidence comes from top secret programs? You know, it’s so hard. So MI5 hear that Guy Burgess is gonna come back, and they absolutely panic because they say, “We know he’s a spy. He knows he’s a spy. Everybody in the world knows that he was a spy, but if he comes back, unless he confesses, we will not be able to prove it.

It will just be horribly embarrassing.” So they actually end up getting Anthony Blunt to write him a letter saying, “Do not come back. Stay where th- where you are.” But yeah, I mean, he’s utterly miserable. He hates it. Donald Maclean is less miserable. Donald Maclean is quite a- inherently boring man, I think.

And he likes thinking about Marx and how much he hates America. So he gets to work, he works quietly for a Russian think tank writing, you know, a book on how much he hates American imperialism without any sense of irony that he was working for Soviet imperialism. He, his life only becomes more miserable when Kim Philby arrives in-

Michael Feinberg: Well, let’s get to that in a second.

I don’t wanna spoil-

Antonia Senior: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let’s do that.

Michael Feinberg: But let’s get back to Philby. Once Maclean and Burgess defect, the sand in the hourglass for Philby does start to run, doesn’t it?

Antonia Senior: It does start... So immediately suspicion falls on the ones left behind. So both Philby, I mean, th- there’s a little bit of a moment where MI5 are a bit too trusting of Anthony Blunt, but broadly, pretty quickly, suspicion falls on definitely Philby, then Blunt, and then Cairncross because there’s some inc- incriminating papers in Guy Burgess’s flat that he left behind that finger Cairncross.

So Philby very quickly is doomed. The Americans are absolutely convinced very quickly that he’s guilty as sin. They want him gone. So he kind of limps home. There is a brilliant document in, that was released in January last year, which is where the British intelligence interrogate, get a former colleague of Philby’s, who’s a top barrister called Buster Milmo to do an interrogation of him, and the full interrogation is now released for the first time, and it’s absolutely mesmerizing.

It should be a two-man play. But Philby cannot answer any of Milmo’s attacks convincingly, but neither does he confess, which puts everybody in a horrible position. So then this is where they kind of introduce this weird legal limbo, which I mentioned earlier, where they effectively say, “He is not to work for British government.

We know that he’s a spy, but we can’t prove it.” So that’s Philby from 1952 onwards, and so he spends the ‘50s in a terrible mess, actually. He can’t get a job. You know, we’ve... I’ve seen, you know, doctor’s reports where he’s sort of, you know, taking pills to go to sleep at night, taking pills to get up in the morning.

He’s drinking lots. He’s behaving with unbelievable barbarity to his wife, Aileen, who, and we know this because MI5 watchers were kind of watching this unfold. He was being followed, bugged. You know, it was not a happy existence for Kim Philby in the 1950s at all.

Michael Feinberg: And he too eventually defects, and there’s some conspiracy theorizing, as you mentioned, about did he really defect?

Did the British help him defect? Did the British tell him, “This is really your only option. Do the honorable thing and exit”? But he too winds up in Russia.

Antonia Senior: He does, and I mean, I So I’m al- whenever I’m confronted with whether something is a cock-up or whether it’s a conspiracy, I assume it’s a cock-up.

It’s a cock-up, yeah. I don’t really ... Yeah. However, in these files that were released last year, there are a couple of flickers of things that make me think that maybe the conspiracy theories have got something in them. So this is the scene. Philby has been sent allowed to go to Bay- Beirut to work as a journalist, and actually you can see that the government lent on these newspapers to, to get him out there, ‘cause he was becoming an embarrassment in London.

So he’s enjoying his time in Lebanon. He’s, you know, drunk all the time, et cetera, et cetera. Then basically, for reasons which I think are quite suspicious which I go into in the book but I, let’s not get sidetracked now, he is ... The MI5 and MI6 restart the investigation. They think they’ve got new information on him.

His friend, Nicholas Elliott, is sent to Beirut to confront him. Philby confesses to Nicholas Elliott, staggeringly easily actually, given how good he is at deflecting and denying, in a way that looks relatively suspicious actually. Anyway, he confesses to Elliott. Elliott then leaves Beirut. MI5 are told that Philby has confessed, and they send reams of questions.

They’re so excited they’ve got this confe- this confession. There is no evidence, and there’s nowhere in the files, and there’s no gaps in the files either to suggest that any of these questions were ever put to Philby, which is very odd. The other thing that’s very odd is that they then contact the Americans and they say, “Philby has confessed.

This is a very delicate operation. Please warn your people in Beirut not to watch Philby, not to go anywhere near Philby, to ... Because if he gets spooked, he might, it will spoil the debrief,” right? So there’s no evidence this debrief is even happening, and the Americans are being warned off, and two weeks later, Philby very easily slips away to the Soviet Union.

So, you know, maybe it’s cock-up. It is possible it’s cock-up. If it’s not cock-up, it’s for precisely the reason that they didn’t want Burgess to come home. They knew that it would be incredibly difficult to prove. They’d offered Philby this deal, which they will then subsequently offer to Burgess and Cairncross, for immunity if he confesses.

So then what they’ve got is a confession, but a pledge of immunity, and a man roaming about drunk, who everybody knows was a Soviet spy but they’re not doing anything about. So yeah, I mean, there, there are good reasons why they would gently encourage him to be off.

Michael Feinberg: And when in Russia, and I think you were alluding to this earlier, Philby betraying his usual loyalty to causes and people, obtains a new romantic partner—

Antonia Senior: He does.

So Philby, once he’s in Russia, he sleeps with Maclean’s wife, so that’s nice for everybody. It’s like the last betrayal. Although having said that, given that Maclean beat his wife and strangled her, and, you know, I’m not sure she’s desperately to blame. She’s in Moscow with a horrible drunkard who beats her.

I think Philby probably looked quite attractive at that point.

Michael Feinberg: So, so that still leaves two who never do defect to the Soviet Union. Anthony Blunt grows relatively old with some privacy up until the Thatcher era, despite the British government knowing what he had done. And I think John Cairncross ends his days in the south of France.

So, so let’s wrap up this story with talking about what happens to Blunt and Cairncross, and do they get off easy or do they face their own sort of psychological prison?

Antonia Senior: So both of them are reinvestigated by MI5 in the wake of the confession of an American called Michael Straight, who says that he was recruited by Soviet intelligence and that it was Blunt who recruited him.

Now, one of the things that emerged in the most recent MI5 files was that the woman who would later go on to become head of MI5 was one of a kind of number of new breed Stella Rimington. Yeah, she’s one of a new breed of case officers who’ve given, who are given this as, in later on as almost like a cold case kind of review.

And they think all these simultaneous confessions are deeply suspicious, right? You know, f- over the course of the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s, Anthony Blunt is interviewed more than 80 times by MI5. He is a, he plays a very brilliant, devious game where he gives them just enough to fend them off and not enough to do anything more.

Anyway, there is something odd about those confessions. But once they have them, they’ve been offered immunity. And then, again, what’s really fascinating is one of the reasons why Blunt and Cairncross are sort of let alone is because MI5 are trying to use them to catch other people. So they’re bugging them and sending them into meetings.

Blunt is sitting in on MI5 interviews with men he recruited into Soviet intelligence, you know, to sort of try and help trap them down. So it, you know, it’s again, it’s slightly game-playing. I mean, again, British counterintelligence have come under immense fire for not being able to pin these men down.

Without the confessions- You know, they only got the confessions by offering immunity. There was no evidence. There was nothing that would stand up in a court of law. So I do have some sympathy. And they were in a psychological prison. Well, not Cairncross. I think Cairncross was quite happy. He ended up with, like, a 20-year-old opera singer when he was in his 60s, so I think he was fine.

Blunt was in a terrible state. You know, he was being blackmailed and betrayed by all his friends. He was being bugged. He was being watched. He developed ulcers. He was cavernously thin. He was kind of miserable, actually, which, you know, is relatively pleasing. But I do... I wonder if they ever kind of paused to think that the master that they served, Stalin, the merest whiff that you were a spy, not even a whiff, like a false accu- accusation you’re a spy would be enough to get you beaten to a pulp and then shot through the head.

The country that they betrayed, they were protected by such, you know, ridiculous bourgeois concepts as the rule of law and due process and evidence, and these were the things that protected them, and I wonder, you know, if they ever gave that any thought. Probably not.

Michael Feinberg: All right, I wanna close with what is explicitly just an opinion question.

I would unhesitatingly recommend your book as the best starting point for somebody who wants an overview from the nonfiction perspective of who the Cambridge spies were, what they did, and how they ended up. But a lot of people come to the Cambridge spies through fictional portrayals, and there’s probably at least a dozen, if not more, novels, plays, movies, what have you, that have been based on their exploits.

And I’m just curious, having immersed yourself in this research and being very familiar with this story, what’s your favorite fictional portrayal of the story?

Antonia Senior: That is such a good question. I mean, particularly because my other day job is to review fiction for The Times newspaper here in London, so I do have a bent towards fiction.

But having spent four years living with these guys, I feel quite strongly that there isn’t a good one. I haven’t read anything because everybody falls into the glamour trap. And in one sense, in fiction it’s almost inescapable because... And I found it almost inescapable in my own book. I mean, I spent an awful lot of time talking about the victims and working out exactly how they betrayed everybody and where they were serving Stalin’s foreign policy and putting them in context and, you know, basically reminding everybody that what they did was monstrous.

And yet, you know, you can’t escape from the fact that when they’re your protagonists, you know, and they’re fooling everybody and they’re wandering around blitzed London, pissed, having won- you know, having affairs, drinking gin that there is something that in fiction makes them appealing. So yeah, there isn’t one.

Somebody else needs to write it.

Michael Feinberg: I will make a pitch for one—not that John Banville needs my endorsement to sell books. I think his Booker Prize will do that quite on its own. But I do think “The Untouchable,” his fictionalization of the Anthony Blunt story, is a fascinating novel. I don’t necessarily agree with its point of view.

I don’t know how much, aside from the bare bones details, it actually gets into Blunt’s inner psychology, but I will endorse it as a good novel.

Antonia Senior: Yeah. I mean, I love John Banville. I’m with you. You know, Alan Bennett’s plays about Blunt and about Guy Burgess are great plays. They’re just nonsense because these men were horrible people who betrayed everybody that was close to them and the idea that they protected their friends is also complete nonsense.

I mean, they all betrayed each other whenever they could and whenever it was necessary. Kim Philby, you know, was betraying Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess left, right, and center as soon as the heat was on. This was not... You know, these were not heroes. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, I hear you, but I’m-

Michael Feinberg: I think that moral condemnation you just articulated is something that much of the historical record has needed for quite some time.

So perhaps we should leave it there. Antonia Senior, thank you again for joining us. Your book, “Stalin’s Apostles,” comes out in the United States, I believe, on May 26th. This is one of the rare books for which I have received a review copy, but will be buying a hardcover for my personal library anyway. So like I said, I will unhesitatingly recommaend it to anybody among our listenership or readership who is interested in the history of counter espionage, the history of British intelligence, or just a sort of ripping yarn about five fascinating, if horribly flawed and evil human beings.

Antonia Senior: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed it. Your questions were amazing. Thank you.

[Outro]

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