Before Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared in 1951, both were disarmingly open in admitting to spying. “I work for Uncle Joe,” Maclean had announced drunkenly at the Gargoyle club to anyone who wanted to listen. Nonetheless, westerners found it almost inconceivable that they had actually defected to Russia, so they focused on their sexuality rather than their politics. “The frog papers are quite sure it is sex,” wrote Nancy Mitford from Paris, while half-aware that “if they were just bouncing about on some double bed they would have been found by now”. TS Eliot was sure that the mystery would soon be solved and the “denouement will be undramatic and quite unconnected with anything to do with communism or the Iron Curtain”.
Almost 70 years later, the Cambridge spies continue to intrigue us, but it’s becoming harder to understand why it was so difficult to believe in their defection at the time. Richard Davenport-Hines, in his fascinating and compendious new book, has set out in part to provide a portrait of the relevant mid-century institutions, and in doing so reveals the answer. His book, he writes early on, is “a study in trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust”. The British trusted each other, the Russians didn’t. When you were offered trust on this scale, it wasn’t something you would generally abuse. Hence it took the spies’ acquaintances a long time to believe that they really had.
As in his recent and acclaimed account of the Profumo scandal, Davenport-Hines digs deep into the pre-history of the story he’s telling. He takes us back to spying in the 19th century before focusing in on the 1940s and 50s. Along the way, he challenges prevailing interpretations and provides answers to all the major questions about the spies.
Why did they do it? These were decades of radicalisation and in Cambridge the Communist party offered the only radical option. At the point when Kim Philby became communist in 1931, the Labour candidate had just been trounced by a Conservative candidate who asserted in print that if Hitler and Mussolini could relax with a good game of bowls once a week, European peace would be untroubled. “I am the witness to the crushing of a world out of date,” John Cornford proclaimed (quoting Louis Aragon) in the 1933 student magazine Cambridge Left. Revolution was coming and it was better to march with the times than to be stampeded underfoot.
What did they actually achieve? Initially, Burgess in particular may have had an impact on Stalin’s decision to sign a pact with Hitler. Certainly he reported various British high officials claiming that they were more concerned to work with Germany against Russia than the other way round. But in general they seem to have wrought less damage than they could have done if the Russians hadn’t been so suspicious. Moscow officials didn’t understand how known university communists could be allowed into the British secret services, and so assumed that they must be double agents. In fact, as Davenport-Hines shows, significant sections of the war effort were comprised of former communists who rewarded the faith of senior officials who understood them to have renounced their youthful foibles.
If the Russians had been more trusting, they might have made more use of the reams of documents the spies provided. As it is, they don’t seem to have acted on much of the evidence provided by the Cambridge Five (though Davenport-Hines includes a very interesting chapter on the use made of the material leaked by spying scientists at the time). Nonetheless, at an individual level, the five did have an effect on the lives of those who were caught up with them. In a rather chilling incident Philby sent men over the border from Turkey into Georgia in 1948 only to vanish immediately. “It is beyond doubt that Philby had betrayed them.”
Why did they keep spying for as long as they did? Hugh Trevor-Roper suggested that they had been addicted to “the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power”. In fact not all of them wanted to keep going, but it proved hard to escape. Maclean asked to be relieved of his work at least twice but received no response from Moscow. Davenport-Hines doesn’t hazard an answer as to why his pleas were ignored, but it wouldn’t be out of keeping with Moscow’s policies that they should at this stage have wanted him to fall apart and be exposed. Certainly this would fit the author’s wider argument, which is that the spies wrought more damage to the British establishment following their exposure than they had while they were actually spying.
“The old easy-going confidence” of the Foreign Office “will be destroyed and henceforth everybody will begin to distrust everybody else,” the diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote as the evidence came to light in 1951. “I do hate that. It is the loss of one more element of civilisation.”
For Davenport-Hines, this is the crux of the story, but the worst damage was not the loss of trust within the establishment so much as the loss of faith in the establishment from the wider public. Indeed, part of the motivation for this book seems to have come from the 2016 Brexit vote, and the distrust of experts it communicated. Davenport-Hines writes that when Michael Gove said the public had had enough of experts, he was stoking the “populist delusion that one person’s opinion is as good as any other, and pretending that it is improper to value trained minds and rational expertise higher than instincts, inklings, hunches and overemotional fudge”.
It’s hard to see Brexit as caused, even indirectly, by the Cambridge spies. But it’s not hard to follow Davenport-Hines in his belief that the public distrust of the 1950s elite shares characteristics with the public distrust of today’s elite. As a result, this book manages to be both nostalgic and politically progressive when it seeks to remind us, passionately and eloquently, of the value of trust.
• Lara Feigel’s The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich is published by Bloomsbury. Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, £25). To order a copy for £21.25, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
