By Phillip Knightley
Last updated 2011-02-17
If Communism had not fallen, the full story of four remarkable pro-Soviet spies would perhaps never have been told. Today, however, the tale can be examined in a clear light, and raises the question of whether the spying game has ever been worth the candle.
The hardest and most bitterly fought confrontation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies during the 50 years of the Cold War was on the espionage front. In this arena the KGB, the 'sword and the shield' of the USSR, pitted its wits against its principal adversaries - the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
...all of whom operated in a world of shadows, where deception and betrayal flourished.
The aim of each was to steal the secrets of the other side, to try to peer inside the mind of the enemy, to fathom his intentions, and to neutralise them before they could be executed. The soldiers in this war were the spymasters, the spies and their agents, all of whom operated in a world of shadows where deception and betrayal flourished.
KGB headquarters, Moscow © During the spy war it was impossible to write authoritatively about it. The present author once wrote that the truth could not be told 'until the files of the KGB, the CIA and the SIS are all opened to public scrutiny' - little dreaming that this would ever happen.
But when Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, this is exactly what did occur, and thus it became possible to tell the story of the four most remarkable spies of the Cold War, four larger-than-life Englishmen: HAR (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom betrayed their country to spy for Moscow.
In the new political climate, it became possible to tell the story both from Britain's point of view and through the eyes of the KGB. And from this tale we can draw some startling conclusions about the nature of espionage and its real value in the modern world.
Anthony Blunt © In the early 1930s, the democratic world appeared to be in trouble. The Great Depression had caused widespread unemployment. Fascism was on the march in Germany and Italy. To many young students at Cambridge University, privileged though they were, this was worrying and unacceptable.
Four of them - Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt - wanted to do something about it. They believed that the democracies would prove too weak to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, and they knew that many people in Britain did indeed admire these leaders. They also thought that only the Soviet Union would be powerful enough to defeat Fascism. So, when they were approached by a recruiter from Moscow, the four young men agreed to serve the KGB.
The KGB believed that recruiting clever people from a respected university was a good game plan, because the chances were that sometime in the future these young men would be among Britain's rulers and well placed to betray their country's secrets.
This is how it turned out. By the time World War Two was underway, Maclean was climbing the ladder in the Foreign Office, Burgess was an intimate of prominent politicians, and Blunt was an officer in the Security Service - MI5. Even more astoundingly, Philby was an officer in the SIS. And all the while they were establishing themselves in these positions, these four men were reporting to Moscow.
Put together, their information should have been of inestimable value to Moscow.
It got better for the KGB. Just before the war ended, Philby was appointed head of the SIS's anti-Soviet section, so that the man who was charged with running operations against the Russians, was a Russian agent. Blunt, meanwhile, had been on the distribution list for material from the war's most secret operation, Ultra, decoded German radio traffic.
Then, as the Cold War got under way, Philby became SIS liaison officer with the newly formed CIA in Washington, where Maclean was first secretary at the British embassy, sitting on a committee that dealt with atomic bomb matters.
Burgess at this time was with the Foreign Office news department. Put together, their information should have been of inestimable value to Moscow. But the KGB files on these dedicated Soviet agents show a different picture.
Guy Burgess © Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, when a British secret service plot nearly brought down the new Communist government, the KGB had regarded the SIS as the most sophisticated and ingenious of all the capitalist intelligence services, capable of all sorts of duplicity and convoluted conspiracies.
So although the KGB had recruited four young Englishmen who appeared dedicated to their cause, was it just possible that the SIS had deliberately placed these men in the path of the Russian recruiter? Was it possible that although the KGB believed that these four agents had penetrated the British establishment, the very opposite was the case - Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt had instead penetrated the KGB?
And all the while the KGB wasted the agents' valuable time by trying to trip them up...
The KGB files show that a powerful section of the KGB believed that this was the case. Officers argued that it had been all too easy for the Cambridge ring. Could the British authorities be so stupid to as to allow men of such left-wing backgrounds into positions of trust in the establishment? How could Philby, who had helped Communists escape from Vienna and had then married a Viennese Communist, get through the security checks that the SIS must carry out on all those it recruited?
This suspicion tainted the KGB careers of all four. None of them was entirely trusted. None of the important information they sent to Moscow was accepted at face value, unless it could be confirmed from other sources.
Moscow's spymasters argued that they could not be sure they were not having disinformation deliberately fed to them, with the intention of misleading the KGB. And all the while the KGB wasted the agents' valuable time by trying to trip them up, trying to prove that their loyalty really lay with Britain.
HAR (Kim) Philby © With the Germans at the gates of Moscow in 1941, the KGB bombarded Philby with orders to write his autobiography yet again, hoping to find in the new version some discrepancy with which to tax him. Even the patient Philby, who is never known to have once said a bad word about the KGB, to anyone who spoke to him, got fed up.
His controller reported to Moscow: 'We've recently raised the issue with 'S' [Philby] about his submitting a summarising, complete and detailed autobiography, with notes on all his contacts, all his work with us, the English institutions, and the like. But 'S' says that he doesn't have the time, that in his opinion, now is the time that attention should be paid primarily to getting information, and not to writing various biographies. We pointed out the error of his conclusions to 'S'.'
...the KGB concluded that this was evidence that Blunt was... a British plant...
And when Philby was not writing and re-writing reports about himself, the KGB wanted him to find out the names of Soviet citizens who might have been recruited by the SIS station chief in Moscow. When Philby looked at the SIS files, and reported that the SIS had not recruited anybody yet, the KGB asked Blunt the same question. When he confirmed Philby's reply, the KGB concluded that this was evidence that Blunt was, like Philby, a British plant, and the British conspiracy to penetrate was more widespread that the KGB had imagined.
Donald Maclean © Once the KGB had convinced itself that the Cambridge spy ring was most likely a British conspiracy against the Soviet Union it faced a difficult decision. How was it to handle this?
If it cut off all contact with the Cambridge ring and it later turned out that its agents were genuinely loyal to the USSR, then the KGB would be blamed. Those officers running the Cambridge ring might be accused of sabotage. They might be shot. All right, then, Moscow reasoned, let's pretend that nothing has happened and do our best to reinforce Philby's conviction that we trust him and his ring completely.
...a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal...
And so the game of deceit and double-dealing continued. The Cambridge spies were deceiving their colleagues, their service, their families and their country. They did this in the sincere belief that they were serving a greater cause, through an elite intelligence service, the KGB, which fathered and mothered them and appeared to trust them totally. But the KGB, in turn, was deceiving the Englishmen, because it really believed that they were playing a treble game and were all traitors to the Communist cause.
The conclusion from all this is that the main threat to intelligence agents comes not from the counter-intelligence service of the country in which they are operating, but from their own centre, their own people.
In a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal, an intelligence service maintains it sanity by developing its own concept of what it believes to be the truth. Those agents who confirm this perceived truth - even if it is wrong - prosper. Those who deny it - even if they are right - fall under suspicion.
From that moment on, the better that agent's information, the greater the suspicion with which he or she is treated. When other agents offer confirmation, the suspicion spreads, until the whole corrupt concern collapses, only for a new generation of paranoid personalities to start afresh.
Knowing this, anyone interested in the spy world should reflect on the moral problems of espionage, and how they might be confronted.
Perhaps one way would to be to consider whether we need intelligence services in the 21st century. They are only a comparatively recent phenomenon (the SIS dates from 1911, the KGB from 1917, and the CIA from as recently as 1947). It could be that nations have been the victim of a vast confidence trick to deceive us about the necessity and the value of spies.
Books
The Private Life of Kim Philby 1999 by Rufina Philby (St Ermin's Press)
The Faber Book of Treachery edited by Nigel West (Faber and Faber)
No Other Choice by George Blake (Jonathan Cape, 1990)
The Philby Files by Genrikh Borovik (Little,Brown, 1994)
Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore (Pimlico) and Philby: KGB Masterspy (Vintage). In 30 years of writing about espionage, he has met just about every major spy and spymaster from all sides in the espionage wars.
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