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

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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. It's the Laugh Fair podcast. I'm Michael Fiber, senior editor of Laugh Fair.

Here today with Antonia Senior, who's new book on the history of the Cambridge Spiring, the Stalin's Apostles, comes out in the United States that ended this month. They'd offered Philby this deal, which they will then subsequently offer to Burgess and Canclaws 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. Whoever knows was the Soviet spy, but they're not thinking about it. Today we talked about the history of the Spiring, how they were recruited, how they were unmatched, and they're lasting effect on the culture

of espionage. 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 locally become known as the Cambridge Spiring, 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 many series, 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 the stories you and I are will have an idea of what we're talking about. 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 further 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 the Retarable 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 youthful exuberance to create an environment where quite a lot of people are quite communist. Now, in 1934, a 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, men, mainly, well primarily,

green sequence form them for the advancement of the revolution.

“So Arnold Deutsch through Austrian communist circles meets a young Cambridge graduate”

called Kim Filby, he's the first to be recruited. Kim Filby gives Arnold Deutsch

a list of other likely recruities. Top of that list is Donald McLean, 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. The boss of Kim Filby'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 boss of Kim Filby's list. Guy Burgess badges his way in once he realizes that his friends are behaving oddly. And then through Guy Burgess and Steve 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, bringing in a spiky young Scotsman called John Kangross.

And they're interested in Kangross, not really because they like him. They don't, he doesn't really fit, but he has just also been, it's had since been a British Foreign Office, so as far as they're concerned, he's a good recruit. So that's the five of them at the early 30s.

Between them, they basically, in different, it 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 ends 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, but overall, and it's an incredible treasure trove that they offer to Stalin. Just for the benefit of our American listeners, I do want to point out that their influence is not just deleterious on the British intelligence establishment, but Kim Filby, at least, had a pretty outsized influence on the Vendase in Central Intelligence Agency.

I believe he was the one who, during World War II, essentially taught in American, name James Hesius Angleton, who was on detail from what was then the OSS, Filby taught him the nuts and bolts of counterintelligence, and Angleton himself rose to be the head of counterintelligence within the United States, and once Filby was unmatched, it really ended Angleton's psyche as well.

Yeah, Angleton often gets a lot of grief for this for his unraveling after Filby 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 America who didn't go further than the kind of rabbit hole. But yes, so this is very much an American story as well as a British story. In 1944, Donald McLean 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 McLean. Filby not only works with very, 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 eye and curtain.

So absolutely everything that the Americans are doing on and off admittedly between 1944 and 1951 to try and penetrate the Soviet world, Filby is betraying to the Russians. 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. Yeah, so in 1944, the MI6, who previously liked the Americans, had been a bit squeamish about spying on the Soviets on the basis of its war allies, they began to realise that they've got a Soviet problem, and MI6 set up a counter-intelligence unit to try and counter the Soviets, and the man peaked to lead that in 1944 is Kim Filby,

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, of course, you were compromised by Filby. And then in 1949, 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 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, all to be captured and used in sort of duplicitous Soviet games against the West. So yeah, I mean, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the extent to which Filby compromised and betrayed British American intelligence in this period,

and I think it's almost unparalleled. And Donald McLean doing exactly the same thing, you know, from within the embassy. So both diplomacy and intelligence, everything the British and the Americans are doing

“in this crucial early part of the Cold War, you know, the end of World War II”

is basically visible to Stalin.

Yeah, so let's stick with Filby for a second, because I want to hammer a formal point you just made, which is these are not just intelligence secrets or position papers that Filby is betraying. He is directly responsible for probably dozens of people who end up murder by the Soviet Union.

There's a would be defector in Turkey, and he functionally delays assisting the individual, so the Soviets can swoop in first and kidnapped 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 in shot with an hours of landing.

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

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 outline their thinking.

And because all the MI6 files are restricted still, the only reason we know about this positioning paper is because somebody found it in the KGB archives, because Filby had given it to the KGB. So there's a positioning paper that just basically says there is literally no point. I'll try 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 they already exist resistance. There are partisans all over Eastern and Central Europe who are 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 periods of the Second World War, we're talking about countries that were invaded by the Soviets as part of the Nazi Soviet parts. Then invaded by the Nazis after Stalin and Hitler stopped being allies and fell out.

And then reinvaded by the Soviets as part of their liberation of Europe. It was an liberation that didn't end for another sort of 50 years. So there were missions across Eastern Central Europe. Filby was betraying all of them.

“Some of this has been slightly downplayed because the Soviet counterintelligence was very, very good, right?”

So they were penetrating these partisans groups, they were penetrating the X-pack communities, which the British and the Americans were recruiting from. But I spent a lot of time in the Lithuanian KGB files and the Albanian Siguromy files, and I had a research 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 Filby 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 sets of 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 Killby 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? So know that the Americans and British believed that these messages are being sent with sincerity.

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.”

So let's continue focusing on Philby before we get to the other floor. 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 when we just discussed, the early studies of him are actually somewhat, if not outright sympathetic, somewhat romanticized.

I'm thinking in particular Philip Knightley writes a book called The Master Spy that, you know,

almost has Philby seeing around corners in a way I don't think he didn't real life. Graham Greene sort of becomes a soft apologist for Philby after his defection. John the Karei who is certainly not sympathetic to Philby. Philby actually gave up La Karei's real identity when he himself was in the intelligent services. But the Karei turns him into the character of Bill Hayden and Tinker Taylor 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 will just outright say is an extracurcable 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?”

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-efficient government kind of structure 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."

So he spends the 50th 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.

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 involved in, I guess, the game, the game of intelligence.”

So in my book, I actually argue that in terms of secrets given to Stalin, Donald McLean was probably more consequential, but Donald McLean 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 grey world. And the thing about that grey 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 turiness, which means that people come back to it and fiction and 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 portraying one's country, right?

A hundred percent. And Graham Greene, who you mentioned, you know, he writes the fort forwards to Philby's very mendacious memoir. And in that 40, he says exactly that's something like, I come with these ass words, but it's something like, yes, he betrayed his country, but who is 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 lissarati, 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 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.

So I want to make one observation and then one provocation to gently push back against one of your assumptions. The observation just is a historical note. This press conference that Phil big gifts to try and clear his own name is within intelligent 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 counter espionage investigations because it is such a perfect set piece of how devious a trader can actually be and still come off as sort of somebody you would want to hang out with to use the awful American terms like somebody you'd want to sit down and have a beer with.

“But I want to push back against one notion and it's not just years, it's something that appears in most of the literature.”

This notion that of Phil be 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, Singen Philby, is a British diplomat who to use like Chadham House speak that is probably offensive these days sort of goes native in the Middle East. To the point where there's one of the earliest biographies about Philby actually theorizes that there's almost this like genetic defects in inherited inclination to betrayal.

The book is called "Trees in the Blood" and it 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 irner hero to Oxbridge to, you know, white hall that he's historically been pictured as?”

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 poshows protected by another bunch of poshows betraying another bunch of poshows. I think it's all very, very one-dimensional because what is actually the case is that they come from not the top top bit of British society, but once like the underneath they are destined to sort of basically run the empire. 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 farther 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 enamoured of his kind of pro-Arabist position that he becomes a wild anti-seamite and actually ends up running as a fascist in a British election and being imprisoned as a fascist by the British government. When Philby is brought into British intelligence, there's this kind of famous lunch, right, where the head of M.I.s. takes Philby and his father's lunch and says to Philby's father, where Philby goes to the Lou,

And Valentine Vivienne and another kind of couple of the older members of British intelligence are worried that Philby seniors are pulling the heavier and fascist tendencies are going to 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 it's a story is much more complicated.

“Now in terms of this idea of Philby inheriting trees and from his father, obviously, it's nonsense, right?”

I do think, I'm quite wary of kind of being an amateur psychologist, 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's the inheritability thing, but yeah, I think this sort of assumption that it's like, you know, the kind of posh appearance bringing in their sons and it doesn't quite work.

“Don, on the claims of father, for example, is a liberal politician, he's a left-wing politician, and his grandfather is like a poor, you know, peasant, I guess, for the ones for a better word, one they would have used at the time.”

He's a minister, you know, John King Cross has come 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 the story that he witnessed his father's heart attack, because he came running in and found his mother and father in the middle of a certain acts, a marital acts and his father had died in the middle of it. This may or not be true, but, you know, it's interesting that this is the story about just tales, these are not, these are not sort of, you know, normal embedded golf club members, you know what I mean, they're slightly out there.

Especially if you're under the coins on the trade, you just need to get out of there, because you can't get out of there, or you can't get out of there. And now, by the Magenta Fendils, many actions were put around the VM, for example, the Motorola Edge 70 Fusion Part of FIFA World Cup 26 Collecting for one euro, for Kurze Zeit by the Telecom.

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 mentally at 90s, we finally get a full length biography of Anthony, blonde by Miranda Carter, 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 blonde was a much more fascinating character. You know, Anthony blonde is actually a legitimate art historian.

I own his monograph on Nicholas Pousal, more for historical reasons than because I care what he has to say about, you know, at Narcadia, ego or dance to the music of time. But, you know, he's the keeper of the Queen's pictures. He ends up heading the Cortolids, which is essentially probably the most renowned art history facility in the world. He actually is the polished, gentle person that so many people think the others are, but he gets so little press and coverage compared to Philby in McLean, Burgess and Karen Cross.

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?

There's nothing, you know, I'm a former journalist, occasional still journalist, and there's nothing, the 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 affection from Bay Roots 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 interrespectability. Now this isn't actually what happened at all.

“And I think the right blunt isn't absolutely fascinating figure who's been utterly underwritten. And I think, you know, why does he get a bit of a pass?”

You know, there's almost like an idea that a man who loves paintings can't be all bad, you know, he can't be a stone-gold murderer. And Miranda Carter's biography of him, which is a brilliant biography, and I love it. I'm not, I'm not decrying it, but she's this interested in his art history as in his spying. So that's also, 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 anti-bland. I agree that the focus on film is slightly distracting from the others because they're equally as fascinating.

I mean, one of the problems obviously is of writing a book about all five of them is that, you know, each of them has taken a can-take full-ed book for his on their own.

“And I'm trying to kind of tell their story as a whole, and it's quite difficult. And I think, 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 Soviet, it's definitely. But as a whole, 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.

Yeah, it's funny. I've always thought of Guy Burgess as sort of like if Sebastian Flight from Bride's head 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 is this American intelligence figure who moved between the FBI and CIA.”

He says, "Would you like me to do a sketch of your wife?" And he does. And it ends up being this near pornographically insulting nude cartoon that just totally ruins the dinner and earns Burgess the enmity of who that is one of the main spy hunters in the United States. And it ultimately does come back to bite him. Yeah, I suppose this is good a point as I need 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 seems to me, McLean, I'm going to ask you to elaborate on this, but McLean sort of has what we would nowadays call, I don't want to say a psychotic break, but almost in 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?

He and a friend break into an American woman's flats, they trust the place, they're found in bed, giggling and chewing on a bone of mutton.

And he sent home in disgrace to recover and he's now calling. 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 McLean, 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, they're eliminating names all the time, and one of the people in that investigation into who is this spy is Kim Filby, unbelievably. So they're quite well informed that the net is closing, and Donald McLean 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, we're recording this on 40th of May, tomorrow is the 50th of May, and that is the day on which Burgess having come home from America fully brief by Kim Filby on the status of the investigation.

Goes into Donald McLean's office in the foreign office, arranges him 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 McLean come reeling out of that meeting with Donald 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 and early June, so everybody's panicking, what are we going to do?”

So they decide, Soviet intelligence decide that he should be offered away out, I mean, they initially know how to do it, their first idea is to send a submarine to the coast of Britain.

But Donald McLean 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 Moten, who is the Russian handler, who's managing at this time, basically says that Burgess was ordered by the Soviet resident in London, a man codenamed Corovine. Burgess was ordered to kind of get McLean off out of the country and to the continent, and to the anchor, and then probably he could slip back in.

“But it all seems very odd, what are the chances of that actually being able to happen?”

So I think Burgess was also massively struggling, 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 boat, 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 anchor.

And, famously, are miserable once they get there. And these Burgess, I mean, he has innumerable quotes about missing being able to follow cricket and have access to his several rotailers that he prefers. Yeah, this is true, and actually to there was a massive dump of MI-5 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-9050s, Burgess decides he hates Moscow so much he wants to come home, right?

So he starts making noises he's going to come home. And MI-5, counterintelligence are horrified because, you know, one of the big themes of the last estate of my book is about how hard and you will know this better than anyone, how hard counterintelligence is, how would you prove spying? How would you prove it in a course of law when you're main evidence comes from top secret programs? You know, it's so hard. So MI-5 here, the guy about just is going to 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. And they actually end up getting Anthony Blunt to write him a letter saying, do not come back, stay where you are. But yeah, I mean, he's utterly miserable, he hates it.

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's life only becomes more miserable when Kim Philby arrives in.

Let's get to that in a second, I don't know.

Yeah, okay, yeah, let's get back to Philby.

“Once McLean and Burgess defect, the sand in the hourglass for Philby does start to run, doesn't it?”

It does start, so immediately, suspicion falls on the ones left behind, so both Philby, I mean, there's a little bit of a moment where am I five or a bit too trusting of Anthony Blunt, but broadly pretty quickly.

Suspicion falls on definitely Philby then blunt and then Kankros, because there's some incriminating papers in Guy Burgess's flats that he left behind that finger at Kankros.

So Philby very quickly is doomed. The Americans are absolutely convinced very quickly that he's guilty of saying they want him gone. So he kind of limps home.

“There is a brilliant document that was released in January last year, which is where the British intelligence interrogate,”

get a former colleague of Philby, who's a top barista called Buster Milmo to do an interrogation of him, and the full interrogation is now released for the first time, and it's absolutely mesmerising.

It should be a two-man play, but Philby cannot answer any of Milmo's attacks convincingly, but neither does he confess, which puts every being a horrible position. So then this is where they kind of introduced this weird legal limbo, which I mentioned earlier, where they effectively say he is not to work for a 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 mass, actually. He can't get a job. I've seen doctors reports where he's taking pills 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,

I-lane, and we know this, because they're my five watches, we're kind of watching this unfold. He was being followed, bugs, you know, it was not a happy existence for Kim Philby in the 1950s at all. The conspiracy theorizing, as you mentioned about, did he really defect, did the British help and defect, did the British tell him this is really, or only option, do the honorable thing and exit, but he too winds up in Russia. He does, and I mean, I, so I'm all, whenever I'm confronted with whether something is a co-cop, or whether it's a conspiracy, I assume it's a co-cop, I don't really, yeah, however, in these files that were released last year, there were a couple of flickers of things that made 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 Bayroot to work as a journalist, and actually you can see that the government lent on these newspapers to get him out there, because he was becoming an embarrassment in London. So he's enjoying its time in the Lebanese, you know, drunk all the time, et cetera, et cetera.

“And then basically, for reasons which I think are quite suspicious, which I go into in the book, but let's not get sidetracked now, he is M.O.5, and M.O.S., it's restart the investigation, they think they've got new information on him.”

His friend Nicholas Elliott is sent to Bayroot 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 Bayroot, M.O.5, are told that Philby has confessed, and they send reams of questions, they're so excited, they've got this confession. There is no evidence, 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 Bayroot, not to watch Philby, not to go anywhere near Philby, because if you get spooked, he might be able to spoil the debrief, right? So there's no evidence this debrief is even happening, and the Americans have been 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.

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 were good reasons why they would gently encourage him to be off.

“And when in Russia, and I think you were learning to this earlier, Philby betraying his usual loyalty to causes and people, I'm tends in a romantic park.”

He does, so Philby once he's in Russia, he sleeps with McLean's wife, so that's nice for everybody. It's like the last betrayal, although having said that, given that McLean beat his wife and strangled her, and you know, I'm not sure she's desperately to blame. And Loske, with a horrible drunkards who beats her, I think Philby probably looked quite attractive at that point.

So, so that's still these two who never do defect to the alien.

Anthony Blunt grows relatively old, with some privacy up until the Fatura era, despite the British government knowing what he had done. And I think John Karen Cross ends his days in the South of France. So, let's wrap up this story with talking about what happens to Blunt and Karen Cross.

“And you get it off easy or do they face their own sort of psychological prison?”

So, both of them are reinvestigated by M.5 in the wake of the confession of an American called Michael Straits, 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 M.5 files was that the woman who would later go on to become a head of M.5 was one of a kind of number of new breed, a stellar remitting.

She's one of a new breed of case officers who have 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, over the course of the 50s and 60s and 70s, Anthony Blunt is interviewed more than 80 times by N.5. 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 Kang Cross are sort of let alone is because M.5 are trying to use them to catch other people. So, they're bugging them and sending them into meetings. Blunt is sitting in on M.5 interviews with men he recruited into Soviet intelligence, you know, to sort of try and help track them down. So, you know, it's again, it's slightly game playing.

I mean, again, British country intelligence 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 stand up in a court floor. So, I do have some sympathy.

“And they were in a psychological prison. Well, not Kang Cross. I think Kang Cross is 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 black males and betrayer 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 pause to think. But the master that they served, Stalin, the mirrored whiff that you were a spy, not even a whiff, like a full-sack accusation you were 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. All right. I want to 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 non-fiction 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?

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 a fiction it's almost indescapable because And I've found it almost indescapable in my own book. I mean, I spent an awful lot of time talking about the victims and working out exactly how they portrays 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 lungs and pissed, having a fair drinking gin that there is something that in fiction makes them appealing. So yeah, there isn't one. Somebody else needs to write it.

“I will make a pitch for one. Not that John Benville needs my endorsement to sell books. I think his book of 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 barobones details. It actually gets into blunt inner psychology, but I will endorse it as a good novel. Yeah. I mean, I love John Benville. I'm with you. You know, Alan Bennett's plays about blunt and about Guy Burgess. Oh, great place. They're just nonsense because these men were horrible people who betrayed everybody that was closest to them.

And the idea that they protected their friends is also complete nonsense. I mean, they all betrayed each other whenever they could. Whatever it was necessary. Kim Philby, you know, was betraying Donald McLean and Guy Burgess left right in 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.

“I think that moral condemnation you just articulated is something that much of the historical record hasn't either for quite some time.”

So perhaps we should leave it there. And Tonya senior, thank you again for joining us. Your books, Stalin's Apostles comes out in the United States. I believe on May 26. This is one of the rare books for which I have received a review copy, but we'll be buying a hardcover for my personal library anyway. So like I said, I will on the hesitatingly recommend it to anybody among our listeners, ship 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.

Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it. Your questions were amazing. Thank you.

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