Traitors to Their Class

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From The Wall Street Journal:

 What motivates a man to betray his country? In “Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain,” Richard Davenport-Hines explores this question in a thoroughly researched chronicle of Britain’s spies and traitors, from the Elizabethan era to the Cold War. His comprehensive account helps fill the gaps in the historical backdrop of the more well-known British spy narratives.

The book culminates in a study of Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, four of the men famously known as the Cambridge Spies. A whole library of literature has sprung up around these enemies of the state, and bookshelves weigh heavy with theories and countertheories regarding their motives. But Mr. Davenport-Hines succeeds in supplying illuminating new anecdotes, including a lengthy one about Maclean and his pajamas—too detailed to repeat here. And could any historian have guessed that Blunt’s favorite fictional character was Winnie-the-Pooh?

For Mr. Davenport-Hines, these men were unlike the spies of the Soviet Union in one important aspect—they weren’t ruthless. The author challenges the popular argument that a privileged upbringing was the root of their treachery. They may have had an elite education at Eton and Cambridge, but, Mr. Davenport-Hines argues, nothing in that history suggests they would commit the “ungentlemanly act” of betrayal. Rather, the author reminds us that 1930s politics in Europe (and Germany in particular) was polarized between the extreme right and the extreme left. For many young ideological intellectuals, this often led to a worldview in which there seemed to be little choice: either fascism or communism, with no middle ground. If Britain was to survive against the fascists, it meant spying for the Soviet Union. Such tensions were often visible on the streets of Vienna, as when violence erupted into physical fighting between Nazis and Communists. Many such conflicts were witnessed by Philby during his period of study there in 1933-34; it arguably became a defining period in his life that would lead to his recruitment as a Soviet spy.

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In addition to the traitors, Mr. Davenport-Hines also considers MI5’s spycatchers and mole hunters. The author has little respect for mole hunters, describing them as “foul-minded, mercenary and pernicious.” But they were necessary, as deception and betrayal had woven themselves into the organizational fabric of MI5 and MI6. The British intelligence services, Mr. Davenport-Hines tells us, had become too trusting of the old-boys’ network.

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It might be argued, for example, that WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have done far more damage, and made the West far less safe, than the Cambridge spies ever did. Mr. Snowden’s release of countless security files compromised the national security of many countries. Mr. Davenport-Hines’s book pursues its central themes up to the present day, tracing the current mistrust of elites, politicians and leaders in the U.K. back to the hostility generated against the Cambridge spies immediately after their defection—a hostility fuelled by conspiracy theories and the media.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal