2/27/2024 0 Comments Spy cam guy friends![]() Perhaps, some KGB operatives wondered, they could actually be triple agents? According to Macintyre’s book, the Russians were often deeply suspicious of intelligence passed on by the Cambridge spies – it seemed too good to be true. The further he and his co-conspirators climbed, the better the material they could pass on to the Soviets. Philby rose the highest in the secret service, eventually becoming first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington and working closely with CIA counterintelligence boss James Jesus Angleton. There’s an exquisite irony in the English obsession with class facilitating a great betrayal of England – a very British undoing. There’s also, Cary says, a particularly British “eccentricity” to this rationale, and an “arrogance, particularly when it’s framed in the English public school culture… I was at private schools and I do remember thinking, ‘Oh, these people actually think that we are the future of the country, they actually believe that.’” Maxwell Martin’s character, he explains, was intended as “somebody who is a complete affront to the old school tie, deliberately sent in there by MI5, to piss them off”. Their peers would find it impossible to believe that one of their own could possibly be a wrong ’un. He had attended Cambridge on a scholarship and lacked the other spies’ privilege. Their status as expensively educated men who knew the right people didn’t just open doors: it would later protect them from suspicion. They were playing a long game: Deutsch’s brief was to talent spot bright young radicals who might rise to prominent positions in years to come.Ĭairncross was the only outlier. Under the guise of studying for a PhD in phonetics and psychology at University College London, Deutsch was working as a recruiter for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency which was a forerunner of the KGB. On a trip to Vienna in 1934, Philby would meet and fall in love with an Austrian communist activist, Litzi Friedmann a friend of hers, Flora Solomon, later introduced him to a man known as “Otto”, aka Arnold Deutsch. In Moffat’s reimagining, Burgess gives impassioned speeches about starving children, Philby leads a workers’ uprising in the dining hall of his college and both stand up for Jewish students: they become, as the TV critic Mark Lawson put it for The Guardian, “the pro-semitic heroes of organised labour”. No wonder the show’s quasi-heroic framing of some of Britain’s most notorious traitors provoked a Crown-style controversy over the ethics of blending fact and fiction. “It’s very disputed as to what motivated the Cambridge spies, but people who were potentially motivated by grand ideals of an alternative society – lots of tensions nowadays are compared to the Cold War, but it’s not really that fundamental challenge of ideology”. “There’s a nostalgia for a time when the big intelligence conflicts felt like they were about ideals,” says Dr Joseph Oldham, lecturer in communication and mass media at the British University in Egypt and author of Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama. The ideological Cold War clash of communism versus capitalism makes an irresistible backdrop from our modern vantage point. The establishment bastion was an unlikely hothouse for radical politics – Philby would later recall asking his economics lecturer Maurice Dobb, an avowed Marxist, how he might “devote his life to the communist cause” after graduating. Like Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and Cairncross, Philby encountered communist ideas at Cambridge. Philby was nicknamed “Kim” by his father, in a nod to the Rudyard Kipling poem which, in an uncanny coincidence, is a very English story of duality, all about a boy spy who becomes “a two-sided man”. “No, I was not,” comes Philby’s reply, followed by another half-swallowed smile. After Philby gives a brief assent, his questioner pushes a little further. “And if there was a third man, were you in fact that third man?” he asks. ![]() The interviewer asks whether Philby is satisfied with his newly clean reputation, now that he has been ruled out as “the so-called third man” – the mole thought to have tipped off British agents-turned-Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, allowing the pair to defect to the USSR in 1951. His name is Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known to his friends, and now the world, as Kim. He answers the questions posed by his American interviewer with few words, sometimes accompanied by the flicker of a smile, a slight air of ennui, as if he is bored with the whole charade. On 9 November 1955, the world’s media crowded into a fourth-floor flat in South Kensington in London, their cameras trained on a self-assured man in his forties, speaking with the clipped accent and unshakeable confidence that is drilled into a certain class of British male through years of expensive schooling.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |