This review was originally published in the TLS of January 30, 1987
The reason that spy literature, whether fiction or straight records of
intelligence and counterintelligence operations, generates so much interest
is that everybody has a stake in duplicity. For, whether actively or in
self-defence, we all want to know how far our species can go in deceiving
its kind. In this anthropological sense, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman’s
Conspiracy of Silence is a let-down, not only because of the mediocrity of
the creed in the name of which its hero became a spy, but also because it
tells us very little about the actual fruits of Blunt’s spying for the
Soviet Union. This is not so much the fault of the authors as of the
Official Secrets Act, which prevents the release of the relevant material by
the intelligence establishment, for which Blunt worked during the Second
World War. Judging by the results of the official investigation described in
this book, one is tempted, indeed, to conclude that “The secret life of
Anthony Blunt” is a let-down about a let-down. It is a temptation worth
resisting.
Devoid of any literary merit, this 588-page book is nevertheless an absorbing
read – because it offers a rather balanced view of a controversy nearly
three decades old. About time, one may mutter, for there is hardly an adult
in the English-speaking world today who is unfamiliar with the Cambridge
Gang of Four (or Five, or Six, or Seven, or more), the piecemeal revelations
of whose treachery rocked the British intelligence service at the rate of
roughly one every three years. Doggedly thorough and conscientious, Penrose
and Freeman’s endeavour indeed verges at times on nostalgia.
The chief virtue of Conspiracy of Silence lies in its being a compendium of
the available material, instead of a launch-pad for another crackpot theory.
Yet it is precisely the quantity and diversity of the material on which the
authors draw (memoirs, letters, taped interviews and so forth) that make the
book’s title a bit of a misnomer. For here everybody talks: a good half of
the volume consists of quotes. Nor does its subtitle – “The secret life of
Anthony Blunt” – do any better, since the space occupied in these pages by
the life and career of Guy Burgess should entitle him at least to join on
the cover the man whose bed and convictions he once shared.
The matter of conviction is somewhat more prominent than that of the shared
bed. It appears to be an accepted fact that some time in the early 1930s the
future heroes of this saga, then students at Cambridge, converted to
Marxism, a doctrine to which they adhered with varying degrees of intensity
for the rest of their lives. As the main reasons for that conversion,
Penrose and Freeman – and countless others – cite the sorry state of the
British economy at the time and the spectre of German fascism rapidly
becoming flesh. Equally conducive were the suspicions the young men
harboured about what they perceived as the pro-fascist foreign policy of the
British government, and their somewhat contradictory apprehensiveness
regarding the impending war with fascism (they were of call-up age). The
only clear-cut anti-fascist entity on their horizon – as well as the only
clear-cut political alternative to the unbearable social cul-de-sac into
which capitalism had driven bourgeois democracies – was Soviet Russia. The
young men must have felt very lonely, but they had an ideal.
This, by now, is the household version of the 1930s and of what happened. As
an exercise in causality, it holds some water, although that water in turn
tastes somewhat Marxist if only because of the underlying assumption that
“conditions determine conscience”. They do; but only up to a point after
which conscience acquires autonomy, which is what distinguishes conscience
from reflex. Beyond that point, an autonomous conscience is capable of
turning tables on conditions, and of starting to determine them. That’s the
story of our species. But even if the aforementioned version of the 1930s is
correct, this story somehow wasn’t told to the bright young men in
Cambridge.
On the whole, this version makes one wonder about the contemporary curriculum
there. For no man in his right mind, or at least with a semester of
political economy under his belt, can swallow the Marxist model of social
justice, let alone its Soviet replica. It doesn’t take a metaphysician to
see that no matter how many pieces you cut a pie into, it won’t grow bigger.
The only difference this kind of redistribution of wealth makes is for those
whose hands end up holding the knife.
The benefit of hindsight is not a precondition of sobriety, either: Keynes was
denouncing Marxist economics as “an insult to our intelligence”, at a
gathering of the Apostles, at exactly the time when both Blunt and Burgess
were members. What this sobriety requires is a degree of familiarity with
history, which, in the absence of ecclesiastical teaching, is our only
available source for an ethical education. This is precisely what the
Cambridge of the day failed to provide, and it is this failure, rather than
the sinister designs of international communism or the intricate web of
homosexual subculture that should be considered the origin of the Gang of
Four (or more)’s treachery.
What Penrose and Freeman elaborately describe as the political climate in
Cambridge in the 1930s seems to have been simply a climate of ignorance.
Nobody seems to have told the young men of Cambridge, for instance, that
killing in the name of a social ideal is a contradiction in terms, that it
is still murder. The only ones in their generation to have learned this were
those who returned from Spain alive. In purely quantitative terms, the
spy-yield was, of course, quite insignificant. But it is small wonder that
the inclusion among the Apostles of people who embraced the kind of tenets
that Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Michael Straight believed in has kept
generations of counter-intelligence officers busy. For convictions made on
such a low mental plane endanger both national security and the ordinary
pedestrian.
The odd thing about systems of social justice, Marxism included, is that they
are always embraced far more eagerly by the middle and upper classes than by
the purported beneficiaries. Workers tend to form unions, not parties; that
is, affiliations based on a common professional and income-level
denominator. By 1934, for example, the tentative date of Anthony Blunt’s
conversion, the idea of cutting employees in — ie, turning them into
shareholders — was familiar enough in the United States to have rendered
that conversion obsolete. Moreover, by 1934 de Lamennais’s thesis about
“co-operation instead of competition” was 100 years old. But then the
fallacy inherent in the educated class’s predilection for blueprinting
social happiness lies in the self-congratulatory urge to promote a worker to
one’s own station, and the inability to imagine, let alone practise, the
reverse. In terms of advancing the cause of a would-be better world, Blunt’s
conversion was a non-event; in terms of the real world, it was a small part
of a large disaster. In this sense, Anthony Blunt was indeed a communist.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which resulted in a drastic reduction in CP
membership all over Europe and in Britain, produced no change in either
Blunt’s or Burgess’s conviction. Nor did the outbreak of a war in which
capitalist Britain found itself fighting fascist Germany while Soviet Russia
was rapidly absorbing the Baltic States and half of Poland, in accordance
with both the letter and the spirit of the Pact. Blunt’s serenity on this
score is explained by Penrose and Freeman with the suggestion that, having
done his time as a talent-spotter for Comintern and Cominform (Hominform, in
the American parlance of the day), he was well enough versed in the arcana
of Marxist dialectics to regard the Pact as a smart tactical move by Stalin
to gain the time necessary to prepare the Red Army for its eventual battle
with fascism. (Never mind the human toll this move took of the German and
Russian-occupied territories.) This sounds plausible. But equally plausible
is the notion that Blunt, an art historian, couldn’t have cared less for
Marxist doctrine in general or its dialectics in particular: that his
talent-spotting and his subsequent spying for Comintern was done as a prank,
as an indulgence of a proclivity for manipulating people, as a favour to a
friend, or for want of anything else to do between his studies and
carousing. Spying, after all, doesn’t take up much time; the accompanying
sense of danger was minimal enough to be exhilarating. It was risky, it was
fun, and the future academic could see himself as a daredevil, as a tough.
After all, he was exploiting the dynamics peculiar to any coterie: the
tendency to gossip, the incestuous alliances, the fascination with guilty
secrets — and what is a better way of becoming privy to a guilty
secret than planting that guilty secret in someone else’s head? Activities
of this nature tend to snowball, however, and by the time Blunt was
thirty-two — on September 1,1939 — there were too many guilty
secrets around and it was too late for him to be able to back out. If he
cared at all about Marxist doctrine, it was about its application to visual
art; and he duly and with fervour extolled the tenets of socialist realism
while debunking works like Picasso’s “Guernica” as bourgeois expressions of
personal terror. If nothing else, the doctrine provided him with a new
terminology. In his field, this was perceived as a cutting edge.
Stalin was gaining time, but so was Hitler. Besides, Hitler was not bumping
off his generals. By June 22,1941, when Germany attacked Russia, Blunt had
already achieved the rank of captain, and had two years of working in MIS
behind him. It is fair to assume that everything he knew in that capacity
was also known to his masters in the Moscow Centre. Still, the German
invasion of Russia turned out to be a boon for anybody spying for Russia,
since the Soviet Union thus became a British ally, and that should have
cleared a spy’s conscience considerably. Under the circumstances, Blunt
could see himself as genuinely contributing to both the British and the
Russian war effort. He thus had the comfort of thinking that his cause, to
use Comrade Stalin’s word out of context, was “just”, if a bit redundant,
since in the capacity of an ally, the British government supplied the Soviet
Union with intelligence material anyway.
To all intents and purposes, Blunt continued to enjoy this peace of mind
throughout the entire war, and so, presumably, did his fellow spies. For all
their known and unknown quantity, however, the Moscow Centre’s pickings were
fairly slim, judging only by the number of convoys lost in the waters of the
North Atlantic. It is perhaps during the final stages of the war and its
immediate aftermath that these bright Cambridge men proved their usefulness,
allowing Stalin to outmanoeuvre his Western counterparts in Yalta, and
providing Soviet intelligence in the liberated countries ol Eastern Europe
with a reasonably detailed Who’s Who of the politicians and resistance
groups backed by London. To assume this is as natural as to hope for the
opposite.
Penrose and Freeman don’t indulge in this sort of speculation. They are
prevented by the wealth of material they have to sort out and by focusing on
their subject, who, as a spy, fades against the background consisting of
Burgess, Maclean and Philby. The background is painted very thoroughly,
however, and the doubts that sometimes engulf its figures are no more than
evening shadows. On the whole, one forms an impression that, though
relatively ineffectual in the course of the Second World War, the Cambridge
spies flourished in the climate of the Cold War which, like phyto-plankton,
they helped to facilitate to no small degree. Maclean’s access to the
British ambassador’s code and his participation in the trilateral Atomic
Commission’s decision-making process alone — not to mention Burgess and
Philby — would be sufficient to stifle any mention of Blunt’s name in the
same breath as his. It may be that Blunt decided to quit MIS after the war
because he felt redundant — if not simply inferior — beside
these comrades. Their activities could at least have provided him with an
argument for persuading his controller to put him on ice for a while.
Confessing in 1964, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he confessed
very little — not only because the immunity deal made him, as it were, the
master of the situation (now it was up to him to choose what to tell to his
interrogators and what to stay silent about), but also because he had rather
little to reveal. Besides, if what Penrose and Freeman recount about his
sexual habits is true, Blunt wasn’t a man given to brooding or
retrospection. At his core, he was a homosexual dandy and a product of a
familiarly garbled reading of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (unlike
Maclean, who was so influenced by J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough that later
on, when he ended up in Moscow and had to live under an assumed name, he
became Mark Petrovich Frazer), with its emphasis on the indefinability of
the good, on aesthetic enjoyment and personal attachment. Add to that the
Marxist cant about internationalism, and E. M. Forster’s high camp dictum
about hoping to have the guts to betray his country rather than his friend,
and you’ll get what made the meek transcend loyalty to the nation; you’ll at
least get Blunt’s reticence in his 1964 confession.
On the other hand, the counter-intelligence section of MI6 is no Holy
Inquisition either: it deserved no better than it got. The tune it heard
from Blunt it knew by heart. What the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures
supplied them with was — in all kindness — pure lyrics. But then confession
is essentially an exercise in self-therapy and, at best, its purpose is to
manipulate the outer — not to mention the inner — authority into
a more benevolent disposition towards the sinner, whether in the short run
or in the afterlife. Blunt was more interested in the short run. Thirteen
years after Burgess and barely a year after Philby ended up in Moscow, Blunt
had a choice between being elegiac, matter-of-fact, or epic. Judging by the
amount of space allotted by Penrose and Freeman to the others, Blunt elected
the minor key.
The epic genre, as Blunt knew, could have cost him his skin. For Kim Philby
cuts a far more substantial figure than Burgess, Maclean and Blunt together,
if only on the strength of his having apparently masterminded the world oil
crisis. There can be little doubt that the idea of controlling the Eastern
Mediterranean and Arabian Peninsula’s oil fields was suggested to the Moscow
Centre from the outside. Up until the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Mediterranean
Basin, the Red Sea and North Africa never constituted a political — let
alone economic — reality for Russia. The farthest Russia ever wanted
to reach in that direction was the Dardanelles, and that more out of its
traditional animosity towards Turkey than for any practical purposes. The
interest, in other words, was largely of a didactic nature, not a product of
a functional, coherent policy.
The Suez crisis marks the beginning of the Soviet presence in this region — a
presence whose initial success and whose purpose were equally baffling. The
most widely aired contemporary opinion ascribed these moves to the
traditional antisemitic sentiment of the Soviet government, now taking the
form of a pro-Arab stance, with its attendant anti-imperialist and
anti-colonialist sloganeering. The relative benefit of hindsight, however,
while not challenging the essence of this interpretation, lies in providing
a literal interpretation to what was perceived as cant: the move was indeed
anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, in the sense that it aimed to deprive
the Western industrialized world of its main raw material, oil. As far as
the ABC of Marxist thought is concerned, this was like saying “A”.
Now, the reason that that “A” could not have been first uttered in Moscow is
that in order to make such an utterance, one must at least know the ways in
which industrial democracies operate, their basic needs and dependencies. At
that time (the last years of Stalin, the first of Khrushchev), this
knowledge was beyond the Politburo’s level of competence. They barely
managed their own country. Even if it were possible to imagine the existence
within the hierarchy of an expert sufficiently enterprising or dogmatic to
have such an insight, he would still have had to work the implementation of
this idea through one or two members of the Politburo, and to a member of
that illustrious body the keeper of such an idea would seem to have a
threatening degree of edge. Such were the days. Besides, the thought
wouldn’t have occurred to a Russian, because Russia itself is enormously
oil-rich.
It must have come from the outside, and it reflects good old imperial thinking
(filling a vacuum, etc). Given the almost total lack of previous communist
activity in the region, the success of the initial Soviet steps could be
attributed either to the sheer novelty of their faces in the Arab world or
to some dormant network being activated. As for the second option, the
network couldn’t have been either German (since Ghelen sold the entire thing
at the root level to the Americans), or French (as the inhabitants of French
territories, down to the darkest pied noir, are always staunchly loyal to
France). This leaves us with only one alternative, and it is quite possible
that in the period 1955 to 1963 the locals who worked for Kim Philby, then
stationed in Beirut, thought that they were advancing the cause of the
British Empire. Once Kim, always Kim.
Like all visionary designs, in the end this great scheme backfired. Still,
improvements for the local population were noticeable enough to soothe a
latter-day Lawrence of Arabia’s conscience — if he remembers the word. But
if, as Penrose and Freeman tell us, “the intelligence world is pragmatic
rather than moral”, then Philby has nothing to worry about in his Moscow
abode save his waistline or whether it is indeed next to John Reed that his
ashes will end up in the Kremlin Wall. But how pragmatic is it? Not very, to
judge by this exhaustive account of its failures. This world is at its most
pragmatic when it comes to covering its shining deniere: towards that end it
uses all sorts of material, though it clearly prefers government paper,
things like the Official Secrets Act. It is a highly provincial world, too,
and it looks up to art historians, nuclear scientists, members of
parliament, aristocrats, and heirs to fortune — that is, it shares and
revels in public fantasies, including the one about itself. We may say that
the depth of provincialism, the intensity of these fantasies, is what a
society pays for its structural rigidity, the way it pays for the
homogeneity of its ideas about the outside world.
In 1950, on the eve of his departure for the United States, Guy Burgess, this
indefatigable bohemian spanner constantly in search of a delicate piece of
intelligence machinery, was advised by his friends to watch his flamboyant
act while in America. He was told that he “should avoid discussions about
communism, homosexuality, and the colour bar”. Burgess is said to have
replied, “What you are trying to say in your nice, long-winded way is: Guy,
for God’s sake don’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.” Nice crack, but the
essence of that warning points to the non-existence of an American
equivalent of an educated class, either in the 1930s, or later. In terms of
education, as well, America produces not a class but a mass; and with the
absence of a class, you can’t develop an intellectual fashion, nor can you
home in on a political group, no matter how left-oriented. At the time, it
would presumably have distressed Cambridge left-wing youths to learn that
their American counterparts were mostly New York Jews (who, on top of that,
were mostly Trotskyite). But it explains why there was less spying for
Russia from those with a college degree. This, too, explains why Burgess had
to die in Moscow: his ideas about the outside world, regardless of his
social radius and the sort of secrets he was privy to, owed everything to
the homogeneity of his milieu, not to mention its homosexuality. The other
name for the phenomenon is, of course, insularity.
That he, Blunt, Maclean “and Philby could wreak such havoc within British
intelligence that the public still, more than three decades after they
ceased to be operational, must be shielded by the Official Secrets Act from
assessing the actual damage, betrays the romantic rather than pragmatic
mentality of the service. Secret intelligence is normally fond of regarding
itself as the brain or nerve-centre of the nation; it is equally fond of
presenting this image to the general public. In the circumstances, the best
thing that can be said about the situation is that Whitehall plays a tough
skull to its sensitive brain’s MI5 and MI6 hemispheres.
Demythologizing the service is a task long overdue; it is about time for life
to start imitating art (here, that of fiction), at least on this score. This
has already happened to the public notion of the police — we know how
corrupt and unreliable the police can be, yet we are not any less safe for
that. To learn about someone’s limitations is to learn about your own
responsibility. In short, a nation shouldn’t put much trust in intelligence.
A nation, if it wants to survive, must rely on its muscle, fortitude, on the
strength and impregnability of its defence mechanism. “Mechanism” is the key
word here, for machines are built because they are more reliable and
replaceable than ourselves. Governments fall for intelligence because
governments are cost-conscious. True, to maintain such a service is much
cheaper than to build a dreadnought or a silo. But the difference between a
dreadnought and a spy is that the former can’t turn self-destructive, or ask
to be loved in a peculiar way. No matter how precise the adversary’s
information may be about this vessel’s speed, fire-power and type of steel,
when it comes to the rub, a dreadnought is a deterrent. For the information
obtained through espionage is one-dimensional: its relation to reality is
that of a photograph or picture. (In some abstract, retroactive way, Blunt
was an ideal spy as Surveyor of the King’s or Queen’s Pictures.) With luck,
and with a good network, with traitors or fellow-travellers, the best that
your adversary may end up with is a family album (of blueprints, of defence
installations, of launch-pads, and of chemical formulae). The photograph,
however, by definition, is an object’s yesterday. What dooms both a spy and
his spymaster is the passage of time and the three-dimensionality of the
reality depicted.
If this biography fails to reconstruct Blunt, it is not so much because of its
authors’ division of labour as because he was eminently replaceable, or, to
put it more accurately and more generously, totally lost. He was a good
example of what is known as negative reality. No amount of weekly calls from
his controller, or books and lectures delivered at the Courtauld, no volume
of rough or gentle trade could give him substance. Did he have blood on his
hands, has he shortened some lives, and how many? To assume that, yes, he
has, would be more prudent than to believe otherwise, although to answer in
detail — in some detail, anyway — one would have to refer to File No
383.7-14.1 of the Ministry of Defence, safe from public eyes behind the
Official Secrets Act.
Unlike many a Briton who dies in order to see his memoir or diary printed,
Blunt, for obvious reasons, never took notes. Those who outlived him won’t
be generous with their recollections, either. He will become — as for some
he has already — “that traitor Blunt”. The Ministry of Defence files of both
“hemispheres” will be — if they are not already — doctored
in a similar spirit. As for the Soviet GRU (General Intelligence
Directorat), its archives are the closest thing to the afterlife one can
approach in this incarnation.
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