‘Cambridge Five’ spies relied on their pedigrees to evade suspicion

Antonia Senior’s “Stalin’s Apostles” opens with two small airplanes humming their way from a British base in Cyprus across Iron Curtain countries to western Ukraine in May 1951. A handful of trained anti-communist Ukrainians parachute into the Carpathian Mountains, outfitted with radios, weapons, and vague messages of support for fellow partisans thought to be operating somewhere in the woods below.

The mission was destined to fail: Soviet secret police were expecting the drop, tipped off by a mole close to the top of the Anglo-American spy machine: Kim Philby. Philby headed a group of upper-crust Brits who had spent years betraying secrets to Moscow after being recruited as idealistic leftists at Cambridge University. Many of them had been members of a secret society known as the Apostles.

Within weeks of the Ukraine drop, the “Cambridge Five,” as the spies came to be known, would break apart. Two of Philby’s oldest friends, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, defected to Russia and a cloud of suspicion hung over the remainder, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Once word leaked out, the public was transfixed by how these scions of wealthy families could become traitors serving Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Why We Wrote This

In the history of spy rings, the Cambridge Five were notorious. Members of the British elite, the men were recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s as university students. They eventually moved into the highest echelons of power – with unparalleled access to British secrets. In her book, “Stalin’s Apostles,” Antonia Senior strips away any romanticism still clinging to their exploits and focuses on the damage to lives, missions, and U.S.-British relations.

The scramble to ferret out the rest of the Cambridge spies, recounted in the book’s final third, is the narrative highlight, with British spyhunters scouring clues as Philby tries desperately to throw them off the trail.

“Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire,” by Antonia Senior, PublicAffairs, 480 pp.

But Senior’s comprehensive account of perhaps the 20th century’s most famous spy ring focuses above all on the human cost of their betrayals, including the three squads of Western-trained Ukrainian nationalists dropped into the mountains on that May night.

Some of the parachutists were eventually hunted down and killed; what happened to the rest remains unclear, but just one managed to escape back across the Iron Curtain. The Cambridge Five supplied Soviet intelligence with information on top-secret plans by American and British covert operatives to cultivate armed resistance at the edges of the Soviet empire. The spies’ efforts at least partly led to the capture and deaths of scores of agents and partisans – many of them anti-communists from Eastern Europe who were fighting for independence.

Senior – a writer of historical fiction, a podcaster, and a book critic for The Times of London – acknowledges the appeal of communist idealism in Depression-era Britain. She also recognizes how a sense of the injustices of British imperialism and a horror at the rise of fascism in Europe helped draw the Cambridge Five to the Soviet cause.

But “Stalin’s Apostles” is not a sympathetic account, and Senior has no interest in understanding the appeal the Soviet project held for the young spies. She is clearly outraged by the public’s attraction to the Cambridge Five – with their mix of upper-class elegance, intrigue, and youthfulness. The writer spends much of her account looking to smash any hint of romanticism around the spies.

“Framed solely as a heist on a staid establishment, the Five’s crimes have become easy to underplay, even to glamourise,” she writes in the introduction. “But there were forgotten victims of their treachery.”

Stalinism is fiercely depicted in all of its brutality, while the Cambridge spies come off as grotesque, gin-drinking monsters. Maclean and Philby were beastly to the women in their lives. Burgess, often portrayed as an amusing, booze-soaked rascal and sexual libertine, once tried to enlist the Soviets to assassinate a good friend (they declined).

In one particularly acidic passage, Senior describes the deaths of a pair of hapless Lithuanian agents delivered straight into the clutches of the Soviet secret police and imagines, lurking in the shadows, “a gleeful Philby.”

“Stalin’s Apostles” offers a lively – if polemical – account of Stalin’s consolidation of a vast Soviet empire, and how a fire hose of secrets from the Cambridge Five aided his maneuvering. Maclean, for instance, was able to pilfer direct personal correspondence between successive U.S. presidents and British prime ministers from his perch at the British embassy in Washington.

Matt Dunham/AP/File

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