MIKE ROSSITER
Headline, 2014, 344 pages, $xx.yy (pb)
A SPY AMONG FRIENDS:
Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
BEN MACINTYREBloomsbury, 2014, 352 pages, $xx.yy (pb)
Klaus Fuchs has had a very bad press because the refugee German
physicist who was at the heart of the war-time British and American nuclear
bomb projects also passed on all their secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union. There is, however, more to Fuchs than his
depiction by conservative Cold Warriors as a reprehensible traitor, as can be
gleaned from Mike Rossiter’s biography.
Fuchs came of political age during the rise of Nazism when he
joined the German Communist Party (KPD) as the only effective resistance force to
Hitler. A fearless activist, Fuchs was
once attacked by Hitler’s street thugs outside Keil University and thrown in a river,
losing some teeth during the assault.
After Hitler’s power-grab, the KPD leadership sent their highly
valuable young scientist to safety in Britain with a dual career as nuclear
scientist and Soviet spy. MI5, Britain’s
domestic secret police, was unaware of Fuchs’ covert role and waved aside what
they assessed as Fuchs’ ‘slight security risk’ for the sake of Britain’s
greater nuclear good.
A decrypted Soviet spy message, however, trained their gaze on
Fuchs in 1949. The evidence was scanty, vague and circumstantial,
and, as MI5 would not want to reveal in court that it had cracked the Soviet’s
secret espionage code, Fuchs would almost certainly have escaped prosecution.
Under gentlemanly
interrogation by MI5, however, Fuchs volunteered a confession. He may have developed doubts about the Soviet
Union, and he was concerned about his colleagues, friends and family getting
dangerously caught up in his MI5 investigation, but the inducement of immunity
from prosecution, which was beyond MI5’s powers, in return for a confession was
crucial.
Fuchs’ illegally obtained confession should have been ruled
inadmissible as evidence in court but with Lord Chief Justice Goddard hearing
the case, there was no way this rank conservative would obey legal niceties. Nor was Goddard moved by the fact that Fuchs
also effectively spied for Britain, his phenomenal memory transporting highly
classified American nuclear weapons know-how, jealously-guarded from even US
allies, back to Britain.
Washington, says Rossiter, knew that its nuclear weapons
dominance “gave a significant advantage to the country that possessed it” in terms
of geo-political power and it was not just the Soviet Union but also Britain
which believed, as Labour’s Foreign Secretary put it, that ‘we could not afford
to acquiesce in an American monopoly’ of the atomic bomb.
Tricked into a confession, Fuchs got fourteen years and served
nine for good behaviour before returning to East Germany, becoming that
neo-Stalinist state’s most senior nuclear physicist where he died in 1988, the
year that also saw the death, in Moscow, of Kim Philby, another Soviet spy and
as reflexively vilified, including by his latest biographer, Ben Macintyre.
Like Fuchs, Philby moved from moderate laborist politics to
communism in the 1930s after witnessing the brutality of fascism in Berlin. An underground communist activist in
quasi-fascist Austria, Philby returned to London and Cambridge University where
his impeccable upper-crust family credentials made him a perfect choice for Soviet
intelligence which was scouting for well-connected students at elite
universities with good career prospects who could blend invisibly into the
British establishment.
Reinvented under the guise of a keen young fascist and
anti-communist, a role Philby found ‘deeply repulsive’ but compensated for by
the romantic thrill of espionage, he joined MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence
agency, eventually rising to head up MI6’s anti-Soviet intelligence operations.
From this position, all activities of MI6, and of the CIA
courtesy of “long boozy lunches” with the CIA head in Washington, found their
way to the Soviet Union which Philby never wavered from seeing as the
embodiment of his left-wing political values, despite Stalin’s Show Trials and
deadly purges, including the liquidation of Philby’s early, cultured and still
idealistic Soviet ‘handlers’.
For Philby, his spying meant helping to foil the West’s Cold
War ‘roll-back’ strategy which centred on MI6 and CIA operations to destabilise
the strong national communist movements in France, Italy and Greece, to repress
anti-imperialist liberation struggles in Latin and Central America, South
America and Asia, and to foment insurrection behind the Iron Curtain.
When exposure loomed for Philby, he, too, like Fuchs, was
offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession but, unlike in Fuchs’
case, leading MI6 officers wanted to avoid what would have been a massive, and career-ruining,
spy scandal and they did nothing to prevent his midnight flit to Moscow in 1963.
Philby’s services to Soviet intelligence had meant the
deaths of those he fingered – the armed anti-communist insurgents in Georgia,
Armenia, the Ukraine and other Soviet satellites; a would-be Soviet defector
bearing the names of those spying for the Soviet Union in the West; and anti-Nazi
but right-wing, anti-communist Catholic resistance activists in Hitler’s
Germany.
Whilst Macintyre vents unalloyed disgust at Philby’s regret-free
“killing for the communist cause”, he fails to summon such moral outrage for Britain’s
war-time execution of Nazi spies (also a result of Philby’s ‘legitimate’ spy
job), nor for the Western spy agencies’ vastly more numerous Cold War toll of
peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and others in the developing world. For Macintyre, some causes (such as “combating
the communist menace”) apparently justify guilt-exempt, spy-induced murder.
Top-heavy on the what and how of spying (codewords, clandestine
rendezvous, etc.) both books are underweight on the why (motives and
principles) of Fuchs and Philby whose guilt is posed only at the level of
breaching official secrets and treason laws.
True political guilt, however belongs to Stalin who was guilty of misleading
the likes of Fuchs and Philby into a blind belief that Russia under the
counter-revolutionary tyrant was socialist and therefore worth spying for.
In the spy’s micro-universe, Fuchs and Philby were isolated
from public engagement as socialist activists working for a democratic,
egalitarian and war-free world. These
were the revolutionary ideals that Fuchs and Philby started out with and for
which, despite their misguided strategy, they remain guilty – and proudly so.
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