Spies & Lies
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The exploits of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess have fascinated both Britons and Americans for decades. Since the late 1970s a steady stream of books – prompted by leaks, official declassifications, archival openings, and confessions by spies, Soviet intelligence officers, and
Allied counterintelligence officials – has exposed almost every facet of the careers of the Cambridge spies. The newest contribution to this literature, S.J. Hamrick’s “Deceiving the Deceivers” (Yale University Press, 320 pages, $29.95) purports to put an entirely new spin on what is widely considered one of the most successful spy operations in history.
The fabulous careers of the Cambridge spies began with their recruitment to the communist cause during their undergraduate years in the 1930s and ended – effectively – with the exposure of Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Burgess, a hard-drinking, promiscuous homosexual, had worked for British intelligence and the BBC; just before his flight to Moscow, he served as second secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, all the while passing along secrets to his KGB controllers. Maclean, acting head of the American Department at the Foreign Office in London, had previously been first secretary in Washington. In that capacity he had access to the most secret and significant diplomatic and political documents, including information about Anglo-American nuclear policies.
That Burgess and Maclean were able to flee just days before the latter was due to be interrogated by British counterintelligence provoked a scandal that refused to go away. By that time Philby had become MI6’s chief of station in Washington; suspicion that he had sent Burgess back to England to warn Maclean led to his being recalled. But despite considerable circumstantial evidence that he, too, had been a spy, he was never prosecuted and the British government issued a series of misleading reports and assurances about his role until his own defection in 1961. Over the years, others in the ring, including the distinguished art historian Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, were interrogated and offered deals that allowed them to remain at liberty.
So much is known. Now Mr. Hamrick, a novelist and former American Foreign Service officer, has come forward with the startling claim that the British government for nearly half a century has engaged in a cover-up. He argues that the British analysts broke messages that implicated Philby and Maclean much earlier than they later claimed. Concealing that knowledge, from their American counterparts, the British concocted an elaborate deception operation designed to feed the Soviets disinformation on American atomic weapon capacity and the government’s willingness to use such weapons (at this time, there was still a real threat of Soviet ground troops moving into Western Europe).
Mr. Hamrick goes on to speculate that, knowing that material from genuine spies like Philby and Maclean would be believed in Moscow, British military and espionage officials put both of them in key positions – Philby as intelligence liaison in Washington and Maclean as acting Head of the American Department at the Foreign Ministry – without informing American officials. They then engaged in a more than half-century cover-up to conceal their actions since “had it been discovered that in 1949-1950 Royal Air Force officers had passed top secret USAF war plans to a known Soviet agent at the British embassy, the incendiary consequences in Washington would have been uncontrollable.”
Mr. Hamrick points to a number of oddities, contradictions, and anomalies in the official story. He is disinclined, however, to recognize that in the world of espionage there are always loose ends. More seriously, his book is based entirely on conjecture and unsupported claims. In numerous places he asserts that British officials “should have” or “could have” learned certain things or “might have considered” engaging in certain actions. He speculates that British military officials centered in the RAF “could have” launched the operation and that a British intelligence operative, Jack Easton of MI5, might have run it but “it is as impossible to know his role as it is to confirm the operation.”
The contrast Mr. Hamrick draws between the efficient, shrewd, and devilishly clever Brits and the incompetent and naive American counterintelligence forces borders on caricature. Somehow the blundering Americans managed to uncover and neutralize more than a hundred Soviet spies via Venona – the decrypting operation run out Arlington Hall – while most of the British spies fled to Moscow or successfully avoided not only prosecution, but even public exposure.
Several assertions Mr. Hamrick makes should raise doubts about his own claims. Mr. Hamrick asserts that Philby did not have “unlimited access” to Arlington Hall, but NSA historians and FBI agents like Bob Lamphere insist that Philby saw everything produced by Venona from 1949 to 1951 – which would have included those of his own contacts to Moscow – and did periodically visit the facility. Mr. Hamrick’s claims that the British concealed certain Venona material from Arlington Hall; these same historians insist that it received a constant stream of translated material as both the Americans and British painstakingly broke one or two words or phrases.
At times, Mr. Hamrick confuses the reader about why some Soviet messages were never broken, falsely insisting that the British have continued to withhold them. And after insisting that the entire plan remained secret because it was a British plan from the start, he claims – with not one iota of evidence – that “it is altogether probable, if not certain, that CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, was told about the operation by a British colleague.”
Mr. Hamrick finally admits that “not one shred of documentary evidence has yet been found nor is ever likely to be found to support” his claim of a deception operation. Because “the most sensitive intelligence operations are never committed to paper,” he concludes, material evidence will never be found.” This last assertion, besides being false, is a desperate effort to sidestep the most basic scholarly requirements. Lots of speculation and little evidence may make for an entertaining tale, but not one of the sort normally offered by a university press.
This spy story is so convoluted, and alleges such an intricate tapestry of deception and conspiracy, that even those deeply versed in the twists and turns of the Philby espionage story will find themselves tied into knots, bewildered by the lack of a clear narrative line. Toward the end, Mr. Hamrick speculates on another matter, but then adds: “But now we’ve left the thin ice we have been wandering and are out in open water, far from shore.” It is a fitting epigraph to his flawed book.
Mr. Klehr is co-author of “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” (Encounter Books).