Anatoliy Golitsyn and his wife Svetlana dine out at the Coconut Grove in L.A. circa 1961.
This is awkward. It seems that the ‘Cambridge Five’ are numbered five because of information from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB major who defected to the USA in 1961. These are Golitsyn’s words circa March 1962, according to Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher:
Golitsin said he knew of a famous “Ring of Five” spies, recruited in Britain in the 1930s. They all knew each other, he said, and all knew the others were spies. But Golitsin could identify none of them, other than the fact that one of them had the code name Stanley, and was connected with recent KGB operations in the Middle East. The lead fitted Kim Philby perfectly, who was currently working in Beirut for the Observer newspaper. He said that two of the other five were obviously Burgess and Maclean. We thought that a fourth might be Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and a former wartime MI5 officer who fell under suspicion after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. But the identity of the fifth was a complete mystery. As a result of Golitsin’s three serials concerning the Ring of Five, the Philby and Blunt cases were exhumed, and a reassessment ordered.
Golitsyn is not a popular figure. On their website, the CIA cautiously implies Golitsyn fed counterintelligence director James Angleton disinformation about Soviet penetration of Western intelligence services— the famous ‘Monster Plot’. David Robarge, the CIA chief historian, takes the denunciation one step further:
Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s, and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized. However, there was no other source, human or technical, that he could use to guide him on the molehunt — only his favored source, KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, and their symbiotic relationship soon became professionally unbalanced as the manipulative and self-promoting defector’s allegations of international treachery grew more fantastical…
According to Robarge, the consequences of this “unbalanced” relationship were:
For roughly the next 10 years, distracted by unsubstantiated theories of Soviet “strategic deception,” Angleton and his staff embarked on counterproductive and sometimes harmful efforts to find moles and prove Moscow’s malevolent designs.
Christopher Andrew, Cambridge University’s weather vane for what is politically acceptable to say about espionage, summarizes Golitsyn more neatly as an “unreliable conspiracy theorist”.
Golitsyn is so reviled in upwardly-mobile intelligence circles that he’s become the ‘Dezinformatsiya’ case study for trainee spooks– a bit like how Angleton is the case study for “how not to conduct counterintelligence”. The CIA drills into its newbie counterintelligence recruits that Angleton was wrong and that Golitsyn was probably sent by the KGB to hobble Western counterintelligence efforts.
So it’s awkward that establishment intelligence historians, including Prof. Andrew, should continue to throw about phrases like ‘The Cambridge Five’ or ‘The Magnificent Five‘ when talking about Philby’s spy ring. According to their canon, the source of this information was “unreliable”.
A book by Chris Andrew and Chris Andrew.
As far as I can tell, pinning the number five onto the Cambridge ring is unjustified. Prior to 1961, British VENONA-type decrypts (Moscow to London KGB channel) mention a “valuable argentura [spy ring] of Stanley, Hicks and Johnson”, which makes a ‘Cambridge Three’. If the Americans/British suspected there were more than three spies in the Cambridge ring at that time, the VENONA decrypts contained handles for an estimated 800 other recruited Soviet agents to chose from, according to Peter Wright in Spycatcher.
VENONA aside, there were plenty of Cambridge ‘friends’ to come under suspicion: Victor Rothschild (provided the spies with valuable intelligence connections); James Klugman (Cambridge undergrad who recruited John Cairncross); Harry Pollitt (British Communist Party General Secretary who controlled Klugman); and goodness only knows how many Michael Straight-like characters were rolling around University halls. To say that there were ‘five’ in Philby’s network seems a bit hopeful, frankly.
So if the source of the ‘five’ meme is unreliable, and given the historical record points to the possibility of more than Burgess/Blunt/Maclean/Philby/Plus One in the Cambridge ring, why do we still keep hearing about the ‘Cambridge Five’ from people who know better? Probably because it suits the intelligence establishment to continue to minimize the number of agents publicly tainted by this scandal. If such minimization is important now, imagine how important it was for the British in 1963.
Readers will remember that none of the ‘Cambridge Five’ actually faced justice for their actions. Maclean made it to the USSR, Burgess ran before he really had to. There was little political will to prosecute Kim Philby for over a decade, and absolutely zero to prosecute the Queen Mother’s cousin Anthony Blunt. According to The Daily Mail, Blunt’s treachery was well known in royal circles since 1948:
A royal source tells the story of how, in 1948, a young ex-officer, Philip Hay, came to Buckingham Palace to be interviewed for the post of Private Secretary to the widowed Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, mother of the present Duke.
As he walked down a red-carpeted corridor with Sir Alan Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, they passed Blunt in silence. When they were out of earshot, Sir Alan whispered to Hay: ‘That’s our Russian spy.’
Catching a spy like Blunt, who was so well understood by his ‘victims’, was hardly a counterintelligence coup. Perhaps the reason that ‘experts’ latched onto Golitsyn’s “Ring of Five” was because 5 – 4 = 1, and 1 is the absolute minimum number of spies needed to explain the ‘tip-off’ which helped Philby evade justice in 1963, when imperial politics turned against Kim.
The search for this one remaining spy has generated a huge amount of media coverage; coverage which for the most part discounts the possibility of a ‘Cambridge Six’, or ‘Cambridge Eight’ etc., despite the fact that a larger spy network was very likely. I think that this unnatural focus on five has served a very specific propaganda goal: to obscure the wide-spread collaboration between elements in Britain’s intelligence community and the KGB. It would damage this ‘fifth column’ if the general public became aware of the extent of their influence. Further exposure of British double-dealing would also have damaged relations with their American counterparts: the Americans were used to lying about their own KGB collaborations, but were not used to being lied to themselves.
Debate around ‘Who was the fifth man?’ has been carefully crafted in order to shepherd public interest away from the possibility of further treachery by trusted ‘intelligence community’ leaders. I have not read every book on the ‘Cambridge Five’ but from what I’ve read so far, the sparky media squabble surrounding this lone ‘fifth man’ was channeled into two camps: 1) Chapman Pincher along with MI5 colleagues Peter Wright and Arthur Martin, who pushed Roger Hollis as the fifth agent and 2) those more ‘urbane’ analysts who objected to Wright’s ‘divisive’ methods. On the whole, group two favors Yuri Modin’s allegations that odd-man-out John Cairncross was the ‘fifth’. (Wikipedia favors Cairncross, btw.)
Fighting between these two camps took place in print, sometimes with weird bitterness– take ‘Yuri Modin’ (in reality, his ghostwriters) on Peter Wright’s questioning of Guy Burgess’ lower-class acquaintances, such as repairmen, etc.:
The vindictive attempts of former officers of British Intelligence (specifically Peter Wright and Arthur Martin) to unearth these so-called agents recruited by arch-fiend Burgess make me laugh. I hate to think that the organizations against which I strove my working life were run by people whose thought processes never went beyond the most simplistic notions of true or false, good or bad, necessary or desirable; but Wright and Martin are certainly people of that ilk.
Later, Modin opines:
Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher states that the reason why the KGB allowed Blunt to do this [transfer to Surveyor of Kings’ Pictures] was that we had another mole inside MI5. Wright concluded, rather hastily, that the other agent was Roger Hollis. In 1987, when Wright’s book was published, British intelligence carried out a detailed inquiry which turned up nothing new. Peter Wright had no proof of what he said. It’s too easy to cast grave suspicion on a colleague, as Wright did on Hollis, without anything like sufficient evidence.
‘Yuri Modin’ has very strong feelings on the subject of the ‘Cambridge Five’ and has little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share his view that John Cairncross was ‘the fifth man’. I’ll point out two obvious things: 1) even the real Yuri Modin didn’t have access to every KGB illegal’s file; 2) Hollis is a much bigger fish than Cairncross. Hollis ran MI5, while John Cairncross was a much lower-level intelligence functionary, so Cairncross being the ‘fifth man’ is far less alarming.
Yuri Modin
Why might ‘Yuri Modin’ have such strong feelings? Well, the introduction to My 5 Cambridge Friends was written by David Leitch from the Sunday Times. Leitch was part of a spy-outing team which included his newspaper colleague Barrie Penrose, as well as Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and John Le Carré, the troika with whom Leitch wrote a book on Kim Philby– ‘The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation’. Who are these men?
In the late 60s, David Leitch worked closely with Bruce Page to ‘expose’ Kim Philby as a KGB agent for the Sunday Times’ Insight team– an ‘exposure’ that would never have happened without intelligence approval. Leitch is also the first man to have claimed in print that John Cairncross was the ‘fifth’ spy, hence his introduction to Modin’s book. Leitch is now dead, but Bruce Page is going strong: in 2013 he wrote a politically-sensitive biography of power-broker Rupert Murdoch in the wake of the hacking scandal.
Leitch’s other journalistic partner, Phillip Knightley, is an established media ‘expert’ on intelligence matters, which means he works closely with the intelligence community. Tellingly, in 2010 Phillip Knightley acted as a bail sureties provider for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The leaks pro Phillip Knightley.
John Le Carré is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, an MI5 and MI6 agent who began writing spy thrillers while still working in intelligence. When ‘Le Carré’ found out he had a readership, he became an ‘ex intelligence officer’. Le Carré has enjoyed a celebrated, orthodox career in mainstream publishing by interpreting current events for the public in politically acceptable ways– all with a sprinkling of ‘James Bond’ dust.
John Le Carré puckering under the discomfort of an awkward pose.
While the ‘fifth man’ debate is mostly centered around Cambridge spies, you’ll find Wright-haters popping up in the oddest places. Take this quote from biographer Francis Wheen in Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions:
At about the same time as [Anthony] Blunt was briefing [Nigel] West, Wright was busily unburdening himself of a lifetime’s secrets– and paranoid anti-Communist obsessions– to Chapman Pincher.
Wheen starts his book by claiming that allegations of Tom Driberg’s spying stem from a plot between Lord Rothschild, Peter Wright and others in the “queer fraternity of spy-writers”. Who is Francis Wheen?
Francis Wheen and his machinery for cranking out Driberg biographies.
Francis Wheen is a BBC radio broadcaster from a privileged army background, who found his calling working for the New Statesman (as in Frances Stonor Saunders and George Bernard Shaw). Wheen is an expert on Karl Marx who supported NATO’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia. His other interest is the spooky Tom Driberg, about whom Wheen has written two biographies. You can read about Tom Driberg’s connection to the Rolling Stones here, and Driberg’s connection to Soviet illegal agent Ernst Henri here.
The ‘other side’ to this spectacle is no less suspect. Chapman Pincher was a well-known journalist who worked closely with British intelligence figures, sometimes even lying for them, as happened with the Christmas Island hydrogen bomb test demonstrations. Peter Wright is a second-generation intelligence agent with strong ties to the Marconi Company. According to Spycatcher, Wright was involved in MI6 attempts to murder the Cypriot General Georgios Grivas, and claimed to be James Angleton’s go-to man for help on CIA plans to assassinate Castro. Peter Wright was also involved in LSD testing as in the MK ULTRA program. Arthur Martin was Wright’s MI5 sidekick. None of these men are ‘good guys’.
Chapman Pincher, eager for any intel honcho to “use” him.
My point with these biographies is to show that neither side to the squabbling over the ‘fifth man’ is free of intelligence connections. Neither side takes the logical position: there were more spies than simply Golitsyn’s five and it really doesn’t matter who the ‘fifth’ one was. Because of this willful foolishness, I conclude that neither side was/is motivated by a sincere desire to uncover the truth about Philby’s spy ring– most likely both sides are working for the same masters.
If you’re willing to view the ‘debate’ over the ‘fifth man’ in the same way as I do, then you’ll be hit by the sobering reality that academia, the media, politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the ‘watchdogs’ of the intelligence community organized themselves to mislead the public over the extent of British intelligence’s cooperation with the KGB. Why might they do that?
