Plus ça change ...

One of the books I an reading at the moment is The Secret World, a collection of writings, published and unpublished by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, an eminent historian with one or two lapses of judgement (well, one in particular) on the subject of the Secret Service in which he served during the Second World War and in which he remained interested ever after.

The articles, letters and book on Philby, reprinted here in full, are wonderfully well written. Professor Trevor-Roper was a stylist that few could rival. Much of it is of enormous interest but he also shows a good deal of closed mindedness of the kind he accuses his own wartime superiors and colleagues. On the whole, I'd say he never came to terms with the extent to which Communists agents of espionage and influence, penetrated various British and American institutions, displaying a certain amount of censoriousness towards anyone who tried to unravel this. (And I find it particularly infuriating that he and, I am sorry to say, his editor, Edward Harrison, refer to Russia when they mean the Soviet Union.)

The review of Andrew Boyle's The Climate of Treason, a crucial publication in the history of that unravelling is dismissive: no real need for it, nothing important in it and, in any case, the three rather sordid traitors (how right Trevor-Roper is on that adjective), Burgess, Maclean and Philby, did very little real harm.

Just as one despairs at such willful misreading one comes across this paragraph. Having analyzed why so many young people joined or supported the Communist Party in the thirties for what seemed like very good reasons at the time, he adds:

There was also another reason, less reputable, but not, I think, less real. Intellectuals often pretend that, as a class, they are advocates of liberty. This is seldom true. Intellectuals like the beauty of mathematical order. They like tidiness, symmetry. Liberty is untidy, asymmetrical. Consequently young intellectuals, even when they speak of liberty, really worship power. they generally grow out of this when they realise that they are less likely to exercise power themselves than to be the victims of it. But for a time they think that they respect it. Communism, as intellectually justified system of total power, has a fatal fascination for young intellectuals seeking short cuts to total solution.

One could point to other displays of total power that intellectuals or those who think themselves to be intellectuals, support. But, when it comes to Communism and its one manifestation in the thirties, the Soviet Union (not Russia), though the same would apply to the supporters of Mao in the fifties and sixties, there is another consideration.

Even more than fascism or Nazism, Communism is a political system that purports to be constructed on an intellectually coherent base. It is not anything of the kind, as it happens, but that is what a good many people, more intelligent and intellectual than the Cambridge five and others of that ilk have believed. Even Albert Camus differentiated between the "irrational terror" of fascism and the "rational terror" of Communism. In actual fact, Stalin was often considerably less rational than Hitler and the terror introduced in Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union was no more rational than that introduced in Nazi Germany, though often considerably more bloody.

On top of this, it seemed that the Soviet Union really valued and cherished its intellectuals while the higgledy-piggledy Western systems did not. Somehow, it did not appear to be important to many that those intellectuals, so cherished at first, often found themselves, as was well known even in the thirties, in prisons, in torture chambers, in labour camps and execution chambers. Other intellectuals appeared to take their place and the life of the intellect was still, apparently, cherished.

Naturally, the Soviet Union's propaganda machine played on the Western intellectuals' sense of grievance and treated them as highly honoured guests as well as highly honoured agents. The easiest person to fool is the man (or the woman but more often the man) who thinks he is the only one to know the real truth but nobody appreciates it. Too much has been written about various fellow travellers for me to have to reiterate any of it (though I may well do another time) but the intricate relationship between intellectuals and absolute power or what they see as absolute power needs to be studied now just as it was by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper.

An interesting though small point

So much has been written about the latest Russian spy ring whose members are on trial that I have no real desire to wade in except for pointing out as I did before that this all adds to that sense of déjà vu. However, this article by the great Ron Radosh, who has made a study of Soviet infiltration in the United States, is very well worth reading.

One little thing caught my eye. Mr Radosh refers to another article on the subject:

The other major article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and was written by my good friends and colleagues, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Going through the long history of Soviet espionage against the United States, they remind us of the many years of placing “deep penetration” agents in our midst, as well as the constant use of “sleeper cells” in the old days of the Cold War.

They write: “There were two Soviet illegals exposed in the late 1950s whose activities came a bit closer to the recently arrested 10. An illegal officer, KGB Col. Rudolf Abel (real name Vilyam Fisher), entered the U.S. in 1948 and operated under a variety of false identities. He was finally exposed when his assistant and fellow illegal, KGB Lt. Col. Reino Hayhanen, defected in 1957. (Hayhanen, of Finnish background, had been sent to the U.S. using false papers identifying him as an American of Finnish ancestry.) Abel, who never admitted his real name, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.”

Interesting, I thought. So Reino Hayhanen had been sent to the US falsely identified as an American of Finnish ancestry. I wonder where the papers came from. Well, as it happens, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr are joint authors of a book called In Denial an account of historians who refused and, in some cases, still refuse to admit the truth about the Soviet Union and, more importantly, about the Soviet infiltration of American political and economic life. (Here is a piece I wrote on it on another blog.)

There is an Appendix to the book, which deals with one particularly horrible tale, that of the Americans of Finnish descent who were lured to Karelia to help build the new socialist state there. Almost all of them ended in prisons, camps, torture chambers and, eventually, execution chambers. Presumably, it was the documents confiscated from one of them that were the basis of Reino Hayhanen's identity.

How many times does one have to repeat this?

An e-mail from JR Books informs me that they are about to publish a book by Gordon Thomas, "Inside British Intelligence - 100 Years of MI5 and MI6". This is the book, they crow, on the basis of an article in the Guardian, that the government or the Intelligence Services or somebody, tried to ban but could not. The article is somewhat dismissive of the book and the information in it.

Whether Mr Thomas, whose book, we are told, is "based on prodigious research and interviews with significant players from inside the intelligence community" really does know what went on behind those closed doors remains to be seen. After all, his biography tells us merely that he is a journalist and likes writing about spies and his picture tells us that he has an execrable taste in sweaters. But you never know. I look forward to reading the book.

However, I was a little puzzled about the fuss. The summary of the book in the press release gives no indication of what the problem might be:

Gordon Thomas’s wide-sweeping history chronicles a century of both triumphs and failures within MI5 and MI6. He recounts the roles that British intelligence played in the Allied victory in World War II; the post-war treachery of Britain’s own agents; the defection of Soviet agents and the intricate process of ‘handling’ them; the tricky relationship that both agencies have with the CIA, European spy services, and the Mossad; the search for Osama bin Laden; and how MI5 and MI6 continue the ‘war on terror’.

Explanation came from the publisher. Mr Thomas fell foul of the Services in that he names "British spies".

Well, I certainly hope so. I should like to have a list of all those Soviet agents who were active for years in the Foreign Office, and the various Intelligence organizations. Alas, I suspect that what they mean is that he names British agents.

Now then, how many times does one have to repeat this: our chaps and chapesses are agents. Spies are the people who work for the other side. Even then, we can differentiate between those who work for the other side because that is their side and those who have betrayed us. It is the latter that I would like to know about. I wonder if Mr Thomas will oblige.