Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-hines

Alan Judd

Enemies Within, Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

By Richard Davenport-hines

Collins £25

Oldie price £16.60 inc p&p

The story of the Cambridge spies, the so-called Ring of Five, starring Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and Cairncross, has been told so many times that it has become part of national mythology.

Also part of that mythology, inspired by Moscow, enthusiastically endorsed by the media and dramatised by spy fiction, is the assumption that the treachery of these young men was the fault of the iniquitous English (not British) class system.

This argument depends on an invented entity known as the Establishment, itself propped up by two other popular assumptions, the Old Boy network and the upper-class homintern. Davenport-hines suggests that the reputational impact of this mythology on institutions of the British state and the intelligence services has been arguably greater than anything achieved by the actual spying: ‘…the insidious propaganda victories… the undermining of authority… the suspicion of educational advantages and the use of the words “elite” and “Establishment” as derogatory epithets transformed the social and political temper of Britain.’

With the exception of Christopher Andrew, author of the authorised history of MI5, everyone who has written on this subject has done so without access to the files. That includes Davenport-hines, of course, but his book makes good use of Andrew’s work and more recent file releases. Equally importantly, it embeds the narrative of espionage in a thoroughly researched personal, political, cultural and bureaucratic context. The result is a better-balanced, more comprehensive and more convincing account of the subject than any of its predecessors.

Davenport-hines’s account of Russian spying on Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the recruitment of Foreign Office cipher clerks, shows that spies came (and come) from a variety of backgrounds and do it for a variety of reasons.

The Cambridge spies were not as popularly portrayed, all upper-class Etonians. Only Burgess attended Eton and he was of solid middle-class stock. More usually, they came from what Davenport-hines calls the ‘mezzanine class’, far more influenced by socialist ideology and communist propagandists than by their schooling, or by unsympathetic or absent fathers, by homosexual exclusiveness (in the cases of Burgess and Blunt) or by class rage.

Prominent among the communist propagandists was Maurice Dobb, the Cambridge don who, on a 1925 visit to Russia, was pleased to discern ‘a hope in men’s eyes’ while closing his own to almost everything else. In 1931, he established the first communist cell in Cambridge and set Philby on the course that led to his recruitment.