Spies like us
Argues that a new book on British double agents is insufficiently critical of the failings of the secret services
Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines William Collins, 672 pages, £25
Richard DavenportHines is a fine writer and a prodigious researcher. His latest book is very fat (672 pages) and exhaustively footnoted, well written, sometimes humorous and, as far as I can tell, reliable in terms of fact. But Enemies Within also has a purpose. It is grimly determined to rescue the security service from its detractors.
While billed as a book about the Cambridge spy ring, it offers a broader history of spying in Britain, with a good deal on Russian espionage too. The first chapter, dealing with spying from the days of Elizabeth I and Ivan the Terrible, is engrossing. But the heart of the book is a relentless assault on those who have “demeaned the men and women of intelligence and moral purpose who joined the secret services”. DavenportHines suggests that MI5 officers were typically “shrewd, efficient and decent”, and it is a dreadful calumny to suggest that the service’s former public schoolboys “protected one another in obtuse, complacent and snobbish collusion”.
In Davenport-Hines’ world, the fact that Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt were all establishment insiders who went to English public schools has no bearing on their becoming spies, or their remaining undetected for an absurdly long time. But the public school system creates either people who are fiercely loyal to it, or people who hate it, and hate the class system it nurtures. The Cambridge spies were the latter. And the security services failed to notice these double agents partly because they were run by people from the same background. Instead, they devoted enormous resources to infiltrating the Communist party and surveillance of working-class folk like Communist party leader Harry Pollitt. Did no one think that, as the best known communist in Britain, he would have been useless as a Soviet spy?
The problem with the security services between the wars, says Davenport-Hines, was state underfunding, which “nudged them into closer reliance on rightwing individuals and organisations than was desirable”. So it had nothing to do with the fact that the chief agent-runner, Maxwell Knight, was a fascist?
Come the war, MI5 is here painted as being imbued with the spirit of democracy. But that doesn’t come across in memoranda I have read. Intelligence officer Guy Liddell, for example, jeered at the Home Office’s reluctance to imprison people without trial as stemming “from an old-fashioned liberalism”.
Elsewhere, the book springs to indignant defence of former MI5 chief Sir Roger Hollis and his deputy Graham Mitchell. One or both of them, according to spy Peter Wright and journalist Chapman Pincher, was a Soviet spy. Davenport-Hines assumes that the charges against Hollis and Mitchell have been finally discredited. But they have not. The MI6 officer assigned to investigate them thought he had been prevented from completing his task properly, and wondered to the end of his life why Hollis did not allow him the use of MI5 resources to investigate Mitchell. I spent some time going through Mitchell’s memoranda for my last book, and he was nasty piece of work. Perhaps all good spies are.
Full disclosure: my last book was about my father, over whom Mitchell organised surveillance for decades. His prejudices, and the grubby pleasure he found in his power over other men’s lives, seeps out of his memoranda. “Shrewd, efficient and decent” he certainly wasn’t.
The book is grimly determined to rescue MI5 from its detractors