This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
For my generation, the one which came of age politically in the early days of Thatcherism, the Cambridge spies were part of vague early Cold War history. The public unmasking of Anthony Blunt as the “Fourth Man” in 1979 was interesting in its way, but even at the time I asked myself whether it really mattered. Wasn’t everyone spying on everyone then, and how much difference did it really make? After all, if Blunt had done something really damaging, why had he been allowed to carry on in his role as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures?
For those of us who thought like this, Antonia Senior’s new book Stalin’s Apostles is a revelation. Her thoroughly researched and robustly presented account of the espionage careers of the Cambridge Five leaves no doubt that these were thoroughly treacherous people who did huge damage to the West — not just during the early Cold War, not just during the Second World War, but from even before that war started. A full list of the damaging material they handed over to Stalin would fill this entire review. Still, let’s give the highlights.
Collectively they provided full accounts of the Munich discussions in 1938; virtually all the Second World War Cabinet minutes; the first feasibility study on an atomic weapon in 1941; reams of super-secret Enigma decrypts; the private correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt from 1944; much of the detailed British contingency planning if war with the USSR came; Western “red lines” in confrontations with the Soviet Union and the early top secret plans to create NATO, on which Maclean was so well placed that, as Senior wryly comments, “it is entirely probable, thanks to Maclean, that Moscow had more knowledge of the March [1948 UK-US Washington] meetings than the Foreign Office”.
And it was not just High Politics. Senior pays proper attention to the now near-forgotten UK-US support for anti-Soviet sabotage and subversion in the late ’40s, and the human cost that went with it. Very probably these operations would have achieved little in any circumstances, but they were doomed from the start as Kim Philby, director of counter-intelligence in SIS and then in charge of UK-US intelligence liaison matters, systematically betrayed them.
Senior does not conceal her sympathy for those doomed Eastern Europeans, “agents just down from the trees” in Philby’s words, dropped into Ukraine, the Soviet Baltic or Albania, only to be rapidly picked up and shot.
To most of us the Cambridge Five are just names. Senior successfully conveys them as real people, if deeply unpleasant ones. Philby in particular emerges as a ruthlessly amoral figure, ready to drop anyone in it to save himself, including even Maclean as the net closed in. Maclean himself, a wife-beating Jekyll and Hyde character, and Burgess, a drunk and a sexual predator, are people you shouldn’t have wanted to get too close to. Yet plenty did, and all three had a manipulative charm that took them a long way. Right up to his fall, Maclean was regarded as a Foreign Office star, incredibly so in retrospect given his behaviour and indiscretions.
That said, the security environment in the British government at the time makes this less surprising. Senior discreetly conveys her astonishment that all five were routinely able to take home the most secret documents, supposedly to work on them, in fact to have them photographed and telegraphed to Moscow.
Cairncross, whilst working at Bletchley, was even able to scoop up armfuls of discarded Enigma decrypts — so secret that most Cabinet ministers were unaware they even existed — stuff them down his trousers and hand them over to his Soviet Embassy handler at the nearby railway station.
The question most often asked about the Cambridge spy ring is “why did they do it?” The answer that emerges from Senior’s story is a simple one: ideological motivation, perhaps idealistic initially, but giving way fast to what Orwell called “transferred nationalism”, simple support for the Soviet Union and dislike of their own countries.
Senior rightly does not make this point didactically, but simply lets the relentless detail accumulate, leaving all five to be condemned by the words of their friends and acquaintances and by their own actions.
In the end, this gripping, fascinating and sometimes depressing book leaves you forced to endorse its author’s conclusion: the Cambridge Five “perpetrated their betrayals with eyes wide open to the nature of their paymaster and the murderous consequences of their actions”. These evil men deserve to be remembered in disgrace and dishonour. Read Stalin’s Apostles to understand why.
