Customer Reviews

Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story of McLean, Philby, and Burgess

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This is a valuable book and essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. Newton has very obvious biases - his mean-spirited portrayal of Philby, for example - but he conducted many interviews with the remaining principals, did much research in the US files, came up with some interesting material on the crucial role of Maclean, and takes a thought-provoking look at the murky circumstances of Burgess and Maclean's defection. Newton is inclined to hyperbole and drama and goes off on some odd tangents, but his views are a useful corrective to the hyper-romantic view of the recent BBC television series, "Cambridge Spies." Worth checking out.

Verne Newton's "Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story of Maclean, Philby and Burgess in America" makes for interesting, albeit frustrating reading. An otherwise engrossing account is vitiated by the author's evident bias against the antagonists of the title. For example, Kim Philby cannot enter the narrative without a nasty adjective and a snide comment with which Mr. Newton apparently hopes to convince his seemingly obtuse readers of the man's dastardly guilt. Always accepting the reports of Philby's detractors (e.g., Michael Straight; John Le Carre) as gospel and deploring the accounts of those (e.g., Phillip Knightley; Graham Greene) who ever had anything good to say about the man, the author causes the reader to wonder about the objectivity of the study. The very subtitle of the chapter on Philby, "The Drug of Deceit," seems designed to preclude any counter-arguments. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean come off slightly better, their chapter subtitles being "The Pathos of Treachery" and the "Politics of Self-Loathing" respectively.

The author's analysis in respect to Philby is especially problematic. For example, he follows the information that by 1943 Philby had become head of SIS's Iberian section--Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar--with a lengthy discourse upon the events surrounding the tragic plane crash of the Polish General Sikorski [witnessed, we are told gratuitously, by "the British actor Major Anthony Quayle"]. Mr. Newton then speculates: "If Philby had a hand in arranging Sikorski's death, it would have been by far his greatest wartime coup" [p. 57]. Checking the nearest footnote, we discover that the information derives from a secondary source: author Le Carre's "suggestion" that "Philby could possibly be implicated." [p. 373] Possibility seems to constitute wishful thinking rather than solid historical evidence.

The most annoying aspect of the book, however, is the author's propensity for asking really important questions and then not answering them. For instance, he wonders "why would the Soviets ever rely on someone so erratic, unpredictable and outrageous" as Guy Burgess? (Mr. Newton neglects to mention specifically by number the 4404 documents that Burgess supplied the Soviet Union, reducing them to "some valuable information." [p. 266] He passes over an even more vital question about the case: Why, if Guy Burgess was so out of control, did the Foreign Office send him to Washington, arguably its most important posting, instead of to some minor embassy where he could do a minimum of harm? The author's suggestion [p. 269], "[t]here must have been something about Burgess that caused otherwise sane people to take leave of their senses," hardly seems a satisfactory answer.