The Foreign Service Journal, June 2008

Spy Tales Revisited Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess S.J. Hamrick, Yale University Press, 2004, 320 pages. R EVIEWED BY T ED W ILKINSON The late S.J. Hamrick was not the first practitioner of diplomacy to spin tales of international intrigue after decades of hands-on experience. One thinks of John Buchan and Lawrence Durrell, both Brits, or Americans Burke Wilkinson and Lydia Kirk, widow of Admiral (and Ambassador) Alan Kirk. But Ham- rick, who died earlier this year (see the May Foreign Service Journal for his obituary) was particularly prolific, producing seven such novels during the 1980s and 1990s. Hamrick’s last work, Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess , is a dif- ferent, perhaps unique form of liter- ature. Neither a novel nor history, it depicts what might have happened in the shadowy world of espionage and counterespionage at the outset of the Cold War (though we may never know for sure). Sadly, the book is out of print, but is available from online distributors in hardcover and paperback editions. The inspiration for the work came from the release of the Venona files, some 2,900 decrypted Soviet-era cables from the 1940s that the National Security Agency made pub- lic between 1995 and 1997. Based on several 1944 cables, Donald Maclean, one of the spies in the infa- mous “Cambridge Five,” had been identified as “Homer,” a Soviet agent who was serving in the British Embassy in Washington at that time. Going over texts already partially broken by American cryptanalysts, the U.K.’s General Communications Headquarters identified Maclean as “Homer” as early as 1947, certainly no later than 1949. Maclean’s fellow moles in His Majesty’s Government, Guy Burgess and “Kim” Philby (nicknamed for Kipling’s famous subcontinental spy), must also have fallen under immedi- ate suspicion because of their known close interconnections. Maclean and Burgess both had histories of heavy drinking and disorderly behavior, and both had been recalled from for- eign posts. Philby was aware that the ice was cracking beneath their feet, and even sent a warning from his senior MI6 liaison post in Washington to Mac- lean in London through Burgess in early May 1951. Yet no constraints were placed on their movements, and Maclean and Burgess were able to flee together to the USSR on May 25, 1951. (Philby defected to Moscow much later, from Beirut, in 1963.) How could the British govern- ment have been so lax and inept at its highest levels? Were the spies being protected because of old-boy loyal- ties? Not likely, maintains Hamrick. To the contrary, once they were iden- tified, it is likely that MI5 and MI6 chiefs manipulated them into feed- ing disinformation back to Moscow. One likely reason was to disguise the inadequacy of Washington’s nuclear arsenal and London’s delivery capa- bility during the late 1940’s, to pre- serve the façade of meaningful deter- rence against the USSR’s ambitions in Europe. Building on their World War II experience with deception, U.K. in- telligence chiefs would have fed the spies — particularly Philby — pro- posed war plans that greatly exagger- ated Allied capabilities. Of course, the British would have kept this dou- ble-dealing from the Washington intelligence chiefs for fear that the U.S., already leery of sharing nuclear secrets with them, would have closed down the information pipeline com- pletely on learning of new high-level moles in HMG. Hamrick’s research is impressive, and he cites an important backer of his theory: General Edwin Sibert, a former assistant director of the CIA, is quoted as having learned later from unspecified sources that Philby was being used as a conduit for disin- formation. Moreover, London’s vehement and steadfast opposition to the NSA’s release of the Venona files, and its refusal to release any of its own work on the same cables (which undoubtedly contain additional deci- phered information from the same period) both suggest that there is indeed more to the story than has been revealed to date. But how and whether it will ever be revealed, and whether it will support Hamrick’s intriguing theory, is a story yet to be told. Ted Wilkinson, a Foreign Service offi- cer from 1961 to 1996, is the chairman of the FSJ Editorial Board. 94 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 8 B O O K S Hamrick’s last book explores the shadowy world of espionage at the outset of the Cold War.