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The members of the Cambridge Five spy ring—H.A.R. “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—are now widely regarded as one of the most consequential groups of foreign agents ever recruited by the Soviet Union. They are so famous (or infamous) that there are now not only a dozen or more books about them, but also documentaries, films, and television series: the contrast between their privileged lives as members of the British elite and the cold, calculated treason in which they engaged over a period of decades continues to fascinate us. During WWII, they penetrated an astounding array of elite British institutions: the secret services (MI5, MI6, SOE), the top-secret codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the BBC, and even the wartime atomic bomb project. During the earliest phases of the Cold War, they continued to send reams of top-secret diplomatic and technical material to Moscow, and to thwart British and American efforts to catch up in the asymmetric intelligence war that the Soviet Union had been conducting against the West since the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Why did they do it? How did they get away with it for so long? How extensive was the damage they did? This lecture will place the treason of the Cambridge Five in the long perspective of the intelligence war between East and West that began in 1917 and continues into our own time.
Bruce Thompson is a lecturer in the Departments of History and Literature and the Associate Director of Jewish Studies at U.C.-Santa Cruz, and also teaches at the Institute. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford; his areas of scholarly research include European intellectual and cultural history, French history, British Isles history, American Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the history of cinema, and the history of espionage.
