Vol. 17 No. 4 · 23 February 1995
pages 9-10 | 4027 words
Lucky Kim
Christopher Hitchens
- The Philby Files. The Secret Life of the Master Spy: KGB Archives Revealed by Genrikh Borovik, edited by Phillip Knightley
Little Brown, 382 pp, £18.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 316 91015 5
- The Fifth Man by Roland Perry
Sidgwick, 486 pp, £16.99, October 1994, ISBN 0 283 06216 9
- Treason in the Blood: H. St John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century by Anthony Cave Brown
Hale, 640 pp, £25.00, January 1995, ISBN 0 7090 5582 X
- My Five Cambridge Friends by Yuri Modin
Headline, 328 pp, £17.99, October 1994, ISBN 0 7472 1280 5
- Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees by Jenny Rees
Weidenfeld, 291 pp, £18.99, October 1994, ISBN 0 297 81430 3
While I was still reading these books, and thinking about them, I chanced to have two annoying near-KGB experiences. A creepy individual named Yuri Shvets published a book called Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest. Its central allegation was that an old personal enemy of mine had been a key ‘agent of influence’ in Reagan-era Washington. I could believe anything of this man except that his ‘controllers’ had awarded him the hilarious code-name of ‘Socrates’. And every checkable allegation in the book turned out to be grotesquely false. So that was irritating, because it meant another portentous non-scare about a virtual non-person. Then, at a party in Georgetowm, I found myself being introduced to Mr Oleg Kalugin. Now apparently retired from his foul career as a secret policeman, Mr Kalugin gave me a card with the name of his consulting firm (offices in Moscow and Washington) on it. The outfit was called Intercon, which seemed more appropriate than was perhaps intentional. Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin – well, he’s a character ...’ and so on. I found myself getting irrationally pissed-off. Here am I, a journalist and a free citizen of the Anglo-American world. But if I seek to know what was really done in the Cold War dark, I must attend upon someone who was a criminal in that war. My ‘own side’ has no intention of enlightening me, and the spook industry has built up such an oligopoly in journalism and publishing that no untainted rival – such as the old-fashioned idea of full disclosure – has been permitted to challenge the self-interested ghouls who pay out their ration of ‘secrets’ in a niggardly and mysterious fashion as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 7 · 6 April 1995
From Michael Straight
In the course of reviewing five books on Soviet intelligence (LRB, 23 February) Christopher Hitchens dwells upon an occasion in 1982 when he and Victor Navasky, then editor of the Nation, were my luncheon guests at the University Club in New York. With remarkable precision, Mr Hitchens remembers that the club’s ‘fine silver’ gave off a discreet ‘tinkle’. In all other respects his memory is, to say the least, blurred.
Mr Hitchens refers to me as ‘a Cambridge spy’. He asserts that I was recruited during the ‘very period’ of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. He adds that he asked me ‘flat-out’ if I had not worried that (in transmitting secrets to the Russians) I was ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’. All of these assertions are simply untrue. I was not a spy in the accepted usage of that word: I was approached (by Anthony Blunt) not in the ‘very period’ of the Hitler-Stalin Pact but in the spring of 1937, when the Soviet Union seemed to be the principal antagonist of Nazi Germany. In my brief terms as an economist for the State Department and a speechwriter for the White House I never sought, received or transmitted any secrets of any kind.
Mr Navasky and Mr Hitchens did indeed question me – as to whether I was not worried that in publishing my book, After Long Silence, I was rekindling the flames of McCarthyism. That was the question to which I replied that the possibility had not occurred to me.
Michael Straight
Chilmark
Christopher Hitchens writes: I can only blame myself if Mr Straight fails to notice that the passage about tinkling silver was written in a cod spy-fiction mode. But for the rest I am on safe ground. After Long Silence does indeed record that the initial approach from Blunt took place in 1937. But it also records that the Russian agent, sent to meet Mr Straight in Washington, turned up in 1938. At that time, and subsequently, he was working in the State Department. The Nazi-Soviet alliance persisted until 1941.
Mr Straight also tells us how he kept quiet about spotting Guy Burgess at the British Embassy after the start of the Korean conflict, and disarmingly concedes that he sat on all that he knew until the day when President Kennedy offered him a job that required a security clearance. That was when he chose to shop Blunt. So he did indeed risk re-igniting McCarthyism, just as he had risked augmenting it by keeping his trap shut so long. As William Safire put it sarcastically when After Long Silence was published: ‘How delicious it must have been for a Red under the bed to deride Joe McCarthy for looking for Reds under the bed.’ The fact that Mr Straight was for most of the time an Establishment liberal rather than any kind of socialist would have lent point to the exposure, which was why Navasky and I did indeed raise the question. It’s near-incredible that he gave the answer he mentions, but so he did.
I can be pretty certain that I did press Mr Straight on the Hitler-Stalin Pact, because I wrote up our meeting for the Nation in February 1983 and went on about the subject at some length. I was surprised at the time that Mr Straight did not respond, but was obviously mistaken (as others had already been) in assuming that ‘long silence’ meant any kind of admission.
Christopher Hitchens is on his way to join the spy fantasists he saw off in his witty review if he believes that John Cairncross, ‘a working-class lad’ and ‘believing Communist’, ‘got hold of the real stuff’ and thus ‘enabled the Russians to re-equip in time to win the battle of the Kursk Salient’. Cairncross may well have been a quieter and more competent spy than the toffs, but his best efforts would hardly have helped here. Ever since the invasion in 1941 the Russians had been producing the T34, the best tank in the world as the Germans described it, in prodigious numbers, and Hitler remarked that if he had known of its existence he might not have invaded. The Russians won at Kursk through crushing tank superiority, and a shrewd assessment by the Stavka – not difficult to make in June 1943 – where Hitler would strike next. They certainly benefited during the war from Allied intelligence, but they needed no help in this instance from Cairncross, or any other Western spy.
Incidentally, I should like to thank Kevin Laffan (Letters, 9 February) and Brian Donaghey (Letters, 9 March) for informing us in such scholarly detail about F. Desprez’s memorable recitation favourite ‘Lasca’ (in the authoritative text of which she draws her ‘dear little dagger’ neither from her ‘bosom’ nor her ‘garter’ but from her ‘girdle’). If such recitations were still given poetry today might be more memorable?
