'The Circus' at Vauxhall Cross

 

For those of us for whom the novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton are a guilty pleasure, particularly the ones dealing with the seedy world of British espionage the recent news that Operation Wedlock, apparently a twenty year investigation into a member of MI6, Military Intelligence, Section 6, suspected of being a mole, i.e. someone passing on secrets to a foreign power, could easily have come from the pens of those two worthy writers.

In a case of life imitating art Le Carre’s 1974 Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy had played out this scenario.. Unlike in real life, where the long and expensive investigation of the individual under suspicion came to nothing the fictional one was successful in rooting out a mole.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/27/uk-spy-operation-wedlock-suspected-russian-double-agent-mi6

Some call it the world’s second oldest profession and the suspicion, and likelihood that one, or more, of those engaged in it, whether they be lowly agents or ‘control’ are playing a double game has probably existed since spying first became a thing.

The nineteen sixties saw three of the the Cambridge Five, Maclean, Burgess and Philby, British members of the security services defect to Russia to whom they had been passing on state secrets for many years because of ideological reasons.

The fourth and fifth persons in the Cambridge Five, Caincross and Anthony Blunt were not exposed until much later. Anthony Blunt was very much part of the establishment. He was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures

The below extracted from the Socialist Standard January 1980

‘And out of all the confusion emerges a picture of British capitalism which does not meet the demands of modern, thrusting, super-competitive capitalism. The Blunt affair, like its predecessors in the Great Whitehall Spy Drama, was taken by many people as evidence that Britain is run by a bunch of effete, disreputable upper class twits who all went to the same school, and who are too stupid, or too corrupt, to recognise a spy even if he was delivered to their In Tray in manacles. Well, there is nothing to be gained by discussing the accuracy of that caricature; it is more useful to point out some of the lessons to be learned from the infamous scandal of Anthony Blunt.

We have already said that Blunt is a very learned man — although it is another matter whether his talents would ever have seen the light of day had he been born into a working class family, who rely on selling their labour power to live. There is little demand among employers for experts in the works of Nicolas Poussin. But then the other spies Blunt was associated with — Philby, Maclean, Burgess — were also very clever. Burgess, said Blunt, was "... one of the most remarkable, brilliant, and one of the most intelligent people I've ever known". (He might also have used words like 'drunken' and 'abusive' except that such minor faults can be overlooked in one of such rare gifts.) Philby too was once highly thought of, the rising star in the Secret Service, described by Hugh Trevor Roper (The Philby Affair) as " favoured by society, liberally educated, regarded by all who knew him as intelligent, sensitive, transparently sincere".

Stalinist Murders

Now the working class are depressingly willing to pay their respects to people who are described as 'intellectuals' even when, like this bunch, they are blind to some obvious facts of reality. Blunt has told us their version of reality in the Thirties:

... in October 1934 I found that.... almost all the intelligent and bright undergraduates who had come up to Cambridge had suddenly become Marxist [sic]... and there was this very powerful group, very remarkable group of Communist intellectuals in Cambridge.

(This provoked a doctor to write, irritably, to the Daily Telegraph from Moreton-in-the Marsh: "I was up at Cambridge in 1935 and many of my circle were bright. But had any of them expressed Marxist views he would have been debagged and thrown into the Cam")

But what was happening in Russia at that time to impress all those incredibly brainy undergraduates? In 1934 the 17th Party Congress was held, with perhaps many of the participants being as brainy as those bright young men in Cambridge. Unfortunately, their leader Stalin was not favourably impressed with them, and soon afterwards he had over half of them shot, along with nearly three-quarters of the Central Committee they had elected. This was a comparatively minor incident in the horrifying story of imprisonment, torture and murder which characterised Stalin's rule over Russia. One estimate of the total casualties during these years appeared in Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror. Conquest used a variety of sources — participants' accounts, official statistics and the 1959 Census — and he came to the conservative estimate of 20 million dead.

Forgetful Politicians

Much of the information about this was available at the time, but it did not impress those brilliant students at Cambridge. Some of them were even prepared to justify the August 1939 pact between Russia and Nazi Germany. "We argued", said Blunt, "that it was simply a tactical necessity . . . " In fact he carried his enthusiasm a bit too far, continuing to pass British secrets to Russia after the two states were in the war on the same side. This illustrates not only his blind devotion to the blood-soaked dictatorship but also the actual fragility of the unity between capitalist powers, even when they call themselves the Allies.’

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2014/09/anthony-blunt-no-sort-of-traitor.html