Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire
In the 1930s, with another world war on the horizon, a Soviet intelligence agent codenamed OTTO arrived in England. His mission was to recruit British citizens willing to spy for the Soviet cause. In the interwar years, leftist ideologies swirled through British university campuses. Exploiting chinks in the British class system, OTTO found his recruits among the disaffected sons of the upper middle class. The five young men who answered OTTO’s call—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—were entitled, resentful, ambitious, and well-connected, a heady combination made them both susceptible and valuable to Soviet intelligence. Over the next two decades, these five men, working in the Foreign Office and in British Intelligence, passed significant amounts of information to the Soviet Union and gave Stalin a front row seat to Allied wartime plans, intelligence, and plans for postwar Europe, fueling his campaigns for a Red Empire in eastern and central Europe.
The spy ring, dubbed the Cambridge Five, was first exposed in 1951, but the unmasking of the whole group and the extent of their betrayal was slower, however, thanks in part to the British government suppressing files and identities. The initial reveal of the spy ring stunned the British public, but revelations about the subsequent coverup shook their confidence in their government. Though much has been written about the Cambridge Five, journalist and novelist Antonia Senior makes use of newly released files by the British government as well as underutilized archives in Eastern Europe. The result is a rich, fast-paced narrative that takes the reader beyond the clubby, smoke-filled rooms frequented by the Five to the places and the people in occupied Europe most impacted by their betrayal.
