INDEX	June 27, 2022
I spy with my little lie
In her book Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, Annie Machon (a former MI5 officer) makes the throw away remark "considering the damage, the Cambridge spy ring did to our national security" and this made me wonder, what damage did they do? So I did a quick research (a very quick research) and found that nobody really knows and it's quite possible they did a great deal to preserve our national security. This is because for the most part they were handing over documents to the Soviets during the Second World War and that war was unquestionably won by the heroic resistance of the Soviets on what the Germans described as the Eastern Front, the largest military confrontation in history. Of course some spies, Blunt for example, continued to play an active role in the establishment long after the war, but it is doubtful how much damage you can do to a nation when you are Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. The point is made in the film the Imitation Game, which shows the MI5 officer turning a blind eye to the spying of John Cairncross (called Allen Leech in the film). This film was quite silly on many levels. For a start, there was no sympathetic MI5 officer turning a blind eye... But it was certainly true that the virulently anti communist Churchill had put a block on sharing intelligence with the Soviets. Cairncross (who claimed not to belong to the Cambridge group, but if he was, he was probably its most effective member) by sharing intelligence from Bletchley Park probably did more to shorten the war and save British lives, than anyone else. But we will never know the truth. There were never any court cases. Even those who were caught, like Blunt, were released with a stern ticking off. And MI5 has spent a fortune trying to prevent the records ever becoming public (most of them should have been published long ago under the 30 year rule). Apparently the Soviets can know all about these ancient secrets but the British public has to be denied access to them. It makes you wonder just why MI5 is described as an intelligence service...
INDEX Posted by Jonathan Brind.		June 27, 2022