In 2005, when British film producers decided to cast the decidedly un-posh Daniel Craig in the roll as James Bond, they were exhibiting a far greater sense of imagination than the 1930s spymasters who ran the British intelligence agencies were ever capable of exercising. The producers recognized that Craig would bring something quite different to the roll as a result of his different experiences - whereas the Grand Poo Bahs of MI5/6 could always be relied upon to recruit young spies from the usual corps of Oxbridge sodomites.
Who were the ones relying on this habit? Why, Stalin's NKVD, of course. Seeing that it was such a small pool of men that the MI5 could view as spy candidates, the NKVD had only to loiter about in the halls of academe in search of young men who were eager to betray their country - and they found them in the persons of Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross (and an American named Michael Straight). All Cambridge men; all traitors. On May 19, 1951 two of these men left their positions in the British Foreign Service and defected to the Soviet Union - it was then that the MI5 learned that they would pay a price for their lack of imagination.
The information that was fed to the journalist who wrote the attached article was clearly intended to disguise the fact that the CIA was totally freaking out.
These eight terrific spy books from Amazon tell the history of the Cambridge spies:
My Five Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross
by Their KGB Controller
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
Kim Philby: the Spy I Married
The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby
My Silent War by Kim Philby
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about Cold War spies can be read on this page.
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful "Blonde Battalions" who spied for the Nazis...
A BBC production:
