My Five Cambridge Friends

Contemporary Review, May, 1995 by Leo Muray

At first he translated their reports and began to assess them as personalities. Then, in 1948, he was sent to the London Soviet Embassy and met some of them. He provides an honest, fascinating portrait of every one of them, of Philby last, since he only met him really when Philby was settling in Moscow. Modin is honest enough to stress that he felt the social superiority of Blunt, Burgess and Maclean, being really a Russian peasant boy. He describes the constant strain he was under in London, because being found out by the British side would have been very bad. One of the amusing incidents he reports was that he and Blunt who had met at a carefully selected place in anonymous outer London, where Blunt was to hand over to him the usual bag full of secret documents he was carrying in a briefcase, were suddenly stopped by police and asked to open it. Blunt, a born aristocrat, calmly opened it. All was well, for the police were looking for burglary tools. They thanked Blunt and that was that.

Modin admires Blunt but his hero is Burgess. He was the fellow who kept the Cambridge Group together and helped to direct their work. Modin is proud of him and of the others. He portrays them as a team of idealist Communists who never asked for money. He shows them as men who were able to lead a double working life and their own private life as well. The five occupied for some crucial periods key posts in the British government and Modin stresses that everything they read, heard and did they reported through their contacts to the Kremlin. Stalin and Molotov occasionally learned about essential policy features regarding the United States/British Alliance before the other side.

Modin dwells on personal details since, as their minder, he had to report everything and it was his responsibility to adjust the risks he and his officers were taking to the person concerned. He does not hide the fact that Blunt and Burgess had homosexual relations, that Maclean told his wife Melinda that he was an active Soviet spy. She kept that secret during all his years at the Foreign Office. Later, in Moscow, she moved to Kim Philby who is shown as an accomplished womaniser who, assumedly, was taught Sex and Communism by his first wife, Litzy, a Viennese, in 1934. Philby had four wives.

Modin gives an amusing account of the reactions of Burgess, Maclean and Philby to living in Russia. Burgess hated it and appears to have drunk himself to death. Maclean learnt Russian and played a part in the political intelligence set-up, Philby was the hero with a Russian redhead as his fourth wife and was given Soviet decorations and a state funeral. It appears that it did not worry Philby that, due to his reports, through Modin, quite a few Albanians, who had been recruited by the West for landings in Albania were wiped out since Philby had, dutifully, reported the whole exercise. He was also sent by the British Embassy in Ankara the report of a KGB dissident, Volkov, about the fact that three spies were working in London, two at the Foreign Office, one in the counter-espionage service. Philby, at the time in the top job in Section IX, the Anti-Communist Department, received Volkov's report. One can guess what happened to Volkov.

Modin seeks to stress that the Five were genuine idealist communists and he shows it by describing in detail that they never met in pubs but at street corners, arranging the exact time and place for another meeting in case something causing suspicion happened. Yet he survived years in London and hundreds of meetings without ever being suspected, being just a minor embassy official, in the press department, of course!

Modin is now disillusioned about the Soviet regime and appears to feel privileged that he had the chance to meet and deal with such exceptional members of the famous 'Oxbridge Upper Class'.

LEO MURAY