For me, who lived in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and tried to scrutinise the serene, almost smiling features of Kim Philby as the lid was closed on his coffin at his funeral, the puzzle is not so much what inspired them to betray their country in the beginning, when many clever, privileged idealists saw communism as a noble cause, as whether they truly went on believing in it. After all, it must have been clear to the dimmest observer, especially if you had seen its workings up close, that the Soviet model was an irredeemable disaster based on mass murder.

And then there is the puzzle of trying to fathom which of the quintet did most damage to the West and which of them went to his grave with a truly good conscience. As a frivolous extra riddle, one might also speculate as to which of them would have been most fun to have dinner with.

Roland Philipps, an admired publisher and first-time author, has written a ripping tale, tapping into a bundle of newly released papers from the archives of the British Foreign Office and a wodge of other fairly new sources, some of them culled from less noticed books, including chunks of material purloined from the KGB. Though serious historians of espionage will still argue over this, he makes a strong case that Donald Maclean was, from the Soviet point of view, the most valuable of the five. He also makes a case that, though he was a psychological mess, he was the least ignoble of them.

The starting point was a daddy complex. Sir Donald Maclean, the spy’s father, was a repressively high-minded teetotal Presbyterian Scottish Liberal who led the parliamentary opposition after the first world war and was later a member of Ramsay MacDonald’s national government, dying when young Donald was 21. The future traitor had been a golden boy, handsome, scholarly and athletic, at Gresham’s, a school that was then an odd mixture of progressive and repressive, where you had to take an oath against “impurity”. One of his closest friends there was James Klugmann, who went on with Maclean to Cambridge, where they both became communists. But whereas Klugmann never concealed his beliefs, even while serving in the Special Operations Executive during the war, Maclean had to bury them, once another Cambridge friend of his, Kim Philby, had had him recruited into the Soviet secret service in 1934, shortly before he joined the British diplomatic service the next year.
Maclean was an extraordinary mixture of perfect clerical diligence, composing lucid analyses and memoranda for his bosses in Whitehall, accompanied by bouts of wild, abusive drunkenness, perhaps spurred on by his domineering but much admired father’s hatred of alcohol. Plainly Maclean’s life as a double agent aggravated this furiously split personality. But one suspects that even if he had eschewed the daunting life of a spy, instead becoming a standard angry leftist within the civil service or in academia  (as  many of Cambridge chums did), he would still have been in a horrible muddle,  punctuating his clever, amiable charm with outbursts of vile, indiscriminate hatred.

Most top spies have a period when their intelligence is most valued. The Russians do seem to have had a genius first for spotting the talent and then for nudging them into an array of posts where they could do most harm; each of the Cambridge Five at one time held jobs where they could pass on secrets of exceptional worth. Arnold Deutsch, the KGB handler of both Philby and Maclean, was extraordinarily acute, sussing out the psychology of both men (and probably giving Maclean his first codename, Orphan). Maclean’s purple patch, in Soviet eyes, was probably from 1944 to 1948, when he was a top man in the British embassy in Washington and then head of the American department in Whitehall.

Maclean sent copies of thousands of the most sensitive papers concerning American and British policy and plans to the Russians. He read and passed on the most intimate exchanges between Churchill and Roosevelt and between Churchill and Truman. Before the meetings in Yalta and Potsdam, where the war victors in effect divided up the world, he told Stalin exactly what the Allies were planning, for instance for Poland and the Balkans (especially Greece). He later revealed the entire game-plan for the foundation of Nato. He enabled the Russians to work out exactly how many atomic bombs the Americans had (Truman had exaggerated in public) and whether they would contemplate dropping them during the Korean war (they did not). As the American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, exclaimed after Maclean’s exposure: “My God, he knew everything!”

Philipps’s description of how, especially during his assignment to Cairo in 1949, Maclean began his descent into the wilder reaches of alcoholism is both horrifying and riveting. On a social trip with friends up the Nile he went mad with boozy rage. He thumped one of his fellow diplomats and tried to beat up a remonstrating Egyptian guard. On another occasion he trashed the flat of two female American diplomats. He was eventually sent back to London to recover from what his indulgent bosses thought must be a breakdown due to overwork; in a sense, given that he was working for two masters, it was.
During his entire 17-year spell as a double-agent, he had several close shaves when Soviet defectors said there was a spy in the upper echelon of the British Foreign Office. Two were murdered (one at the direct instigation of Philby) before they could precisely identify the traitors. In his drunken rages, Maclean several times blurted out the truth about himself. Eventually two brilliant American cryptologists, Robert Lamphere and Meredith Gardner, broke Soviet codes that pinpointed Maclean as the mole.

The dilatoriness of the British intelligence services and the Foreign Office in failing to nail Maclean once it became blindingly clear to their American friends that he was their man makes you want to scream. Philby, of course, knowing that the net was closing in on his traitor pals, was cleverly encouraging his British colleagues to look at the wrong suspects and to drag their feet. Philipps’s description of Maclean’s  final days in England before he and Guy Burgess together took a weekend pleasure boat to St Malo and then on to Switzerland and Russia  is both thrilling and exasperating.

The British were almost certain he was guilty by May 4, 1951, putting a tail on him and tapping his telephone. But they failed to bring him in. It was not until May 25 that he hopped it. Astonishingly, the watchers knocked off on Friday afternoons for the weekends, so his final flit was unobserved. The British then compounded this mind-blowing incompetence by failing to tell their American friends, who had unmasked Maclean in the first place, what had happened until mid-June. Not surprisingly, the effect of the entire episode — the British failure to catch the spies when they could and should have, as well as the appalling fact of the spies’ existence in the first place — was massively to damage trust between the British and American secret services. 

Philipps’s telling of the tale is masterly. He weaves a complex web of professional, psychological and marital themes into a wonderfully fluent, coherent and compelling narrative. But niggling reservations remain.

Philipps has not quite cracked the riddle of Maclean’s 32 years in Russia, where he spent almost twice as long as his period as a double-agent. Did he truly believe, until his dying day, that his treachery had served a noble cause? His Moscow years, on which Philipps devotes a mere seven pages, are still a bit mysterious. Maclean was determined to become a true homo sovieticus, apparently shedding his alcoholism, joining Moscow’s main foreign-policy think-tank (known by its acronym Imemo), even writing a worthy treatise on British foreign policy since Suez, broadly predicting the eventual demise of the West. “He fraternised with likeminded intellectuals, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn . . . He was able to blossom in the society he had half chosen.”
I wonder. On paper he happily settles down, after his bizarrely attractive American wife Melinda, who knew his secret right from the start of his marriage in 1942, has briefly gone off with Philby. Melinda then departs for good to the West. Their three children are brought up as Soviet citizens, but they all emigrate to the West too. Nobody who spent a month in Moscow in the 1950s, let alone the 1980s, and who by then would have known the scale of Stalin’s atrocities, could have continued to believe in the cause unless almost crazily deluded or capable of some pride-filled self-deceit.

Philipps is indulgent, casting Maclean as an idealist who pursued a noble ideal valiantly upheld to the end. He claims that the “compelling argument” of Maclean’s Imemo thesis contains “an early plea for glasnost”. Had he lived into the Gorbachev era, he might, thinks Philipps, have renewed his hope of a “convergence” between the Soviet and Western models of society.      Maclean tells a fellow British communist that “whatever disappointments he felt about aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, he believed to his death that the USSR and its new society has a much better prospect than the old of overcoming the major ills of our civilisation”. Philipps approvingly cites the obituary in Izvestia, a government mouthpiece, which hails him as “dedicated to the pursuit of peace and justice for the largest number”.

Unlike Philby, Maclean never wrote a memoir nor agreed to be interviewed by a Westerner until he talked to Mark Frankland of the Observer a few days before his death in 1983. Philipps fillets the skimpy reminiscences of the handful of other foreigners — including a Reuters veteran and a disenchanted former correspondent for the Morning Star — who knew him a little. He is mentioned by the dissident Roy Medvedev. I cannot believe that Maclean, who died in 1983, found a “fellow dissident” in Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia in 1994.

In a coy afterword, Philipps gives a clue to his indulgence of this clever and brave but ultimately self-regarding, priggish, tortured man who insisted in a letter to his mother that he had “nothing to be ashamed of”. The author’s own grandfathers cast their own shadow over the tale. One of them, Roger Makins, later Lord Sherfield, was the last colleague of Maclean to have seen him on British soil, the very day he slipped away, and apparently always kicked himself for not realising that the watchers took off for the weekend on Friday afternoon. Philipps’s other grandfather, Wogan Philipps, was, like Maclean, a communist who apparently refused even after the collapse of the Soviet Union to admit that the noble ideal would not one day prevail. Philipps modestly shrinks from mentioning that he was also a hereditary peer who, as Lord Milford, was the last communist member of either British house of parliament.

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Plainly Libya is currently a disaster. But Gaddafi’s fall, engineered five years ago by Mr Cameron among others, did not lead directly to the current chaos. It was a gamble that in the short run succeeded and in the middle run has failed. But in ten years time Libya is still likely to be better-off than it was under the 42-year-long dictatorship of crazy Gaddafi.

For the first two years after his demise there was progress, albeit patchy and muddled. The Libyans’ initial transitional ruling council performed quite well. A remarkably successful election was then held in the summer of 2012, which produced a plurality for the more liberal and secular-minded Libyans in a fledgling parliament of 200, 80 of whose members were elected on party lists, the rest as individuals of varying beliefs, including Islamist. The treasury, the central bank and the national oil company continued to function adequately, with a plethora of foreign advisers, some of them British, giving sound advice, not always heeded. The 22-country Arab League, with the exception of Algeria and Syria, was unusually united in its enthusiasm, eagerly endorsing the initial Western intervention. The UN, assisted by the British, French, American and sundry Europeans, was entrusted with co-ordinating political and economic aid.

It is true that Libya’s fragile governments soon made a string of mistakes, often against outsiders’ counsel. A cardinal one in 2013 was the passage of a “law of political isolation” — eerily echoing the disastrous deBaathification law in Iraq — which barred from politics anyone who had worked for Gaddafi at a middling-to-upper level, including some impressive people who had defected many years before. Probably the biggest boob was endlessly to pander to the militias that proliferated during and after the rebellion rather than rein them in. But in the absence of an international peacekeeping force or a professional post-Gaddafi national army, none of the newly-elected leaders felt strong enough to crack the whip.

This was hardly the fault of the outside world, least of all Mr Cameron. Competing Arab and Muslim influences (Turkey and Qatar v. Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia) muddied the Libyan waters. Above all, the Libyans themselves were adamant that there should be no Western troops on the ground and no UN peacekeeping force. In any case, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was inconceivable that any Western government would wish to take part in one. A report by the Rand Corporation of California reckoned that 12,000 Western troops could have done the job, but most analysts reckoned that at least 120,000 was nearer the mark.

Plainly the UN’s and the West’s refusal to send troops sorely reduced the chances that the initial intervention would be followed by a successful transition. But the report fails to explore the alternatives. Had the West failed to act militarily when the rebellion broke out, it is likely that Gaddafi would either have suppressed it with the savagery that he had so often treated his enemies, or a civil war would have ensued with even greater bloodshed and chaos than currently prevail. Think of Syria, where Western non-intervention — against Mr Cameron’s wishes — has led to a far bloodier stalemate with no end in sight.

One of the report’s weirdest assertions, eagerly repeated by Cameron’s critics, is that “the [British] government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated” and that “the rebels included a significant Islamist element”. Leaving aside the vexed question of how to define an Islamist, both statements are ridiculous. The first rests largely on the analysis of two academics (one of them an adviser to the LSE’s ill-fated North Africa project funded by a Gaddafi foundation), whose testimony was accorded reverential credence by the committee, in particular their assertions that there was “no evidence” that Gaddafi had planned a massacre in Benghazi in the event of recapturing it and that the British government “selectively took elements of [Gaddafi’s] rhetoric at face value”.

Tell that to the families of the 1,270 people (a tally documented by Human Rights Watch) who were murdered in one night in 1996 in a prison in Tripoli, or to those of the fans of Al-Ahly football club in Benghazi who were shot out of hand when the club’s stadium was blown up and bulldozed in 2000 after a match where jeering had broken out against a rival team controlled by one of the dictator’s sons. People like Gaddafi, a clown but also a mass-murderer, do not have to “plan” massacres.

As for the second notion, that the British government “failed to identify” Islamists, it was all too well known that there had long been Islamists in the anti-Gaddafi opposition. They could hardly be excluded during the rebels’ campaign. But both the first election, in 2012, and the less satisfactory second one, in 2014, showed that most Libyans preferred a more secular type of government. Cameron can hardly be blamed for not preventing them from coming out of the woodwork. Rooting them out was the task of the newly-elected Libyans.

The other standard canard, duly promoted in the report, was that UN Resolution 1973 allowed Nato to use “all necessary measures” to protect civilians (including bombing from the air but specifically not putting boots on the ground) but specifically barred regime change. It is true that the first morphed into the second as the rebellion proceeded. But that was entirely because it soon became clear that, as Gaddafi continued to shell towns in his determination to squash the rebels, civilians would be protected only if he were militarily defeated. It was obvious at the time to anyone, including the supposedly aggrieved Russians, that the resolution could and probably would be interpreted elastically, ending in Gaddafi’s demise. The report criticises this as “opportunistic”. In fact it was diplomatic common sense, while indeed offering a rare opportunity (if that word must be used) for Nato and the West to align themselves with the Arab world and give momentum to the Arab Spring, albeit that it subsequently fizzled.

The committee also highlights the “implied criticism” of Lord Richards, the former British general who oversaw the British campaign and is credited with questioning whether it was in the national interest. For sure, he raised doubts, as generals often must. But a close reading of his testimony shows his attitude to be more ambiguous than the report says. More recently, on the BBC’s Today programme, he went further, arguing with hindsight that only a “comprehensive” policy including troops on the ground could have worked. But in his testimony to the committee he acknowledged that that was politically impossible. At the time he did not flatly say, “Don’t do it.”

Yet another baseless criticism by the committee is that the British government failed to try hard enough to deploy the mediating services of Tony Blair, who had cultivated Gaddafi earlier in the century, persuading him to drop his chemical and nuclear weapons programmes. Nor, laments the committee, had the government considered a “pause” after Gaddafi’s forces had withdrawn from Benghazi, to give him a chance to negotiate. To his credit, Mr Blair refused to criticise Mr Cameron or the government, pointing out that Gaddafi showed no willingness whatever to seek a compromise once the rebellion had begun. Nor did the African Union, many of whose members had reason to be grateful to the Libyan dictator for his oily handouts, make the slightest headway on the same basis — a point oddly ignored in the report.

Especially in its summary and conclusions, the committee seemed determined to emphasise evidence that casts Mr Cameron’s government in a bad light, largely ignoring — for example — the nuanced eloquence of Sir Dominic Asquith, a fine Arabist who as ambassador advised the fledgling Libyan governments in the year after Gaddafi’s fall. In his testimony he scotches the overblown notion that the British had no follow-up plan. Incidentally, only two of the nine British ambassadors since 1984 gave evidence, though several were involved in post-Gaddafi projects. No witness from the UN was questioned, though its performance as chief overseer of the aftermath is widely deemed to have been limp. Only one British journalist gave evidence, and he notably failed to sing the committee’s tune. Nor, most strangely of all, did a single Libyan come before the committee. One wonders how the 17 witnesses were chosen. Mr Cameron was surely unwise, by the way, to refuse to take part himself.

It is hard to deny that Libya is now worse-off even than it was under the brutal but secure grip of the dictator. But in the first flush of the Arab Spring Mr Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and indeed Barack Obama, albeit that he “led from the back”, were surely right to intervene to give Libyans a chance to start afresh. Self-serving though it sounds, Mr Cameron is also right to say that sadly it was the Libyans, not outsiders, who have been mainly responsible for blowing that chance.

Much has been made of the fact that a majority of the committee’s members — six out of 11 — are Conservatives. Was it a coincidence that every one of them is a Brexiteer, that the chairman was sacked as a minister by Cameron, and that John Baron, who expressed ill-disguised schadenfreude throughout the hearings, was the sole Conservative to vote against the intervention in Libya, along with just 12 other MPs, naturally including Jeremy Corbyn? The entire tone of the report, especially the summary, smacks of a desire to trash David Cameron. It is the report itself that should be trashed. 

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