Poetic Justice and Four British Traitors February 19, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
The second in our Poetic Justice series (covered Molotov in Mongolia a year ago) is dedicated to George Blake, Donald MacClean, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. Beach has treated these sorry four briefly on another occasion: Dealing with Double Agents. But for the uninitiated all were British spies whose night job was to work for the Soviets as double agents. By rights, and Beach taps this out on his keyboard as someone who is normally disgusted by the death penalty, they should have been taken down into a cellar and shot in the back of the head NKVD style: they were discovered, Burgess and MacClean in 1951, Blake in 1961 and Philby in 1961/1962. Instead, Burgess and MacClean, Philby and Blake all escaped the hands of avenging law: Blake managed to get out of a British prison in 1956, the others fled as the net was closing in on them (the incompetence of British counter-espionage almost beggared belief). However, this apparent injustice led to an absolutely marvelous denoument because if you are a Soviet Double Agent in the 1950s the short list of destinations has, in fact, just one name on it: Moscow. Now, Moscow may be a wonderful city and Muscovites are certainly a wonderful people, but this was the 1950s/1960s… Stalin was still alive or still remembered, the country was trying to pick itself up after its struggle with the German wolf and best of all there were supermarkets stocked by Communist commissars. But then that was what Donald and Guy, John and Kim had been fighting for wasn’t it? This is why they had sent western agents to their deaths: for the triumph of ‘democratic’ socialism? Beach likes to think of them running off the Aeroflot jet (all rust and decomposing foam seats) and falling to their knees to embrace the tarmac of the ‘true fatherland’.
Of course, the problem with coming face to face with your dreams is that, well, judge for yourselves… Burgess crashed and burnt. He was dead by 1963: vodka and the Moscow climate doing its worst. However, he too could not leave Britain behind and never properly learnt Russian, and even considered returning to the UK gambling on not being charged. (A message he sent to Macmillan read ‘I will not make embarrassments for Her Majesty’s Government if they don’t make them for me. I will give no interviews without permission.’) His body was returned to Britain after his death and he is buried next to his mother in the UK. Donald Maclean integrated well and became an English teacher: he seems to have had some regrets about his support of the Soviet system and associated with dissidents by the 1970s. His wife Melinda came to Russia a year after Maclean and, then, in 1964, betrayed her husband with Kim Philby on a skiing trip. Who would have thought it, Philby… Philby, who was given a 24 hour KGB guard and not allowed to leave his house unattended for many years, stayed at home and listened to the BBC World Service and read Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse (which gives the lie to his claim that ‘to betray you have to have belonged’). He married a KGB agent, the beautiful Rufina Pukhova (pictured with Kim above), twenty years his junior and he used to confess his horror to her at life in the Soviet gulag: apparently the ideals were good but the leaders had got things wrong. (These precious insights.) He was sometimes given special guided tours around Soviet power plants and factories which he admitted to finding tedious: espionage purgatory? Blake is the only one of the four alive: he lives to this day in Moscow and claims to have kept the Marxist Leninist faith. Does he punch the heavens every time an FSB slips some radioactive poison into someone’s tea?
Other bits of poetic justice: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
