“I think that the world in which we shall live these next thirty years will be a pretty restless and tormented place,” Robert Oppenheimer wrote his younger brother Frank from Berkeley in 1931; “I do not think that there will be much of a compromise possible between being of it, and being not of it.” Many thoughtful men and women felt that way in the decades between the two world wars, and for some of them, Communism seemed to promise what the
The same horror and havoc of the First World War, which made the Russian Revolution possible, recruited the ranks of the first Communist parties of the West. Secondary manifestations of crisis augmented them — the rise of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and the Spanish Civil War. The economic crisis which reached the United States in 1929 swept thousands into the Communist Party or under its influence.
But commitment to Communism was also always personal, Chambers emphasized, the resolution of a crisis of faith; “his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth.” Partisan observers then and since have ridiculed such commitment, judging it naive or even delusional, but it was no more so than any other religious conversion seen from outside the circle of faith.
For committed Communists it followed that the Soviet Union was the new world's vanguard. Some acknowledged its unparalleled violence, its rule by terror; some did not. “The Communist Party presents itself,” Chambers noted, “as the one organization of the will to survive the crisis… It is in the name of that will… that the Communist first justifies the use of terror and tyranny… which the whole tradition of the West specifically repudiates.” “We were defending the first socialist country,” insisted Ruth Kuczynski, a German Communist who lived in exile in England. “We didn't know — I didn't know — about Stalin's crimes,” she told an interviewer late in life. “We knew how the capitalist West wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. It really seemed possible that they had managed to insert all these agents [who were purged during the Great Terror] into high places… I believed Stalin.”
Blindered or open-eyed, some among the faithful invested the raw, brutal, revolutionary new nation with their hopes of connection. Through its instrumentalities, they hoped that they could fight fascism, anti-Semitism, ignorance, inequality. Harry Gold believed he was attacking a universal and all-encompassing anti-Semitism:
In only the Soviet Union was anti-Semitism a crime against the State… Here, too… was the one bulwark against the further encroachment of that monstrosity, Fascism. To me Nazism and Fascism and anti-Semitism were identical. This was the ages-old enemy of the Roman Arena, the ghetto, of the inquisition, of Pogroms, and now of concentration camps in Germany. Anything that was against anti-Semitism I was for, and so the chance to help strengthen the Soviet Union seemed like a wonderful opportunity.
Soviet intelligence networks made productive use of Communist Party members even though such volunteers were not trained agents and even though their Party affiliation made them suspect to their own governments; they were such people as money could not buy.
Recruiting usually followed a standard pattern. Committed Party members looked out for potential converts with useful skills or affiliations, made them welcome, proselytized them, obligated them with favors and gifts. Out of work in the depths of the Great Depression, Harry Gold got a job with the help of a Party recruiter, Tom Black. “That wonderful $30.00 every Saturday kept our family off relief… I was grateful to Black, very much so.” A 1946 Royal Commission investigating Soviet intelligence operations in Canada found that there were “numerous… groups where Communist philosophy and techniques were studied… To outsiders these groups adopted various disguises, such as social gatherings, music-listening groups and groups for discussing international politics and economics… These study groups were in fact ‘cells’ and were the recruiting centres for agents, and the medium of development of the necessary frame of mind which was a preliminary condition to eventual service of the Soviet Union in a more practical way.” Besides commitment to the cause, the “necessary frame of mind” was secrecy:
This object is to accustom the young Canadian adherent gradually to an atmosphere and an ethic of conspiracy. The general effect on the young man or woman over a period of time of
A candidate dropped out of Party activity when he agreed to become an agent, dividing and isolating him still further.
This theme of recruiting had significant variations. Morris Cohen, a native New Yorker born in 1910 to immigrant Russian parents and a high school football star, had joined the Communist Youth League in 1933 at the University of Illinois and subsequently volunteered to fight with the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. While recovering from wounds in a hospital in Barcelona, Cohen was invited to attend the Republican Army's nearby Barcelona Intelligence School, which operated under the code name Construction. There he was recruited for US espionage by a Soviet intelligence officer. “In April 1938,” Cohen wrote in his NKVD autobiography, “I was one of a group of various nationalities sent to a conspiratorial school in Barcelona. Our chief commissar and leaders were Soviets.” Cohen completed his course of espionage training in February 1939 and returned to the United States to begin a productive career.
Ruth Kuczynski's older brother Jurgen was the political leader of the German Communist Party in England. Jurgen had escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 through Czechoslovakia and taken up teaching at the London School of Economics. Ruth, born in Berlin in 1907, came west by a different route; trained in Moscow as a clandestine radio operator, she had already worked out of Czechoslovakia, Trieste, Cairo, Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking and Poland. By the time she settled in England in 1938 she was a major in Red Army intelligence (GRU as opposed to secret police intelligence, NKVD; the two entities maintained parallel and independent networks).
The most productive cell in the history of Soviet espionage developed at Cambridge University in the 1930s. While physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory probed the real world of the atomic nucleus with the new tool of neutron bombardment, a brilliant and fanatic group of young Cambridge intellectuals at Trinity College lauded the certainties of Marxian metaphysics. The majority of the group were homosexual or bisexual in a society that branded homosexual acts as felony crimes; sexual orientation contributed to affiliation even as it taught the young conspirators double standards and a double life. But Communism in any case was intensely fashionable at English universities between the world wars. Michael Straight, an American student at Cambridge at the time, estimates that “the Socialist Society had two hundred members when I went to Cambridge and six hundred when I left. About one in four of them belonged to Communist cells.”
The nucleus of the Cambridge group was Guy Burgess, recruited in 1933 by a Russian agent who worked in London as a journalist under the alias Ernst Henri. Burgess, the handsome son of a well-married naval commander, took prizes at Eton and first-class honors in history at Cambridge. His brilliance and charm won him election to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, an elite secret society whose members were known as the Apostles. He enlisted at least two of the members of his cell by seduction. “At one time or another,” wrote a don who adored him, “he went to bed with most of [his] friends, as he did with anyone who was willing and was not positively repulsive, and in doing so he released them from many of their frustrations and inhibitions.” Of the four other men who came to be known as the Cambridge Five, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean certainly count among Burgess's sexual conquests. Kim Philby and John Cairncross were already dedicated Communists, but Cairncross at least acknowledged finding Burgess “fascinating, charming and utterly ruthless.”
John Cairncross was a tall, rangy Scotsman from Glasgow, born in 1913-He studied at Glasgow University for two years beginning in 1930, when he was seventeen, took a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, then won a scholarship to Cambridge. Anthony Blunt was one of his Trinity supervisors there and directed him to Burgess, who recruited him for espionage in 1935. In the autumn of 1936, after he graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors in modern languages, Cairncross joined the British Foreign Office. Maclean, the tall, athletic namesake of the Liberal
