The need for security services in democratic countries to work well is, I think, the point in this review (full text electronic subscriber only for US$20, one sucks it up even with paying for a print one, print media need to make money) of Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain by Chapman Pincher:
...V.G. Kiernan was one of the famous or notorious Communist Historians Group of sixty years ago, who died last February aged ninety-five. In 1987 he published a startling essay, which sneered at "spasms of virtuous indignation about the wickedness of a small number of idealists." He still thought fondly of Burgess, one of those "who helped to induct me into the Party" at Cambridge in the early 1930s, and although he never saw Burgess again after Cambridge, "he did what he felt it right for him to do," Kiernan claimed. "I honour his memory."
Scarcely less remarkable—although unremarked by most reviewers—is a passage by Kiernan's sometime comrade Eric Hobsbawm in his autobiography Interesting Times (2002), a curious book and another period piece. After a brilliant undergraduate career at Cambridge, where he too joined the Party, Hobsbawm spent the war in the ranks of the British army, never rising above the rank of sergeant or leaving the shores of England, and is still resentful that he wasn't given work fitting his undoubted abilities. He specifically thinks he should have been asked to join to the code-breaking station at Bletchley, along with so many dons from King's, his Cambridge college.
He also mentions the Cambridge spies. He only knew Burgess and Blunt after the war but, while he was an active young Communist, though not himself a Soviet secret agent, "We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us—certainly I—would have taken it on ourselves, if asked." So Hobsbawm is bitter because he wasn't recruited into the single most important and secret British enterprise of the war if not of the century, while cheerfully admitting that he would have spied for Russia if asked.
Those old comrades seem unaware that they are saying exactly what many others who were on the left in the 1930s and 1940s do not want to hear. Over and again it has been argued that just because men and women were Communist sympathizers or Party members they were not potential traitors, and that it was grossly unjust to vet or purge officials on political grounds. Reading Hobsbawm, one might rather conclude that at least the authorities got it right in his case, and that the general principle of political vetting was justified.
As for Guy Burgess...A friend gave him some man-to-man advice if he did return to America: have nothing to do with left-wing politics, avoid the color question, and no queer antics.
"I think," Burgess replied, "what you're trying to say is, Don't make a pass at Paul Robeson."
He Kept Marx Going
...
Yet if there is a gulf separating Marx from Engels, and Engels from Marxism-Leninism, there is also a connection, which Marx's General makes it possible to trace. For while Engels found more pleasure in life than Marx, he was no less committed to revolutionary struggle. It did not take Marx or Marxism to turn him into a Communist. And the more likable Engels seems as a man, the more terrible his theoretical ruthlessness becomes. It was Engels, not Marx, who wrote that "history is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses."..
