Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire

In this labyrinthine history, journalist Senior (The Tyrant’s Shadow) recaps the exploits of the Cambridge Five. Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blun became ardent communists in the 1930s while studying at Cambridge and were recruited by Soviet agents to seek government positions with access to wartime secrets. The intelligence they produced was so voluminous that Moscow analysts had trouble reading it all, Senior writes, and included crucial information on Anglo-American war plans and the atomic bomb program. The author particularly highlights the spies’ role in helping Stalin consolidate Soviet rule over Eastern Europe during the early Cold War, including providing intelligence that led to the execution of Western spies in Soviet territory. Senior’s colorful narrative portrays spying as a decidedly shambolic enterprise: at the Bletchley Park cryptanalysis compound, Cairncross would scoop top secret documents off the floor and stuff them down his pants; on one occasion, a handler found an alcoholic Burgess “in the toilets, where all the precious Foreign Office documents had spilled out of his briefcase and onto the floor.” Senior also makes it a semi-tragic story of idealism corrupted by ideology, facilitated by an establishment “chapocracy” that held well-bred Cambridge chaps to be incapable of such treachery—and then shielded them after they were exposed. Elegantly written and stocked with charismatic, spectacularly flawed characters, it’s a captivating, psychologically probing spy saga. (May)