Kim Philby and Bad History
Writing in The Critic, the journalist Charlotte Gill has brewed a storm in a teacup with #twitterstorians. Gill wrote,
Some will always say that history can never be 100% accurately represented in art. Sathnam Sanghera recently tweeted “History is argument. Narratives take over from other narratives all the time”, reflecting the ever-fashionable line. But this idea of “everyone having a different narrative” has been pushed to the point where you could write a book called “How Women Won the Battle of Hastings” and probably get a publishing deal. “Delusion is okay — as long as you’re diverse”, is the message from the Wokies.
Sanghera responded on Twitter, ‘Wilful stupidity from GB News producer on The Critic website. History is argument, but there are also obviously such things as facts.’ But my thoughts on historiography will have to wait for another post, suffice it to say Sanghera is right. What surprised me is that this journalistic intervention into historical theory was written in a review of a TV spy drama, A Spy Among Friends (2022). This is a dramatization of Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name (2014) — a biography of a notorious Soviet mole, Kim Philby.
My interest was piqued and I read the review in full. It is a very odd piece. The central thesis is that the series isn’t very good for three reasons. First, it gets its history wrong and Gill is keen to highlight those errors. Second, it is a ‘woke’ intervention which ahistorically superimposes its gendered politics onto the past. Third, it deploys too much artistic licence and the story of Kim Philby is interesting enough without resorting to invention. Ultimately the review concludes, ‘Sadly, as in the case of Kim Philby, ideology will remain paramount for some.’ In Gill’s view, the real story of Kim Philby has been vandalised in the pursuit of a “woke”, feminist, classist ideology. For Gill, her review is clearly a positivist fightback against the woke—crusading ruffians who would sacrifice the very facts of the past on the altar of the politically correct zeitgeist. (Spoiler alert: the term “woke” has become a wholly meaningless slur, a stick used by people to beat anyone who has a view of human diversity that is more progressive than their own.)
It is ironic then that Gill appears to completely misunderstand the history of Philby and the Cambridge Ring of Five. In addition, she makes a few howlers of her own. Normally, I wouldn’t care. But if you’re going to take issue with a drama for its mistakes then it would be wise to fact-check your review first.
For instance, Gill writes that ‘Nicholas Elliott, also [like Philby] [was] an M16 agent’. They most certainly were not MI6 agents, to be precise they were both intelligence officers. Agent and officer are not synonymous terms. To be fair, they are often conflated, indeed I’ve done it myself. But if we are being strictly accurate, as Gill demands, she has made an error here.
Gill claims, ‘The gist is that M16 is a boys’ club for toffs, and that Elliott, being a toff, and others (also being toffs), were blind to recognising that their pal, another toff, was “guilty as hell” when it came to being a Commie spy for Russia, as a judge once said about Philby.’ Yet, the word ‘toff’ means to be of the landed elite. Philby and Elliott were both of the upper-middle class rather than the gentry. A judge did not say that Philby was “guilty as hell”. In fact, it was penned by Helenus Milmo, an MI5 officer tasked with investigating Philby in 1951. Milmo did not become a judge until 1964 after Philby had already defected to Moscow in 1963.
Gill complains that a character tells Elliott to ‘“burst into flames for all I care” when he asks if he can smoke. (Incidentally, this etiquette would have never existed in 1963’. Where her idea that such etiquette simply did not exist in the 60s is derived from remains a mystery. Fans of the James Bond franchise may recall that in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, Bond says to Blofeld, ‘If I’m going to be forced to watch television, may I smoke?’ In fact, ‘Do you mind if I smoke? I don’t care a hang if you burst into flames!’ is a very old joke dating back to at least the 1930s.[1]
The majority of Gill’s ire is reserved for the character Lily Taylor,
The biggest evidence of this comes in the shape of Lily Taylor (played by Anna Maxwell Martin), a working-class M15 agent from Durham, who never existed yet dominates the TV show. Her function, as an invented character, is essentially to expose the toxic patriarchy — made more despicable because it is a posho patriarchy — of M16.
Lily, who ‘has the personality of a hammer’ and a ‘diverse trailblazer’, is indeed an invention. However, the existence of a sharp-witted and bolshie woman, in the highly patriarchal world of British intelligence, is hardly a stretch of the imagination. Just such a woman, Jane Archer (nee Sissmore), not only existed ( and appears as a minor character in the series), but was written about in precisely these terms. The writer? Kim Philby.
Jane Archer was a legendary MI5 officer, an expert on the Soviet Union and the lead interrogator of the Soviet intelligence officer, Walter Krivitsky, who defected to the West in 1937. Archer also had a wicked tongue. She was sacked in 1940 because she criticised acting MI5 director, Jasper Harker. She moved over to MI6 and worked for Philby, who sidelined her precisely because she was too good at her job and thus posed a danger to him and his fellow Soviet moles. When her appointment in his team was suggested, it ‘gave me a nasty shock, especially as I could think of no plausible reason for resisting it.’ He further wrote that ‘Jane was a woman after my own heart, tough-minded and rough-tongued … Jane would have made a very bad enemy. To keep Jane busy, I put her in charge of the most solid body of intelligence on Communist activity available to the section at the time.’[2] Where Lily differs from Archer is that Archer wasn’t working class.
Another woman dangerous to moles like Philby was Milicent Bagot. Bagot is widely thought to be the inspiration for Connie Sachs, the unconventional Soviet specialist in the novelist John le Carré’s fictional MI6 (“the circus”), immortalised in the classic spy fiction Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Bagot was another strong-willed, no-nonsense woman. According to the authorised historian of MI5, she ‘was a stickler for meticulously correct officer procedure, terrifying some younger officers to whom she pointed out their shortcomings’. Her expertise was born of an ‘extraordinary memory for facts and files … which passed into Service folklore.’[3]
Indeed, it has been suggested by Frank Close that it was Bagot who first raised suspicions regarding Philby’s treachery in the 1950s. [4] However, this seems unlikely and I don’t buy it. Once two fellow members of the Cambridge Ring of Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, absconded to the Soviet Union in 1951, MI5 rapidly deduced that Philby [code-named Peach by MI5] had likely tipped them off and therefore was probably a mole himself. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bagot was a fiercely competent Sovietologist and mole hunter, having played an important role in identifying Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet Atomic spy.
Inventing an unruly, bellicose, yet brilliant woman, ‘with the personality of a hammer’ (to quote Gill again), in the highly patriarchal environment of MI5 is not a product of ‘progressive politics’. It is a broadly accurate assessment of the British intelligence community at that time. The intelligence services were highly patriarchal, they did undervalue women and it cost them. To quote the historian and biographer Richard Davenport-Hines:
The key to understanding the successes of Moscow’s penetration agents in government ministries, the failures to detect them swiftly and the counter-espionage mistakes in handling them lies in sex discrimination rather than class discrimination. Masculine loyalties rather than class affinities are the key that unlocks the closed secrets of communist espionage in Britain.[5]
While I disagree with Davenport-Hines on the (lack of) importance of class in these matters, he is correct in his point regarding gender. To write off such considerations and erase them from our cultural memory would be a far greater attack on the historical realities of the British intelligence community at that time than the creation of a fictional character like Lily Taylor. The inclusion of brilliant women should not be shied away from lest conservative reviewers accuse writers of being “woke” ideologues distorting history. Lily might not have existed, but women like Jane Archer and Milicent Bagot most certainly did.
Where I will agree with Gill is that writers should cease to ‘think their fiction (which they call history) is better than reality’. The series writer, Alexander Carey, did not need to invent Lily. He could have simply incorporated real women like Archer and Bagot. However, screenwriters are not historians, they have the artistic licence to make their story work as they choose. If Lily was a more suitable device to illustrate an essential truth — how assumptions regarding gender and class hindered counter-espionage efforts — then that is fair enough. To describe such artistic licence as a lie, as Gill’s headline does, is absurd.
The irony is that Gill is guilty of precisely the sins she claims of Carey. Like most anti-woke culture warriors, she projects her own ideologically driven assumptions about history onto the realities of the past. Rightwing culture warriors would profit from investing their time into reading history, as opposed to complaining about “woke” representations of a past they do not remotely understand.
[1] Penrith Observer, ‘For Lighter Moments’, 21 May 1935, p. 14.
[2] Kim Philby, My Silent War (Modern Library Paperbacks, 1968, 2002), pp. 105–106.
[3] Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (Penguin, 2009, 2010), p. 330
[4] Frank Close, Trinity (Penguin, 2019), p. 66.
[5] Richard Davenport-Hines, Enemies Within (William Collins, 2018), p. xxvi.
