The trivialising of treason
Ferdinand Mount
These things are sent to cheer us up. There's nothing like a witch-hunt, with real witches, to set the blood racing. Never has a single scandal — even in the rich annals of British cock-ups — united in a profusion of humbuggery people in so many walks of life from the Queen to Mr Dennis Skinner. The cant pours from every orifice.
The seeming discrepancies between Blunt's public statements and Mrs Thatcher's original, surprisingly full statement only emphasise the thundering incompetence of all concerned, Did Blunt help Maclean to escape or didn't he? How much was really gained by Blunt's cooperation or is this simply a feeble excuse by the authorities for their failure to nail him on admissible evidence? And if Blunt was really no longer much use after his confession, as he claims, why then was he not disgraced at the time?
This is all very terrible, is it not? Treason is the worst of crimes, isn't it? And the treason of Sir Anthony Blunt (following Dr Watkins's example, we do not stoop to tardy mistering in this column) did appalling harm. Such as? Well there were these British agents in Eastern Europe who were bumped off. But weren't they traitors too, being nationals of the countries in which they operated? If Blunt ought to have his head chopped off — a more honest solution than taking his knighthood away — what about them? Is there, can there be any standard of morality in these matters which is not somewhat relative?
You notice distinct unease in the discussion of treason these days—an unease which seems to echo the popular fascination with the stories of individual traitors. No longer do most people find it quite so easy to relegate traitors to the ninth circle of hell. Or perhaps they never did. Dante, after all, was among other things the propagandist for a shaky city-state constantly at war within and without, In wartime these things are simple because they cost the lives of your fellowcountrymen. Hence the Sunday Telegraph's delight when it thought, alas wrongly, it had nabbed Blunt for an act of wartime treachery which had cost the lives of Dutch Resistance fighters (it had got the wrong chap, apparently). But every time that there is a businesslike exchange of spies or a captured spy is turned round to serve as a double agent instead of being prosecuted, the horror at the act of treason is thereby diminished. In the end, the maintenance of bureaucratic prestige dictates that only outsiders can be tried in court — nosey journalists, debt-ridden aircraftsmen, half-baked aliens. Top spies skip free. The trivialising of treachery began as soon as the first alpha mind was recruited to the secret service. As long as the spy was regarded as a useful creep ranking somewhere between the ponce and the bookie's runner, he could be treated with contempt; his dirty work coincided with his social and spiritual status. But in the second war and to some extent in the first, technology and the twentieth-century absorption with propaganda demanded a better class of spy.
Shifting espionage up-market led gradually but surely to its de-moralising. In spy thrillers the reader's attention is first drawn to the disillusion and spiritual disgust of the hero, but these are surely effects rather than causes. The vital premise of John Le Carre and his imitators is that Smiley is superior; the fact that he is also fat and plain and cuckolded is mere camouflage; what he essentially is is brilliant and patient and married to a Lady. And for those qualities to be stretched and displayed, his opponents must have qualifications of a comparable order. The battle becomes a FirstDivision game which gradually loses the capacity to occasion moral indignation.
Everybody engaged in the business has a vested interest in insisting that spies are all brilliant. To judge by their behaviour, the present lot can't have been that brilliant. Blunt fell both for the crude inanity of Leninist aesthetics and for Guy Burgess who, like Maclean, appears to have been a quarrelsome drunk of the silliest kind whom no rational person would dream of taking advice from. Blunt's tepid expressions of regret do at least include some acknowledgement that anyone ought to have known at the time what Soviet Russia was like.
The Americans — and nobody claims they are brilliant — seem to have had little difficulty in rumbling the whole lot. If they had been Russian traitors, they would have all been shot before they had packed their spongebags. Only in England were these narcissists accepted at their own valuation. They were not all buggers, but they were all narcissists.
Perhaps the most ludicrous of all the effusions in National Effusion Week was the flood of letters to The Times praising Blunt's work for 'art', in ecstatic terms befitting a mixture of Rembrandt and Fra Angelico; he is said to have made art history 'respectable' single-handed — as if Burckhardt and Berenson had been regarded in their day as pornographers.
Those who have studied the lives of the Philby crowd have often expressed astonishment that they should have taken so little serious interest in the cause for which they were betraying their country and their friends. (EN!. Forster's choice is usually bogus); most didn't read Marx much, though Blunt did; most don't seem to have known much about Russia — or cared. They were frivolous, absorbed in their own egotistical dramas — the conflict of allegiance, the agonised double life, the heart-stopping moment with the torch and the filing-cabinet, the placid salute to the commissionaire as one passed with one's bulging briefcase. 'Goodnight Huggett.' 'Goodnight, Sir.' How exciting, how superior. The whole business implies a chilling removal from ordinary humanity. Whether or not Dante had a true estimate of treachery, his description of its effects does not sound inappropriate to the TV appearance of the latest specimen: 'Each held his face downwards; by the mouth their cold, and by the eyes, the sorrow of their hearts is testified amongst them.'
Yet it seems Sir Anthony was and is extremely kind to the young, not just to boys either, courteous and sympathetic to strangers. True, he has been disliked and suspected by some people he came across, but only by a minority. And all the time —or only a little bit of it, according to Blunt's own apologia — he was tirelessly working for one of the most barbarous tyrannies in history. It's a rum way to want to live.
Even as Sir Anthony is publicly debagged, though, you begin to sniff a musty smell. Spying is already dated. Children seem to find the whole business incomprehensible and boring, one of those curiously old-fashioned obsessions, which occasionally seize grown-ups. They find it hard to accept the overweening selfimportance of spies. And so should we.
This sceptical attitude does not implY either a weakening of patriotism or a loss of moral feeling in the West, as is often claimed. It merely indicates that patriotisM and moral indignation have been too often exploited by dubious politicians for either feeling to be quite so freely expressed. We may be forgiven for being a little more sparing with our outrage, if not with our contempt.
Mrs Thatcher's determination to reassert control over the security services Is admirable in itself. If spying is importnt, then it is too important to be left to 515 Yet I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the only solid benefit gained from the whole business is the killing of the Protection of Official Information Bill — alre9cIY, under fierce attack by back-benchers both parties before the Blunt affair: VI', best argument for open government Is that it helps you to catch the Vies betray your secrets, but rather that fewer secrets you have, the more efficireen! your government is likely to be. For sec. the create the demand for spies — and corruption and waste of time they with them.
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