Historians and Spies

‘Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully… They can spoil everything’, was the (possibly apocryphal) view of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The last few years seem to suggest that both sides in the cold war took Khrushchev’s warnings seriously. Last year the national archives released the security files of some of the Communist Party Historians Group including Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and John Saville, whilst last month it came to light that Sir Martin Gilbert had met with the Hungarian secret service who had attempted to recruit him. It might seem odd to many that historians would draw the attention of security services but the nature of the cold war meant that history became a battlefield of ideology that was of vital interest to all involved.

The British state’s observation of historians shows the level of paranoia that the cold war created. Whilst the Communist Party was a subversive group who acted under the influence of Britain’s cold war enemy, we should consider that British values exalt the freedoms of belief and association. Both of these principles are challenged by an almost continuous state of observation that was applied to potential subversives during the cold war, and which is currently being universally expanded. Many of the documents relate to the direction of the Historians Group following the turmoil of 1956 which led to the creation of the new left and Evan Smith has blogged on the subject.

I’m struck by the extent of observation that the British state kept potentially subversive historians under. Like many communists Hobsbawm routinely had his mail opened and telephone calls were tapped. Much of the information was destroyed after a few weeks and only that which was deemed of importance to state security was left on file. Hobsbawm still managed to fill 8 sizable files and some of these have been digitised. One of the telephone intercepts says ‘Eric was in Cambridge and was calling to see if he might come round after supper. Alan [?] invited him to come and eat something with them but Eric preferred to come later – he mentioned he was just going into Hall for his meal’ (27/11/59). An innocuous statement at first, but when I mentioned this to a colleague he suddenly brightened up and told me that Hobsbawm and the others would have known that they were being spied on and did things like this to confuse MI5. So perhaps the quarry did all he could to avoid the huntsman.

Gilbert’s case was somewhat different. The biographer of Winston Churchill later became part of the British establishment rather than an intellectual renegade like Hobsbawm. Of course, this would not necessarily make him less prone to spying for the East. The approach from Hungarian secret services came whilst Gilbert was an undergraduate. Like many Western scholars who had an interest in and visited Eastern Europe his potential future influence might have been beneficial to foreign security services. Gilbert –either wittingly or unwittingly – met with Hungarian agents several times in both Budapest and London who lavished him with hospitality. Perhaps it was Gilbert’s claim to have been involved with CND, or other left-wing dressing that attracted his suitors. Then again the New Statesman suggests that Gilbert knew exactly what was going on and soaked up the hospitality whilst leading the Hungarians in a merry dance.

One further historian, who never attained the fame of Hobsbawm et al, but who certainly had worked for British security services before becoming a communist was the sports historian and novelist Jim Riordan. Riordan’s biography Comrade Jim (Harper, 2009) is a fantastic read, although I am sceptical about some of his claims. On national service he served in Berlin listening to intercepts of the Soviet wires before moving to Moscow as a committed communist. Riordan quickly became disillusioned with life under communism and worked translating books into Russian. His biography reveals that he met several former spies and continued to hone his football skills with the British residents team in Moscow. One of Riordan’s stranger claims is that he played several games in defence for Spartak Moscow. Riordan had always been a keen footballer and trained with the team. Riordan claims to have played twice for an injury hit Spartak, under the Russified psuedonym Eeordahnov. By all accounts he lacked the fitness of the pros and could not handle the speed of the opposition strikers. But Riordan’s is a great story nonetheless.

Whilst in Moscow Riordan mixed with several members of the Cambridge five. He remembers several cricket games organised by Donald Mclean whose public-school Englishness clearly stuck with him following his defection to Moscow. Mclean organised a match amongst defectors, translators and a Daily Worker correspondent. The match was umpired by another Cambridge spy, Guy Burgess, and supported by the British community in Moscow who apparently did their best to turn it into a kind of country fete. Mclean scored 15 and Riordan was out for a duck. When Burgess died aged 52 in 1963 Riordan acted as pallbearer at his funeral. He recalls inviting Mclean over to dinner. Whilst he describes him as ‘perfect gentleman’ it seems Mclean was a poor drunk who turned nasty during the cheese course. He describes the Cambridge spies as committed to Marxism, whilst his own commitment wavered having experienced the reality. Riordan returned to Britain in 1965 to complete his PhD studies and was promptly expelled from his local Communist Party branch for his reformist tendencies. He was able to find academic work in Bradford.

What connects the three cases above is history and ideology. Whilst Hobsbawm and Riordan were, at some point, committed Marxsists, GIlbert was not. But that did not stop the communists trying to recruit him. Perhaps the analytical mind draws the association between historians and communism, or the high boredom threashold that allows them to continue examining document after document when others might stop. I think that most of all, however, we should consider their ideological role in shaping and reshaping national and international narratives. Khrushchev thought historians were dangerous for the same reasons that George Orwell did in his celebrated novel 1984: they had the ability to influence how people thought about their nation. That is why MI5 spied on Hobsbawm et al, it is also why the Hungarians attempted to discover where Gilbert’s loyalties lay.