James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies

Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged 21, I stayed frequently at the large north London house where Klugmann (1912–1977) stored the overflow of his vast library. My hosts, who treated me almost as family, were members of the Communist party, as were lots of their friends whom I met. They included a good many of the dramatis personae of Geoff Andrews’s life of Klugmann (as well as several of the Hollywood Ten in exile from McCarthyism; curiously, none of them features in this biography).

Klugmann was a party functionary, loved and revered by my hosts and others as the CP’s chief theorist. ‘Those who knew him in later years,’ says Andrews, ‘found it extraordinary that this owl-like, donnish, avuncular, bespectacled and eccentric Billy Bunter could have parachuted into Yugoslavia or shared Mao’s base camp at a height of revolutionary agitation.’ He played a crucial role in the SOE, persuading Churchill and the Allies to back Tito and the Partisans. It is possible he died a virgin — Andrews thinks that he sacrificed his homosexuality to the party he stubbornly never left, saying: ‘Even his sexuality seems to have been repressed from an early age because of damage he perceived it would cause the Party.’

Andrews is not the first to credit Klugmann with ‘converting’ Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Michael Straight (though not Kim Philby) to communism, but the release of Klugmann’s MI5 file and Soviet intelligence files appears to show, too, that Klugmann manipulated them to fake breaking with the Party. Andrews says he crossed the line of being an honestly open Party member to committing espionage when he — as he himself seemed to feel — betrayed his friendship with John Cairncross by presenting him to the Soviet spymaster, Arnold Deutsch,
in 1937.