The Cambridge espionage gave difficulty for any parties to separate reality and make-believe. 50 years of the cold war tension between the Soviet Union and the western democracies made forming allies possible. The Soviet Union’s (KGB), the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the central intelligence agency (CIA) of the United States pitted intelligence wits against each other. The primary purpose was obtaining secrets of the other side and trying to neutralize them before being executed. Having the belief of democracy as being too weak to stand with the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and the KGB recruited Harold Philby as spies. Anthony Blunt was teaching at the university where he drafted the other spies who were students. With opposition to capitalist democracy as their motivation, the Cambridge spies enjoyed privileges as high ranking officers of the political adversary’s intelligence a problem the UK and US made causing difficulty in identifying and halting the spies operations.
The Cambridge spy’s opposition to capitalist democracy was their primary motivation towards pledging their alliance to the KGB. The 1930s had the democratic world in problems because of the widespread unemployment (Benmelech, Frydman, and Papanikolaou 2019). This was as a result of the great depression. It dawned on the Spies that doing away with fascism will only be achieved by the Soviet Union. Blunt, who was a communist, recruited a team of devotees like him. The world will be a better place with joint ownership of all means of production, according to them. The full social and economic equality of all members of society made them believers of Marxism–Leninism (Lownie 2016). The team was willing to betray their country and lie to achieve the goal of the KGB. By sending classified information to the Soviet Union, the governing system they opposed will fail to prompt the change they wished. The risks and the commitment they had as spies were inspired by their dislike of capitalist democracy and the promotion of communism.
During their lives as spies, privileges played a role in their choices and activities. The KGB recruited personnel from the university because of their ability to penetrate essential jobs in the government. Their strategic positioning gave them the privilege of becoming members of the British Establishment. This was a group of dominant elites selected with a specific secret agenda only known to them. According to Prickett (2017), Cambridge Apostles, an elite society at Cambridge University, also registered Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Guy Burgess as members. They later discovered their motive and accused them of having spied for the soviets. The privileges enjoyed in joining the elite groups at the university put them in positions that proved relevant to the KGB.
As World War II was underway, the Cambridge spies were actively climbing the ladders of the working environment. Maclean was going up the Foreign Office in England. Blunt was working as an officer in MI5 Security Service, and Burgess was an intimate of prominent politicians. Philby was posted in the British embassy in Washington DC as an SIS officer (Davenport-Hines 2018). The privileges they received from being top officials in the United States and the United Kingdom’s governments played a crucial role in the choices and activities imposed. The KGB got better because of their spies infiltrated the enemies. As the head of the SIS anti-Soviet section, Philby used his position to ensure as much classified information as possible was sent to the Russians. He even warned he’s counterpart Maclean that the US and the British Intelligence had learned that he was a spy enabling him to flee before being captured. The power privileges blanketed the Cambridge spies in their choices and activities during the whole time.
The UK and US intelligence services made mistakes in identifying and halting spies operations. The infiltration process was simple, making the KGB think the Cambridge spies were working for the British Intelligence. The SIS was looked at as the most sophisticated and ingenious of all the capitalist intelligent services. They were believed to have the capability of duplicity and convoluted conspiracies. It defied logic that the Englishmen were now in the path of KGB. They strongly doubted if the spies had penetrated the British intelligence. The Russian forces had a notion that the British Intelligence were onto them. Despite all these doubts, they could not risk compromising their assets, and they lived on the hope that they had the upper hand. However, this was one of the mistakes made by the UK and US intelligence. They allowed men with left-wing backgrounds to assume positions of trust in their establishments. Harold Philby had helped a communist escape from Vienna and then married one from that area (Davenport-Hines 2018). He came out clean after going through all the intelligence security checks SIS carries out on all those it recruited. This was the primary problem that led to the solidification of the spies within the systems, which made it difficult to halt their activities.
The first problem led to the difficulty in pointing out moles within the intelligence. The number of infiltrations gave the KGB an upper hand in evacuating their assets once they got compromised. Philby, as the head of the anti-Soviets, knew every information, regardless of the clearance level. Even when the organizations tried to keep the secrets within the select few, one of the spies would be among them. While launching an investigation on Maclean, efforts to prove he was indeed a spy were futile because Philby tipped him off. He sent Burgess to England, where Maclean was serving (The Foreign Office), and in no time they had defected to the Soviet Union (West, 2017). This showed how much compromised the different intelligence was as it proved impossible to get any spies. The only reason Harold Philby was suspected is because of his close relations with Burgess. The spy war era also made it impossible to write about any of the occurrences. It had to take the KGB, CIA, and SIS files to be open to scrutiny to the public. The sharing of ideas at that time was impossible, making it much more difficult to identify them. The combination of these mistakes created difficulty in identification and halting moles by the UK and US intelligence.
The Cambridge spies come up with a way that will bring the end to capitalist democracy. This motivation and the privilege positions they held made it difficult for the UK and the US government to identify and halt their practices. In their time at the university, they spied on British Establishment and Cambridge Apostles, who were the secret elite groups. They further went on working for the UK and US intelligence and leaked a lot of classified information. The deep infiltration into these agencies brought the rise of moles and made it difficult to halt their misdeeds. Their maneuver to the top was swift, making the KGB doubt their loyalty. However, they provided a lot of classified information that was accurate after some follow up, proving Cambridge spies loyalty to their cause.