The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives

This book is worth reading if only for the chapters on the Great Illegals; Blunt and Burgess; The Vegetarian (John Cairncross); Atom Secrets; and the Philby Reports--excerpts from the KGB files. Many of these present hard intelligence. However, Philby's detailed report on wild goings-on in London clubs (including The Nuthouse) and their frequenters (including Happy Harbottle, Snooty Parker, and Buffles Milbanke) must surely have been a colossal joke at the expense of the KGB, which was always pestering Philby to answer the same tiresome questions over and over. West's chapters on the early history of the Soviet Secret Service, which seem to be well documented, are more of interest to the scholar than the lay person. But I must say that I found the book absorbing as a whole.

This is the most sensational volume to appear so far in Yale University Press's rapidly growing library on Soviet espionage during the 1930s and 40s. The authors-espionage journalist Nigel West (pseudonym of Rupert Allason, a Conservative ex-MP) and Oleg Tsarev, a former KGB operative posted to London-accessed Moscow Center files to confirm, disconfirm, or extend what has long been known, believed, or suspected about the Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross) as well as a host of lesser but highly effective agents. Richly detailed and slickly written, The Crown Jewels is a riveting read and a potential supplement to Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilev's The Haunted Wood and another Yale volume Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. But let the reader beware: West does not play entirely straight with the reader. Wrapping up a long and important chapter on Cairncross, he asserts that after exposure in 1979, the first atomic spy "fled to France and completed his memoirs shortly before his death in 1995." In fact, Cairncross lived in Italy for well over a decade after The London Times named him and a half-dozen "mole journalists" (including West) began detailing his activities, often with Cairncross's limited and self-serving cooperation. But-most interestingly-during Cairncross's last months, spent not in France but in the Cotswolds (with the permission of H.M. Government), West himself ghost-wrote, packaged, and marketed the first version of the verbally incapacitated Fifth Man's "recollections", The Enigma Spy. Based on Cairncross's fragmentary notes and his second wife's recall of his table talk, that book, published in 1997, is now widely discredited. Why the mis- (and dis-) information? Why the coverup of West's intimate connection with Cairncross? Could this book contain other such "problems"? Persuasive as The Crown Jewels may be, it must be read with a gimlet eye.