Published in The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 7, 26 April 2007

Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess
by S.J. Hamrick
Yale University Press, 297pp

Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.

By the onset of the cold war, Philby was an officer in His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) in charge of Section IX, its anti-Soviet unit. Burgess was in the BBC and then the Foreign Office. Maclean was a fast-rising British diplomat—in the Paris embassy on the eve of the German invasion, later in the Washington embassy, and a member of the Joint Policy Committee, an Anglo-American group that dealt with atomic bomb matters. Cairncross was secretary to Lord Hankey, minister without portfolio in Churchill’s War Cabinet, and had such access to British secrets that he was able to tell Moscow in September 1941 that Britain was going to build an atomic bomb, only five days after the government had made that decision.[1] Blunt, the most aristocratic of the five, was a distant cousin of the Queen and a well-known scholar of seventeenth-century French art at Cambridge who later became director of the Courtauld Institute in London. As a member of MI5 during World War II, he was privy to Ultra, Britain’s top-secret code-breaking operation, and passed to Moscow what he learned from Ultra of German military plans.

By any reckoning this would make these traitors one of the most successful espionage rings in history. But now S.J. Hamrick, a former American Foreign Service officer, has plowed through practically all the books on the subject and consulted intelligence documents recently declassified in Washington, London, and Moscow and arrived at a new conclusion about them. He paid particular attention to the Venona archive, a cache of encrypted Soviet intelligence cables that were read by British and American code-breakers during the cold war. Some of the cables were released by the US National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in 1995 and 1996. Hamrick’s research has enabled him to show in a most convincing manner that the accepted accounts of the espionage of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean are at best flawed, and often plain wrong. Well, a lot of spy stories are wrong; neither spies nor intelligence services are given to writing to authors or newspapers to put the record straight. A book correcting errors and exaggerations in the accounts of the Ring of Five might interest spy buffs, but what new material does Hamrick claim to have?

In the second part of his book, Hamrick sets out to reveal a secret British deception operation which he says took advantage of the unfolding of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean investigation to turn the tables on the KGB and its servants. The aim, as Hamrick suggests in his title, was to deceive the deceivers. Furthermore, argues Hamrick, this was accomplished without the permission or knowledge of the British or American governments. Nor was this Western deception trivial stuff, involving the doublecrosses, recruitment efforts, and other games usually played between rival intelligence agencies. The plan was intended to convince Moscow that the US and Britain were ready to mount a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union that could cost the lives of millions. This was not true and would have been a gigantic bluff to conceal the fact that the West did not have the means to do any such thing.

If this deception plan did exist and was put into operation, then Hamrick’s book reveals a cold war event of major historical importance. But he himself is quick to admit that he has no proof of such a plot. He writes, “Not one shred of documentary evidence has yet been found nor is ever likely to be found to support it.” From where, then, did he ever get the idea that it happened?

Mostly by deduction. He makes a good case that ranking members of British intelligence—among them Dick White, then of MI5, and Jack Easton of MI6—knew that Philby was a traitor well before the generally accepted date on which he fell under suspicion—May 1951. But since they allowed him to continue his work for Moscow, Hamrick concludes they must have been using him in a deception operation. He then produces a source to confirm both his theory and the nature of the deception:

In 1976 an experienced and respected US army intelligence officer then in retirement disclosed that Philby had been used in Washington “to pass fictitious information about the effectiveness of the Strategic Air Command and the size of the US atomic arsenal at the time of the Korean War.” The comment was made by General Edwin L. Sibert during a series of conversations with Anthony Cave Brown, an English writer researching a book on Sir Stewart Menzies, “C,” the Chief of MI6. Cave Brown included the remark in his Menzies biography published in 1988.

General Sibert gave no further details and since he died in 1977, Hamrick has only Cave Brown’s account on which to rely. Here we have a major difficulty: Cave Brown was a notoriously unreliable journalist and author, given to mixing fact and fantasy with a skill that made untangling them impossible. Cave Brown died in July 2006, and London’s Guardian newspaper said in an obituary that he was “a buccaneering journalist who seldom let the facts get in the way of a good story, which may explain why he took a special interest in espionage and conspiracy theories when he turned to writing books.”[2]

Without anything more substantial to justify Hamrick’s thesis, unless something emerges from the Venona or other archives that remain unreleased—a highly unlikely event—then the central part of his book, the deception operation, however plausibly presented, will remain no more than an interesting theory.

When the Ring of Five scandal was first exposed in 1967, not much was known to the public about Burgess and Maclean and virtually nothing was known about Philby. The British government had succeeded in painting the Burgess and Maclean defection to Moscow in May 1951 as a drunken impulse of two unimportant junior diplomats who were already punished by being forced to live in the USSR. Philby’s flight from Beirut to Moscow in 1963 was similarly dismissed and received little more than a few paragraphs in the British press. Then at the suggestion of Jeremy Isaacs, head of current affairs at Thames Television, and provoked by the remarks of a former Foreign Office official, John Sackur, who was seeking a job as a foreign correspondent—”You’ll never be able to publish the Philby story—it is a scandal that goes to the highest in the land”—the then editor of the London Sunday Times, Harold Evans, assigned the paper’s investigative team, Insight, on which I was then working, to look into Philby’s flight.

The Times’s editor in chief, Denis Hamilton, objected; publicity would help the Russians and could put SIS officers at risk. Hamilton went to see the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who arranged a meeting with the chief of SIS, Sir Dick White. Hamilton agreed that the Sunday Times would show SIS each article before it was published so as to make sure no one would be endangered. Hamilton did not inform the reporters working on the story of this deal but as I made inquiries among retired spies it became fairly clear that some sort of accommodation had been reached between the paper and SIS. Nevertheless, our findings were sensational. When we published the early results of our investigation, the British public learned for the first time of the Ring of Five’s betrayal. Philby’s attempts to undermine Western security, we found, had been constant and relentless, his access to our secrets apparently total. We homed in on two examples. The first was his job in charge of SIS’s anti-Soviet section. If the officer in charge of Britain’s anti-Soviet plans was a Soviet agent himself, how could any anti-Soviet operation succeed?

We looked particularly hard at Philby’s appointment in 1949 as liaison officer between British intelligence and the CIA/FBI. This post, we wrote, would have given him access to whatever the CIA was planning against Moscow, and names of whoever the FBI was investigating as possible KGB spies. We were soon joined by other journalists, historians, academics, and scriptwriters. I wrote so much about Philby in Washington that Hamilton chided me in his gentle manner that I had become Philby’s public relations officer. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had worked for SIS, attracted attention when he suggested that if Philby had not been uncovered, in time he could well have become chief of the SIS and thus been in a position to run the intelligence cold war against the Soviet Union to Moscow’s advantage. But what most excited readers—and Hamrick misses this—is not what secrets the Ring of Five revealed, but who had revealed them. As le Carré later put it, “The avenger stole upon the citadel and destroyed it from within.” The very class of Englishman the British people relied on to protect the nation had betrayed them, and one of them none other than a distant member of the royal family. (A West End play by Alan Bennett had a scene in which the Queen, secretly aware of Blunt’s treachery, subtly tries to get him to confess to her.)

Among Philby’s deepest secrets, the story goes, was that he had access to the Venona intercepts, the name given to decrypts of cable traffic between the Soviet consulate in New York and Moscow. These cables were being painstakingly broken by American and British cryptographers and had a major part in most postwar spy cases. In early 1951 Philby realized from Venona transcripts that the FBI was closing in on Maclean, then head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, and that MI5 was planning to investigate him soon. Fearful that Maclean would crack, Philby sent Burgess from Washington to London to oversee Maclean’s escape.

Everything went wrong—an intelligence nightmare. Philby told me about this in a week-long interview in Moscow in January 1988. Burgess was to accompany Maclean across the Channel to France in case he tried to back out at the last minute. Instead, in May 1951, Burgess went too, all the way to Moscow, both never to return. Since Burgess, contrary to KGB rules, had shared a house in Washington with Philby, Philby was immediately under suspicion. He was ordered back to London from Washington, faced an inconclusive MI5 trial, and was sacked. Eventually he got a job as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist in Beirut. He kept contact with SIS, but his career with the KGB was over.

When SIS had enough admissible evidence against Philby, it sent a senior officer to Beirut to try to get him to confess. Philby listened, procrastinated, and then, in January 1963, put into effect a KGB escape plan and went to Moscow, abandoning everyone and everything close to him: his wife, children, family, friends. After our series of articles in 1967, the subsequent books and articles produced little new information. Philby’s own book, My Silent War, was published in 1968. Heavily censored by the Soviets, often inaccurate, it was pored over by Western intelligence officers looking for clues, messages, and disinformation. They were disappointed. In 1988 Philby died in Moscow. He had said himself, a few months earlier, that he had no regrets, that he had made the right decision back in the 1930s to commit himself to communism and had looked forward to its coming triumphs.

Burgess had died in 1963 in Moscow and Maclean had died in 1983. Thus, none of the three lived to see the collapse of communism. With Philby’s book we could surely have been forgiven for thinking that the Ring of Five never faced justice. With Philby, Burgess, and Maclean dying in the USSR, and Cairncross dying in France, where he had moved as a precaution even though MI5 knew it lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute him, they got away with their treachery.

Blunt’s fate was quite different. In 1964 he accepted a deal. The government would grant him immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession and for revealing all he knew about his fellow traitors and their KGB controllers. Once he had his immunity, Blunt stalled. Years passed and despite regular interrogations MI5 considered it was getting nowhere. Meanwhile, Blunt was able to continue his successful academic career and his position as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. He also kept his knighthood, which he had been awarded in 1956. A group of senior officers, outraged that Blunt had got away with his treachery and suspecting that his royal connections had something to do with it, embarked on a secret unauthorized campaign to “out” Blunt and destroy him. Influential journalists were briefed and one senior officer even managed to get into 10 Downing Street in June 1974 to warn the prime minister, Harold Wilson, through his Cabinet secretary, that there could be other cases of KGB penetration, possibly in the intelligence services themselves.

In 1979 Andrew Boyle, a former wartime intelligence officer turned author and broadcaster, published A Climate of Treason in which the main character, “Maurice,” is a thinly disguised Blunt. The press jumped on it and there were questions in the House of Commons. Briefed by MI5, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that Blunt’s immunity from prosecution did not include a guarantee to him of secrecy and she named him as a member of the Ring of Five. He was publicly disgraced, stripped of his honors, shunned by most of his friends and colleagues, and died four years later, aged seventy-five. With Philby’s death several years later, it seemed time to consign the entire story to cold war history.

Now Hamrick has put forward a radical new version of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean story. He argues that we got a lot of it wrong. Quite likely. Trying to reconstruct a man’s life by interviewing his friends and colleagues, many of whom were in the intelligence world themselves, was journalistically perilous and my interview in Moscow with Philby himself, which had been arranged by the KGB, left many unanswered questions. Why did Moscow allow it? Was I being used? To what end?

Hamrick’s revisionist account forces anyone who ever wrote about Philby, Burgess, and Maclean to ask: Why didn’t we think of that at the time? The most glaring example was our mistaken belief that by being liaison officer to the CIA and FBI, Philby was at the heart of Western intelligence operations against communism. Hamrick reminds us that the CIA in 1949 was an incompetent small-scale spy service scattered all over Washington desperately looking for a role for itself. When it started promoting subversion behind the iron curtain, its plans—attempting to organize, for example, a Hungarian anti-Communist army in Austria—were so ill-conceived and so optimistic as to border on fantasy. When they failed, as they were bound to do, the CIA kept quiet until, in the 1960s, the growing celebrity of Philby offered the agency the possibility of blaming some of the failures on him. It was Philby, for example, who, according to US informants, betrayed the British plan in 1949 to drop anti-Communist, expatriate Albanians back into their country to sabotage the regime and create subversion. In consequence they were all arrested and executed. But Hamrick says Philby had little or nothing to do with the betrayal. He notes that the first British landings on the Albanian coast had already taken place by the time Philby arrived in Washington, and that there is no evidence that he had been informed about them. He also lacked a good courier to the KGB at that time.

Hamrick seems to me right. By an odd coincidence, I met a former high-ranking officer of the Albanian secret police at a diplomatic party in London a few years ago. He insisted that his agents had penetrated all the Albanian émigré organizations, that they knew about the British plan early on, and that Philby was not involved. His claims, if he was willing to repeat them, could have provided the beginning of an inquiry into the truth about Philby’s espionage; but such an inquiry will probably never be made.

Hamrick says that there were many strange anomalies in the Philby case that should have alerted all of us to the possibility that there was more going on in Washington at the time than we imagined. Maclean’s escape plan in retrospect seems silly. If the aim was to get Maclean to safety in Moscow before MI5 could interrogate him, and to have Burgess accompany him so that he would be sure to get there, why send Burgess to London by sea? Why allow him to hang around in New York enjoying a long goodbye before embarking? In allowing this delay, what could Philby have been thinking? Hamrick quotes Rebecca West as wondering why Philby did not simply hand over the problem to Moscow.

After all, in the summer of 1950, the KGB had quickly spirited Morris and Lona Cohen, an American husband-and-wife spy team, out of the US, a step ahead of the FBI. KGB agents since 1938, they had delivered stolen atomic secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviet consulate in New York. As Lona Cohen recalled in Moscow in 1990, “A comrade came to our apartment and wrote a note, in case the FBI was listening, ordering us to leave the country immediately. We were gone within the hour.”[3]

Much of the accepted Philby, Burgess, and Maclean story does not make sense. Hamrick’s main point is that there were people on both sides of the Atlantic in 1949 and 1950 who thought that Philby was a dubious character with a suspicious past. He had left-wing beliefs at Cambridge; in Vienna in 1934 he married Litzi Friedman, a known Communist activist; he worked for the Communist underground in Austria. Most suspicious of all, there was the case of Konstantin Volkov, a KGB officer in Turkey in 1945 who had offered to defect and bring with him the names of Soviet agents in Britain. Sent from London by SIS to handle the defection, Philby, worried that Volkov might be able to expose him, tipped off the KGB, which immediately spirited Volkov back to Moscow, never to be seen again.

As for Maclean, Hamrick says that Dick White, the chief of MI5, believed that his guilt had been established beyond question by the 1948–1950 Venona decrypts. So in 1950 we have the chief of MI5 sitting on proof that Maclean is a traitor, and several senior British intelligence officers privately convinced—but without sufficient evidence—that Philby is too. Yet they did not act on this information until a year later. It is Hamrick’s contention that some of these officers took matters into their own hands to mount a deception operation against Moscow and chose the principal traitor, Kim Philby, as their conduit to do it. Why does he believe that they would want to do this?

Hamrick recalls that in 1949 and 1950, the West was in fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Red Army had 400,000 men at arms within striking distance of Berlin. A few senior military officers and Royal Air Force officers backed by some like-minded Americans believed that the threat of atomic retaliation was the most effective deterrent against Moscow. The US Air Force had a war plan: “Trojan,” which provided for the nuclear bombing of some two hundred Russian cities. The problem was that the West did not have the atomic bombs or the planes to carry out such an operation. Trojan and any other Anglo-US war plans were largely illusory and required a nuclear arsenal and a strategic strike force that would be inadequate for years to come. It was all a bluff.

Hamrick writes that the Western military planners failed to realize the respect that Stalin had for the US as the strongest nation on earth. But what mattered was what Washington and London thought Stalin believed. Many Western leaders were troubled by his apparent dismissal of the atomic bomb’s war-winning powers and troubled even more by Soviet doubt that the West was actually willing to use the bomb.

The British chiefs of staff, according to Hamrick, thought that the best deterrent against a Soviet attack would be “our known preparedness to defend ourselves and to hit back.” The only effective deterrent to a potential aggressor was tangible evidence of “known preparedness.” The vital word is “known.” It had to be known to Moscow. A propaganda campaign with blustering anti-Soviet speeches by politicians would not have worked. What the Anglo-American military planners needed was a way to let the Russians know about their plans for use of atomic weapons in retaliation for any Russian attack, and that they were willing to act on them.

The best possible way would be to get a message to Moscow through a Soviet agent so well placed in the West that theoretically he would have access to such secrets and be so completely trusted by the KGB that there would be no question about the authenticity of his information. He would need to have shown deep ideological commitment to communism and unswerving loyalty over a long period. Hamrick argues that Kim Philby, with his well-known left-wing background, would have been an ideal choice. Moreover, the way to plant the deceptive information on him without arousing his suspicions was already in place. MI6 in London ran a special high-security communications channel with the British embassy in Washington. The officer who handled the Washington end of this channel, encrypting and decrypting all the traffic, was Kim Philby.

Hamrick’s theory is that Philby would have read and passed on to Moscow a message or messages emphasizing the West’s determination to use the atomic bomb if need be, outlining collaboration between the RAF and then Strategic Air Command, and giving details of the Trojan war plan. The beauty of the plan was that if Philby were not a KGB agent, as the conspirators believed, and did not pass the information to Moscow, nothing would have been lost.

I have said earlier that the only hint that Hamrick can muster that any such deception operation occurred came to him via the work of Anthony Cave Brown, an author notorious for his cavalier attitude toward facts. And there is another difficulty with his story. Hamrick says Philby was the ideal Soviet agent on whom to plant the deceptive material because he was so well trusted by the KGB. But he was not. He had fallen prey to a paradoxical phenomenon in the intelligence game: often, the better the information a spy provides his masters, the less likely he is to be believed. Throughout Philby’s career with the KGB some new, ambitious case officer in Moscow would look at Philby’s file and wonder about the volume and apparent value of his material.

We know that in 1942 the KGB did what all intelligence services do when doubtful about an agent—it handed Philby’s entire file to a trusted desk officer who had previously had nothing to do with him and was therefore impartial, and asked for an evaluation. In Philby’s case, the officer was a woman, Elena Modrzhinskaya. According to Russian author Genrikh Borovik in his book The Philby Files,[4] the first point Elena Modrzhinskaya raised was: Could the British Secret Intelligence Service really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow? Steadily she developed the case against Philby. She noted that, without exception, his Soviet controllers had been shot for being German or Polish spies, or had defected to the West.

Then came the piece of evidence that Modrzhinskaya thought clinched matters. The British had intercepted and decoded a telegram from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to his foreign minister in Tokyo. Philby copied it and passed it on to the KGB. But Moscow already had a copy from another source and when it compared the two, the final paragraph was missing from Philby’s version. In it the Japanese ambassador suggested that Hitler might soon try to make a separate peace with Stalin, a vital piece of information.

Philby’s controller demanded an explanation from Philby. The answer, Philby said, was simple—at the time the British intercepted the message, radio reception was very poor, so the last part was garbled and could not be decoded. The KGB refused to believe him and accepted Modrzhinskaya’s conclusion—Philby was an SIS plant and so too were Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross. Maclean was a genuine recruit but he was being secretly manipulated by the others.

Her conclusion was, of course, totally wrong. But according to Borovik, who had access to Philby’s personal KGB file, having made this decision the KGB bosses now displayed the twisted logic that distinguishes spying from other human activities. The reasoning in Moscow went: Elena Modrzhinskaya has made out such a powerful case against Philby and his colleagues that we will have to act on it. But what if in the end she turns out to be wrong? We could be blamed for having got rid of four devoted penetration agents. We might be shot. So let’s not cut off contact with these English agents altogether. If they are working for the British they will have to give us some genuine material to maintain their credibility and that material will be valuable to us. We will pretend that nothing has happened and do our best to reinforce Philby’s conviction that we trust him and his Cambridge colleagues completely.

Hamrick is aware of this background and therefore that the deceptive operation, if it did indeed exist, could have failed because the KGB did not entirely trust Philby. (Hamrick quotes Borovik extensively, lists his book in his notes, and describes him as “a valuable source.”) But he is dismissive of the Modrzhinskaya affair: “During the 1940s,” he writes, “Moscow Center suspected [Philby] of being a disinformation agent under British control,” but he adds that those doubts had passed, a claim which, in view of the KGB’s cultivation and use of agents over decades, seems highly unlikely.

Hamrick has written a valuable book because it challenges many of our assumptions about the most-discussed espionage events of the cold war. But it fails when it tries to show that an anonymous group of Anglo-American military intelligence officers turned these events around and deceived the deceivers. Hamrick prudently excuses in advance his lack of evidence for this: “Military and intelligence operations that leave no paper behind don’t exist except in memory. And after the memories have perished, nothing is left.”

[1] See Nigel West, Mortal Crimes (Enigma, 2004), p. 15.

[2] Dan van der Vat, “Anthony Cave Brown,” The Guardian, October 17, 2006.

[3] They later turned up in London as Peter and Helen Kroger, ostensibly antiquarian book dealers, but actually communications officers for Conon Molody, who ran the Portland Naval Base spy ring. Exposed by Molody’s sloppy spycraft, they were sentenced to twenty years in jail, only to be exchanged after eight years for Gerald Brooke, a British lecturer, held in the USSR for distributing anti-Soviet pamphlets in Moscow. This was a deal so favorable to the KGB that it has remained inexplicable to this day. Lona died in Moscow in 1992 and Morris died a year later.

[4] Little, Brown, 1994.

Buy Deceiving the Deceivers — US | UK

Published in The Independent, 14 October 2005

The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
(Fourth Estate, £25)

This brilliant but enormous book (no less than 1,366 pages) has been sixteen years in the making. Its obvious ingredients are 328,000 notes, documents and dispatches and Robert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience of reporting the Middle East. But there is also a hidden element – the author’s ethical, philosophical and moral approach to his life’s work.

Fisk believes that most journalists who have reported from the tragedy-strewn and bloody countries of the Middle East have failed their readers and viewers. He has decided that they have been competent – even outstanding – in giving the who, how, where, what and when of events but have left out the “why”. He says that every journalist in the Middle East needs to walk around with a history book in his back pocket to remind him or her why we got to where we are; why the injustices and horrors of yesteryear are engraved in the people’s minds and why they have a powerful influence on what happens next.

This conviction was put to the test in a most personal manner. Fisk was on the Afghanistan border in November 2001 when a crowd of refugees from the American bombing turned on him and began to stone him. His head was split open, blood clouded his vision and for a while it looked as if he might not survive. He fought back and then realised what he was doing. “What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and attacking and punching the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country – among others – had been killing. . . God spare me, I thought. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.”

He escaped and decided he would not be able to live with himself unless he stuck to his convictions and explained to his readers why the Afghan crowd had attacked him. So he wrote about the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and how the determination of the Alliance that “good” must triumph over “evil” even if it meant burning and maiming civilians and their families. He concluded that if he were an Afghan refugee, “I would have done what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

It is a measure of how intensely Fisk is hated by some that his mail included unsigned Christmas cards regretting that the Afghans had not finished the job. Americans were particularly vicious. The Wall Street Journal carried an article which was headed “A self-loathing multi-culturalist gets his due.” The Canadian/American columnist, the pugilistic Mark Steyn, wrote of Fisk’s account of his ordeal: “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.”

It is not only Fisk’s efforts to explain the Muslim side of events but to understand them that makes him enemies. He is also seen as an apologist for the West’s worst bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. Fisk has interviewed bin Laden three times, once in the Sudan and twice in Afghanistan. The two men got on well, even though Fisk says that bin Laden tried to recruit him. From Fisk’s description of the meetings we get an impression of the man very different from the one generally disseminated in the West. Fisk says bin Laden is devout, shy, thoughtful and like Bush and Blair possesses that dangerous quality – total self-conviction. Fisk says bin Laden has an almost obsessive interest in history and believes that it is working against the United States for whom hatred “lies like blanket” over the Middle East.

Fisk got his break on The Times in its glory days when, aged only 29, the then foreign editor Louis Heren, offered him the Middle East as his beat. He had the temperament for the job – adventurous but not foolhardy: “There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.” He stayed with The Times for 18 years and says it was always loyal to him and that he had great trust in its editors.

Then in July 1988 a story he had written for The Times, the results of his investigation into the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by the American warship Vincennes, killing 290 passengers and crew, was cut and changed, its meaning distorted by omission. “This, I felt sure was the result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times . . . Readers of The Times had been solemnly presented with a fraudulent version of the truth.” So he resigned and went to the work for The Independent where he remains today. In the book he justifies his long explanation of why he left The Times by writing–and any serious reporter has to agree with him–”When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job, we have also become a party to the events that we are supposed to be reporting.”

Fisk’s critics complain that he is not objective and detached. This is right. He is subjective and engaged. What’s wrong with that? We are talking here about different views on what journalists, especially foreign correspondents, are for. Fisk has thought a lot about this. He writes: “I suppose, in the end, we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: ‘We didn’t know – no one told us.’ ”

But he quickly realised that this is not enough. Our leaders present war as a drama, a battle of good versus unspeakable evil and demand that we are either with them or against them. They promise that with God on our side and minus a few hard-won civil liberties we will march to eventual victory, But, as Fisk points out: “War is not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.” Then one day he meets Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist whose articles on the occupied Palestinian territories Fisk rates higher than anything written by non-Israeli reporters. She gives him a better definition of his duty: “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.”

So he began to challenge authority, all authority, “especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they decide that they will kill and others will die.” He continues to fulfill this duty with passion and anger. As he admits, his work, especially in this powerfully-written book,is filled with accounts of horror, pain and injustice. His triumph is that he has turned a slightly dubious and over-romanticised craft into a honorable vocation.

Buy The Great War for Civilisation — US | UK

Published in The Monthly, September 2005

A couple of years ago at Britain’s premier literary festival, Hay-on-Wye, two star performers dominated the programme: ex-President Bill Clinton and journalist/author/commentator Christopher Hitchens. Clinton arrived in his Secret Service car, attended a few parties, hit a few golf balls, made a politically-stirring speech and departed to a boo or two for keeping a crowd of well-wishes waiting.

Hitchens arrived jet-lagged after a seven-hour plane trip from America and four-hour car journey from London, dishevelled and clearly under the spell of an indeterminate number of whiskies. To the barely-concealed alarm of the festival organisers, he went to the performers’ hospitality room and ordered more. It was going to be a long-night.

The next morning, I went to hear him talk about his hobby (obsession?), the works of P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The venue was packed, a sell-out. “What are you lot doing here on a Sunday morning?” said Hitchens in mock reproach. “You should be in church.” He then went on without a note or a pause to hold us spellbound for an hour. He was witty, provocative, original, entertaining and informative. He got a standing ovation and easily ranked as the festivals’ most popular attraction.

Yet I doubt if there was a single member of that liberal, book-buying, Guardian-reading audience who did not know that this was the same Christopher Hitchens who had stunned the international Left by abandoning his socialist ideals, turning on his old comrades, and embracing George Bush, Washington’s neo-conservatives and the invasion of Iraq.

The shockwaves this caused is best expressed by writer Tariq Ali, a friend of Hitchens for more than 30 years. He says: “On 11th September 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed the planes they had hijacked into the twin towers of New York. Among the casualties, although unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again. The vile replica currently on offer is a double.”

Another admirer, the Independent newspaper commentator Johan Hari – even now unable to give up totally on Hitchens – has puzzled over what happen to him. “He was sailing along the slow certain route from being the Left’s belligerent bad boy to being one of its most revered old men. And then a hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon – a building which stands just ten minutes from Hitchens’s home. . . within a year, Hitchens was damning his former comrades as ‘soft on Islamic fascism’, giving speeches at the Bush White House, and describing himself publicly as ‘a recovering ex-Trotskyite’.”

There are several questions we need to answer. Why the volte face and is it irreversible? And why does Hitchens’s current stance appear not to have seriously dented his public image? This is a good moment to do so because his latest collection of columns and essays, “Love, Poverty and War” (Atlantic Books, London) has just been published. Let’s begin with few biographical details and then see what clues there are in the essays.

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on 13 April 1949 in Britain. His was a military family, which explains a lot. “I come from a longish line of military and naval types on my father’s side and was brought up on and around bases and within earshot of tales of stoicism and even courage. I was very glad that during the long peace that followed the ‘boom’ of my babyhood, to be the first Hitchens for a few generations who did not even have to contemplate donning a uniform.”

At Oxford University he became a Trotskyist and wrote for the magazine “International Socialism” – “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism.” He left Oxford with a third class degree and went to work for the Left-wing “New Statesman” magazine in the 1970s where he became friends with writers like Martin Aims and Ian McEwan. He built a reputation as an aggressive left-winger, homing in on targets like the Vietnam war, Henry Kissinger and the Catholic Church.

He moved to the United States in the 1980s to test himself in what he saw as the premier league. There he found American attitudes to social intercourse very liberating. He could not only put English politeness, modesty, reticence, good form and understatement behind him but make a career from doing so. He expanded his targets to include Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and American policy in Latin America. He opposed the first Gulf War, arguing that Saddam Hussein was the victim of an American conspiracy and had been lured into the war by President Bush.

The first hint of his changing views probably came with the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie over his anti-mullah novel “Satanic Verses”. He accused Islam of theocratic fascism and the international, multicultural left of being soft on Muslim extremists. He hardened his stance after 9/11, supporting US military action in Afghanistan and becoming increasingly alienated from his left-wing colleagues on The Nation.

He resigned from the magazine in 2002 after a highly-charged exchange of letters with its most prominent left-wing contributor and anti-war leader Noam Chomsky. Hitchens said he could no longer contribute to the magazine because he believed that its editors, its readers, and writers such as Chomsky considered the American Attorney General John Ashcroft to be a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.

It is now not easy to pin a political label on Hitchens. He has said he no longer feels part of the Left and does not object to being described as a “former” Trotskyist, with the emphasis on “former”. He admits he still admires Trotsky and that his political and historical view of the world has been influenced by Marxist thought.

He supported Bush during the presidential election, but not enthusiastically, and had a supporting word for Kerry saying it was “Indecent” for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. “There’s no one to whom he can surrender, is there?” Then last year he confessed to British columnist Johan Hari, that it is not Bush he admires but “pure” neo-Conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz which to my mind puts Hitchens a long way to the Right and with little chance of any change.

It is clear from the various essays in the book that Hitchens chooses his subjects very carefully. They need to fit specific criteria. There would be no sense in writing a brilliant attack on a non-entity. Who would read it? Equally, there would be no sense in demolishing the reputation of someone who had already lost it; Lord Archer, for instance. Next, gentle criticism will not suffice. The attack must be so wounding that it will outrage many readers.

Here’s a contemporary example: Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US serviceman who was killed in Iraq. Mrs Sheehan camped outside President Bush’s Texas ranch in protest against the war and says she will stay there until the President agrees to meet her. Her protest attracted the support of many other bereaved mothers. Hitchens response was to accuse Mrs. Sheehan of “spouting piffle” and lambaste her protest as “dreary sentimental nonsense”.

Amazingly, he is sometimes surprised and sensitive if his target hits back. When the rebel Labour MP, George Galloway, who had openly supported Saddam Hussein, went to Washington and wiped the floor with a Senate Committee trying to link him with the “oil for food” scandal, Hitchens turned up outside the hearing to put some awkward questions to Galloway. Galloway used Hitchens-style tactics to deflect them, abusing Hitchens as a “drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay”. Hitchens later complained in a newspaper column that Galloway had been “unfair”.

But he is not easily intimidated. He lives on the top floor of one of Washington’s tallest buildings. He describes in the book how in the autumn of 1993, the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism urgently advised him to change this address “because of credible threats received after my wife and daughter and I had sheltered Salman Rushdie as a guest and had arranged for him to be received at the cowering Clinton White House.

“I thought, then as now, that the government was doing no more than covering its own behind by giving half-alarmist and half-reassuring advice. In other words, I have a quarrel with theocratic fascism even when the administration does not, and I hope at least some of my friendly correspondents are prepared to say the same.”

On another occasion, he went to introduce his documentary film on Mother Teresa, which his producer had, over Hitchens’s objections, called “Hell’s Angel”. “I was picketed furiously by a group called the New York Lambs of Christ, a distinctly sheep-like organisation.” The police told him he would require a full security escort because some dangerous criminal elements had been spotted in the crowd. “I didn’t believe that the Lambs would resort to bloodshed and declined the protection.”

But as he pushed his way towards the hall, he was accosted by a gang of bearded, leather-jacketed roughnecks. “I approached them and asked them what they wanted. With some awkwardness, they handed me a notarised ‘cease and desist’ order.” It was from the local chapter of the Hell’s Angles claiming that Hitchens had violated their trademark.

He is prepared to debate with anyone. He debated with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival over Moore’s film ” Fahrenheit 9/11″, and then followed it up by giving him a good kicking in Slate in June, 2004, included in this book. “Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognise courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause in front of credulous audiences is everything.” And then he offered Moore another debate. “Any time, Michael my boy. Let’s redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

The title of the book, presumably Hitchens’s idea, comes from an old saying that has it, “Life is incomplete unless love, poverty and war have been experienced.” Hitchens runs through these three states in his introduction to the book. I wonder if he realises how much of himself he reveals in doing so.

On war, he writes, “My father’s lightly-armed cruiser HMS Jamaica delivered the coup de grace to quite a serious Nazi battleship named the Scharnhorst in December 1943, a much better and riskier day’s work than I have ever done, or will ever do.” Yet, now in his mid-fifties and with no compelling professional need to do so, he visits conflict zones from the Lebanon to Afghanistan and Iraq.

On love he is very brief, despite having children by more than one woman. “[W]hen I read Bertrand Russell on this matter as an adolescent and understood him to write with perfect gravity that a moment of such emotion was worth the whole of the rest of life, I devoutly hoped that this would be true in my own case. And so it has proved and so to the extent that I can regard the death I otherwise rather resent as laughable and impotent. . . My three children are all beautiful, intelligent and humorous, (I shall say nothing about their mothers except this: to have been lucky with women is to have been lucky tout court.)”

In his section on poverty Hitchens agrees he makes a very comfortable living from what he does. But I suspect that if his editors stopped paying him tomorrow he would continue to do it anyway. What can we make of all this – the writing, the lecturing, the debates, the intemperate attacks on anyone he disagrees with and the political transformation from darling of the Left to patriotic hero of the American Right?

The essays in this book vouch for Hitchens’s erudition, range of interests and writing skills. This explains the many admirers he has for the body of his work. But what is it? Is it nothing more than old-fashioned, “in your face” journalism pushed up-market, “trash the celebrity”, but with an intellectual slant?

Little old ladies ask him in bookshops is there not anything or anyone he likes? He gives an answer of sorts in his introduction. After listing all the things in his life he has reason to be grateful for, he writes: “I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.” Christopher, may already be too late.

Published in The Independent, 18 March 2005.

All of These People
A memoir by Fergal Keane
HarperCollins £18.99
395pp

Hooked on bullets and booze

This is a book about two Fergal Keanes. The first part tells in lyrical terms of his boyhood in an Ireland that has since disappeared. His father Eamonn was an actor whose talent was sabotaged by a lifelong love of drink that ruined his marriage and alienated him for many years from his son.

In fact, drink runs like a leitmotif through the book. In Keane’s early days in journalism, one gets the impression that there was hardly a reporter on the Irish papers who was sober long enough to write a story. Practical jokes were common, the victims usually junior journalists. One was sent to a council meeting to deliver to the city manager an important letter about the approaching St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The manager interrupted a speech, heaved with laughter and passed the letter back to the reporter. It read, “My name is John Breen and I want my arse painted green for St Patrick’s Day.”

Even at that early stage, Keane was dreaming of the day he would be a foreign correspondent, preferably in Africa, an area for which he had developed a passionate interest. He discovered his talent for reporting conflict in the 1984 marching season, when the police were trying to prevent Orangemen from marching through flashpoint areas in Co Armagh: “Surrounded by violence and chaos, I was focused and calm, observing and recording the battle”.

The second Fergal Keane now comes on stage. He made it to Africa, which he loved, and began covering for BBC radio the violence in South Africa between the ANC and Inkatha. Soon, he was as hooked on the addiction of conflict reporting as on the alcohol that addicted his father. Keane writes: “I felt afraid so much of the time and yet I felt at home in this craziness. I was more alive than at any time in my life.”

He was a member of what he and colleagues called the Bang Bang Club: a group of hardened war correspondents who did their best to pretend that what they watched, photographed and reported did not affect their psychological well-being. But some became emotionally crippled and at least one committed suicide.

Keane was himself by now fighting a battle against alcohol, but unable to break from the job: “I am on the front line, risking it all, our own correspondent calling out his news down a crackly line”. He reported the genocide in Rwanda and, with other correspondents, remains disturbed by it to this day. How were they able to leave threatened people behind to be slaughtered? He survived his alcohol problem but was still addicted to war. “We knew that when that war ended there would be a lull, then there would be another drama and the same media faces would turn up,” relieved by a new sense of purpose. “Alive again, yes, that’s the word, alive”.

But after Kosovo and Iraq, the death toll for war correspondents soared. It became safer to be a soldier than a reporter. Keane now had a son and “when the call came to return to Iraq, I told my editor I would not go”. When he now sees a colleague in a flak jacket, he feels “a momentary pang. It is a loss of a kind, I know that. But… I cherish the life I have.” This is a completely honest account of reporting conflict by a journalist who got out in time. He is one of the lucky ones.

Phillip Knightley’s updated history of war reporting, ‘The First Casualty‘, is published by Carlton.

Buy All of These People — US | UK

Published in The Bulletin, November 2003

Black Kettle and Full Moon
Daily Life in a Vanished Australia
by Geoffrey Blainey
Penguin Viking
484pp

This is history at its sparkling best–interesting, enlightening, painstaking and objective. If you want to know about prime ministers and politicians, wars and class, economics and production, religion and sport, then look elsewhere. This is a book about people, ordinary Australians, and how they organised their daily life a long while ago.

It describes where they lived, how they shopped, what they ate and how they cooked it, what they drank and why. It tell us how they kept warm and cool, how they lit their houses, what they wore and where they bought it. It begins in the middle of the 19th century when there were less than half a million white Australians and ends with the First World War when there were five million.

It was an era of plenty–in the 1880’s Australia probably had the highest standard of living in the world. It was an era of optimism and contentment. “Sail up Sydney Harbour, ride over a Queensland plain, watch the gathering of an Adelaide harvest, or mingle with the orderly crowd which throngs to a Melbourne Cup race,” wrote the English-born novelist Marcus Clarke, “And deny, if you can, that there is here the making of a great nation.”

Yet Australians of today, although they may have read about about the broad historical and political trends of the period, do not know how their ancestors coped with life. Blainey himself became aware of how little even historians knew about the everyday when citizens who set up folk and regional museums asked him questions about candles, tobacco tins, matches, bottles, jars, jam-making, shoelaces and billy cans.

“In a spasmodic way I began to collect the evidence in this book long before I decided to write the book,” he says. But where did he find the information? Sometimes living Australians could remember something a great-grandparent had told them. Newspapers of the period proved a gold mine. A report of a fire which destroyed a shop would list all its contents. Shipping notes listed cargoes, catalogues for trade fairs showed what was on sale, paintings revealed much when you knew what you were seeking, someone from a family of butchers would remember what was traditionally used in sausages as colouring and preservative.

So the book is fascinating in its detail. Prepare to have a lot of your cherished beliefs and prejudices shattered. Garlic was in common use in Australia long before the first Italian and Greeks immigrants arrived. Most Australian men did not drink beer but spirits, especially rum.

The favourite drink of everyone was tea. It was taken black, sweet and piping hot and more was drunk in Australia that in all of Continental Europe, far more than even the teeming population of India could down.
It was drunk morning, noon and night, with meals and in between. The meals were, of course, meat, meat and more meat. Before refrigeration there was no export market for meat so Australians had to eat the lot themselves. They tucked in with vigour. To know the full taste of meat was to be an Australian.

And not just beef and mutton. Butchers sold pig’s trotters, tripe, kidneys, brains and tongues, dripping and lard, flaps of mutton, sausages and saveloys and corned beef. Until state governments stepped in and passed protection laws, Australians also ate a wide variety of native birds, from swans to emus.

Blainey writes: “Visitors were less surprised by the vote than by the meat. That every man could vote was interesting. That nearly every man and woman could eat meat at nearly every meal was astonishing.”

Some parts of everyday life were more efficient than they are today. In Sydney in the 1880s you could post a letter early in the morning and receive a reply before sunset. Blainey modestly admits that after three decades as an historian, some of his discoveries suprised even him. “I did not know that each locality in Australia at one period kept a different time on its clocks.” When it was noon in Sydney, it was already two minutes past noon in Newcastle.

There is a lot more along these lines: you could have ice in your summer drinks but the ice was not from the local ice-works (they came later). It was cut from winter ponds near Boston and packed in straw brought as cargo on sailing ships to Australian ports.

And did you know that Australia had a distinctive odour? “We are near Australia,” said sailors as the ship approached land at the end of one long voyage. “Can’t you smell the flowers?” It was worth reading this excellent book just for that line.

Buy Black Kettle and Full Moon — US | UK

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 2003.

Paul McGeough is a distinguished member of a fast-vanishing band of journalists, the roving foreign correspondent. Once upon a time, every newspaper had at least one. In the golden age, the ’60s and ’70s, some had four or five.

Few lasted long. The things they had seen, the drink, the corrupting influence of expense accounts and five-star hotels, the strain of a part-time marriage and the deadening feeling that history was circular and what they were writing about they had written before, pushed them into early retirement. The accountants, appalled at what they cost, made certain they were not replaced.

McGeough is still there. Working out of New York, he wanders the world for the Herald and The Age. This book can be seen as an expansion of his experiences before and after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York – a thicker, richer version of his journalism.

“Nothing could prepare you for the reality of the destruction or the listless response of the inhabitants. The smell of decaying flesh came from buildings that still stood and from different sections of the rubble.”

I see it as more than that. It is a riposte to the oft-voiced criticism of modern foreign correspondents, typified by Professor Virgil Hawkins, of Osaka University: “They race from one humanitarian disaster to another, with little time or background knowledge to grasp the issues behind the conflicts they cover.”

McGeough’s book describes his working life – the difficulties, the discomforts, the danger. But it also has thoughtful social and political insights about the countries he visits. This is a serious book by a serious journalist, a man with his heart in the right place, who has a natural sympathy for the underdog. And, like all good journalists, McGeough has been blessed with the luck of being in the right place at the right time.

He was in his New York apartment, 34 floors above Ninth Avenue, when the al-Qaeda terrorists struck. Being a good reporter, he did his best to get to the scene and describe it:

Six blocks from what is left of the World Trade Centre, the streets are full of crying people. The city is totally shocked … A massive mushroom cloud hangs overhead … Papers that a few minutes ago were on people’s desks now litter the streets and float in the air like a blinding white snowstorm. It is 10.30am. The second tower has collapsed.

But McGeough is thoughtful, too. His reporting from Israel and the occupied territories shows how the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, seized the opportunity provided by George Bush’s war on terrorism to intensify Israel’s battle with the Palestinians and their suicide bombers. “In a five-minute address in which he used the word terrorisma 14 times, Sharon told Israelis: ‘We must fight this terrorism in an uncompromising war to uproot these savages.”‘

He says the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp was not a massacre, but quotes various international organisations as concluding that it could well have been a war crime.

His descriptions of what he saw in the camp, and the people he interviewed there, leave little doubt about his own conclusions:

Nothing could prepare you for the reality of the destruction or the listless response of the inhabitants. The smell of decaying flesh came from buildings that still stood and from different sections of the rubble.

He recounts how Israeli soldiers shot at journalists trying to enter Jenin, and how his way was blocked by machine-gun fire.

But McGeough’s sprint along the edge of death came not in Israel but in Afghanistan, in November 2001. He was riding on an armoured personnel carrier when it came under Taliban fire. A German correspondent sitting beside him, and two other correspondents, were killed. McGeough resists the temptation to become the hero of his own story, instead making the telling observation that “unlike the fighting armies and terrified civilian population, foreign journalists were there by choice”.

With America’s war on terrorism set to go on for the foreseeable future, McGeough will no doubt remain busy. He ends his admirable book with a few reflections on the major player in this deadly game:

The failure of the US to do anything about legitimate historic claims by oppressed minorities like the Palestinians and the Chechens ensured the continued festering of terrorist breeding grounds … But George W. Bush was determined to march on Baghdad. Somehow, the President was in the wrong place, fighting the wrong war.

Phillip Knightley is one of the world’s most distinguished investigative journalists, and the author of the classic work The First Casualty: The war Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (Prion and Johns Hopkins, revised edition 2000).

Buy Manhattan to Baghdad — US | UK

Published in British Journalism Review, Volume 13, No.3, 2002

Blood and Champagne:
The Life and Times of Robert Capa
by Alex Kershaw
(Macmillan, £20)

Let’s get the bad stuff over first. Robert Capa was a liar, a compulsive gambler, a depressive, a heavy drinker, and a womaniser (especially with prostitutes). He used people, broke promises and when he was accused of being a communist and the U.S. State Department kept his passport, he “named names”, to get it back.

At the urging of the appalling Henry Luce, the founder of Life and producer of the March of Time newsreel series, he staged Republican attacks on Fascist positions during the Spanish Civil War and filmed them, noting that they looked “more real” than if they had actually taken place. And, I maintain, he faked the most famous war photograph of all time, the Spanish soldier at the moment of death.

A review of this excellent, objective and exhaustive biography is not the place to go into all the evidence that made me conclude back in 1974 that the moment of death photograph was a fake. The author seems to me to do this admirably.

But I suspect that Capa did not set out deliberately to fool the world with the photograph. He posed it because he intended it to be symbolic, as, indeed, the caption with its first publication in the French magazine Vu in 1936 made clear.

But then, a year later, Life got hold of it and someone–no one will admit who–wrote a new caption that changed the photograph utterly: “A Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head.” It created a sensation and Capa was suddenly famous. I understand his dilemma. Should he have jumped up and down and shouted, “No. No. You’ve got it wrong. It’s not real?” Or just have kept quiet, telling himself that the fuss had nothing to do with him?

Perhaps it didn’t. The author has found a British academic, Caroline Brothers, who blames the public at large. “The fame of this photograph is indicative of a collective imagination which wanted and still wants to believe certain things about the nature of death in war. What this image argued was that death in war is heroic, and tragic, and that the individual counted and his death mattered.”

Either way, from that moment Capa never looked back. He was born Andre Friedmann in Budapest–”It’s not enough to have talent,” he said, “You also have to be Hungarian.” He got his first break in Berlin where, working for one of the many photo agencies that flourished all over Europe in the 1930s, he photographed Trotsky addressing a huge crowd on “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution”.

Hard times followed in Paris where at one stage he was reduced to fishing in the Seine in the hope of catching his dinner. In 1936, just before Capa and his new girlfriend, a tiny, red-haired communist called Gerda, went to Spain they both changed their names. Andre Friedmann became Robert Capa because “it sounded American and was easy to pronounce.” Gerda had a better reason changing her name to Taro: her real name was Pohorylles.

Spain was the happiest period their short lives. They were friends with Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and Herbert Matthews of the New York Times. They were all committed to the Republican cause and hoped that they were helping win the war. Then Gerda was crushed to death by an out-of-control Republican tank and Capa was never the same again. He told Martha Gellhorn, “In war you must hate somebody or love somebody. You must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.”

At the D-Day invasion in 1944 his photographs of GIs struggling through the waves to land on the Normandy beaches are considered by many to be the greatest pictures of the war. But his spark seemed to have dimmed and his commitment had faded. The author makes the important point that in every article bearing his pictures for Life, his work was captioned to support Henry Luce’s view of the world. Was this at the back of Capa’s mind when he became a co-founder of Magnum which to this day insists that the captions on its photographers’ pictures should not be amended.

His peace-time work was undistinguished. He went with John Steinbeck to the Soviet Union to do a big photo-essay. Steinbeck said later that he did not want to work with Capa ever again. To get his photographs Capa had promised to send people gifts from America–cameras or anything else they fancied–but he did not keep his word and Steinbeck himself had to do it.

The fact is that you could not trust a lot of what Capa said, something he was quite willing to admit himself. Part of the dustjacket blurb for his book, Slightly Out of Focus, reads :”Writing the truth being so obviously difficult, I have in the interests of it allowed myself to go sometimes slightly beyond and slightly this side of it. All events and persons in this book are accidental and have something to do with the truth.”

All right, possibly a Capa joke. But what are we to make of his reaction to the loss of his American passport because of an FBI report full of ludicrous allegations that he was a Communist and supported Communist causes? He swore an affidavit to the passport authorities denying that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party but then went on to name some who were, including his old colleague and friend Joris Ivens: “probably a communist”. Some of his friends believed that he cut a deal with the CIA–in return for his passport he became a CIA agent.

Life staff photographer Hansel Mieth said of Capa: “He was a made-up person, mostly by himself. . . He was made up of many people, some very good, some not so good. . . .” So let’s end with some of the good. He was great fun to be with, charming, generous and considerate He was an inspirational mentor and the staff of Magnum remember him with enormous affection. He was physically brave and took enormous risks to get the photograph.

He was probably the first photographer to bring home the horror that war inflicts on civilians. His pictures of petrified Spanish mothers and children after a fascist bombing raid on Madrid are a better tribute to his skill as a war photographer than the discredited “moment of death” image.

Capa died in Vietnam on 25 May 1954 when hit by a mortar, the first American correspondent killed in a war that would later claim many more. He was barely 40. His career had probably run its course and he was growing increasingly pessimistic about the future of photojournalism, believing that television would soon take over. It is no consolation to those who knew and loved him, but Robert Capa would not have taken kindly to old age.

Buy Blood and Champagne — US | UK | Kindle e-book

Kennedy’s Wars
Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam
by Lawrence Freedman
Oxford University Press, £20
528pp

In the middle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to President Kennedy and gave him the bad news. The Cuban-exile troops were trapped on the beach. Kennedy would have to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power if the invasion to topple Castro were to succeed.

Kennedy’s reaction was interesting. He did not say, as he well might have, that he could not risk such a move because it would provoke Moscow. Instead he was inclined to agree to protect his public image. He said he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.”

But when his military advisers failed to come up with a clear and credible proposal to save the invasion, Kennedy’s political instincts took over. Faced with impending failure, he either had to raise the stakes and risk conflict with the Soviet Union or quit. As this brilliant and perceptive study makes clear, Kennedy’s claim to be a great American president probably rests on that single strength–he knew when to quit.

Kennedy was in charge during some of the most dangerous days of the Cold War. He confronted communism in Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. He and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. But again Kennedy knew when to quit and Khrushchev responded to his mood and quit too–just in time.

Freedman, who has made full use of all the new sources available since the fall of Communism, says that the wars which often seemed so close during Kennedy’s few years in office, were in the end not fought–at least by Americans. “He left the Cold War in a far less dangerous state than he found it.”

Freeman is a sympathetic historian. He points out that the historian knows what happened next and therefore has to resist the temptation to highlight missed opportunities, recklessness, misperceptions and miscalculations. Kennedy never knew that his enemy, Castro, would outlast another seven American presidents with his revolution intact, that Vietnam would turn into a cruel and tragic war, and–most important of all–that Soviet Communism would collapse.

He had to fight the Cold War on a day-by-day basis, defend the free world with all the vigour he could muster and yet avoid a nuclear war that could end civilisation as we know it. His strength was that he had a strategy for doing just that. Freedman explains this with admirable clarity–and throws in a few surprises.
For example, he says that Kennedy had respect for the Soviet Union as a competitor for international influence, believed that there could be peaceful co-existence, had no plan for winning the Cold War and wanted a nuclear test ban treaty from the start of his administration. This was no “better dead than Red” president.

Yes, he made mistakes. He had an exaggerated view of the extent to which communist insurgencies around the world were controlled by Moscow. Only late his in presidency did he realise that these conflicts were better dealt with on their own terms rather than by big power bargaining.

He thought the Soviet economy could sustain the growth of its military indefinitely and he took Khrushchev’s bluster seriously. “It took until 1963 for him to get the measure of Khrushchev and start to appreciate the severity of his opponent’s problems–in agriculture, economics and alliance measurement.”

Kennedy’s strategy for handling the Soviet Union developed over the years. It was one that came naturally to him as a politician but, says Freedman, might well have been taken from a book, “Deterrence or Defence” written by the British strategist Basil Liddell Hart and which Kennnedy had reviewed for the Saturday Evening Post in 1960:

“Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes–so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil–nothing is so blinding.”

As applied by Kennedy, this became known as the graduated or flexible response, moving forward in crises one step at a time, raising at each stage pressure on opponents, probing their will, exploring opportunities for a settlement even while preparing to up the ante.

For Kennedy it seemed to work. He looked for military measures that were enough to satisfy conservatives at home without risking major war while “negotiated outcomes were pursued to the extent that any conservative revolt could be contained.”

In this he was helped by Khrushchev, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev listened to the trigger-happy exhortations of his own generals, put himself in Kennedy’s shoes and decided that Kennedy to had to cope with a military establishment itching for battle. Further, Khrushchev was worried that the American military might overthrow Kennedy and seize power.

Freedman says that this issue was not wholly a Soviet fantasy. Two Washington journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had recently published “Seven Days in May”, describing how a military coup might occur in Washington, and Kennedy had not dismissed such an idea completely.

The behaviour of the air force chief, General Curtis LeMay, certainly suggests that a coup could have been a possibility. LeMay told the president that his handling of the Cuban crisis in the early stages was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich”. When Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a settlement, LeMay railed at Kennedy that this was “the greatest defeat in our history”. He even considered ignoring Kennedy’s deal and attacking in any case.

This book is scholarly yet very readable. It shows a new and softer side to Kennedy. Freedman suggests that Kennedy was lucky in that he presided over a turning point in the Cold War that was not so much to do with American policy as the fact that the Soviet challenge simply ran out of steam.

But he still gives Kennedy full credit for demonstrating in words and deeds that the superpowers had to co-operate to prevent a nuclear catastrophe–a lesson that has the same relevance today as it did during John F. Kennedy’s bright but all too brief reign.

Buy Kennedy’s Wars — US | UK

Published in The New Statesman, 1 October 2001

Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5
by Stella Rimington
Hutchinson
£18.99
pp296

The importance of this book lies in the fact that it was published, not in what it has to say. Even after the Cold War ended and the government formally admitted what most of us knew all along–that we had a security service, MI5, which under the guise of protecting national security kept an eye on us all–no one dreamed that the head of such an organisation would ever dare write an autobiography.

So let me say early on, that Stella Rimington, deserves our thanks for resisting the bullying of the Cabinet Office and many of her colleagues and associates in Whitehall and pushed on to publication. This is a blow struck for a more open society, hitherto one of the most secret of the western democracies. With luck it could well end in the death of the Official Secrets Act, especially its heavy-handed suppression of any former spy who wants to write about their days in the service.

But any reader interested in knowing how MI5 really operates is bound to be disappointed in this book. To start with the manuscript has been gutted to placate Mrs Rimington’s critics, who did not want her to write anything at all.

Next. Mrs Rimington herself has drunk too deeply from the secrecy cup and tells us frankly in her preface than anyone hoping to read about specific operations, details of sources of information, human or technical, or about the precise way in which intelligence is gathered and assessed need not bother to read on: “There are no such revelations here.”

So what we have here is the story of a pleasant woman from a modest middle-class background who gains a modest degree and marries her long-time boyfriend who becomes a diplomat. When he is posted to India she is recruited to secret work in Delhi almost by accident–she is so bored that she jumps at the chance to help the High Commission’s MI5 officer with his typing. Back in Britain, again bored, she applies to MI5 for a job, gets it and then fights her way up the ranks to become the service’s first director-general who is not a bloke.

The early life and India period occupy the first third of the book, leaving readers to wonder when they are ever going to get to the James Bond stuff. But, in fact, I found the India period the most interesting. It is a shrewdly observed portrait of the behaviour of British civil servants abroad with the sun going down on the Empire but not quite set–the complaints about Indian servants, the climate, the bureaucracy, the parties, the amateur dramatics, the gossip, the longing for “home”.

So is there then nothing useful at all in this book for someone seeking enlightenment about MI5? Ms Rimington writes in a cool, detached manner about her life in the shadows but she is human and in at least two places her attitudes and prejudices break through.

Just as the dissident MI5 officer David Shayler has claimed, alcohol apparently plays a major role in the working life of many an MI5 officer. Mrs Rimington writes: “I remember one gentleman, who was supposed to be running agents against the Russian intelligence residency in London. He would arrive at the office about ten and about eleven would go out for ‘breakfast’. He would return at 12 noon smelling strongly of whisky to get ready to go out to ‘meet an agent’ for lunch. If he returned at all it would be at about 4pm for a quiet snooze before getting ready to go home.”

In one section of MI5 where Mrs Rimington worked, she admits getting caught up in drinking sessions with two officers who had been in the Colonial Service. “It was routine for them to return from lunch about four in the afternoon and then we all settled down to afternoon tea laced with whisky… I used to go home to my baby daughter some evenings rather the worse for wear if the whisky tea had been too well laced. I suppose there was some plan in what we were doing and some strategic direction somewhere, but I certainly did not know what it was.”

Later, again confirming some of Shayler’s criticisms of MI5, Mrs Rimington hints at how bitter the turf wars must have been as MI5 and the Special Branch of the Metropolitain Police struggled to dominate intelligence gathering in Northern Ireland. “Frankly, in my opinion, neither the intelligence-gathering techniques nor the assessment skills of the police were in those days, up to scratch.”

As we know now, MI5 won and took on the lead role in Northern Ireland. As a result, writes Mrs. Rimington, “I acquired a reputation as a ruthless and wily manipulator of Whitehall, of which I was rather proud, though I don’t think it was very accurate.”

Mrs Rimington ends with the hope that her former colleagues will not blame her for what she has done in going public. “They will be getting on with the job they have to do and not spending too much time worrying about this book.” One could say the same about the readers.

Buy Open Secret — US | UK