Mask of Treachery

Rating:
Summary: Not for the Beginner
Review: Boy was MI5 asleep at the wheel. It is really something that this level of KGB penetration could take place, especially in a government that was so focused on the issue of stopping the spread of communism. This book details the Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Cairncross USSR spy ring inside the British intelligence services. This books main theme is trying to increase the roll one of the 5 spy's from one that has been traditionally thought of as a lower level pawn to one of the leader of the whole enterprise. The book basically unfolds as a biography of Blunt, instead of an overall review of the full ring. Blunt being the subject of the book, the author goes out of his way to increase his involvement in the spy ring thus increase the readers interested in the book. He does a good job here, both with the detailed history and the way Blunt interacted with the others in the spy ring. I just did not believe this book that fly's in the face of all the other literature on the topic. I was a little put off by all the detail of Blunt's best know personality trait, homosexuality

Regarding the telling of the story the author does a good job. The book was a bit jumpy, not the best construction of a story. It also tended to drag at times; the author did not have the skill to present a laundry list of facts in an interesting way. The author did do a very good job in documenting his sources. I have read a few books on this topic and this one would probably not be my first choice, I suggest Spy Catcher. This is a good book if you are deeply interested in the topic.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the Beginner
Review: Boy was MI5 asleep at the wheel. It is really something that this level of KGB penetration could take place, especially in a government that was so focused on the issue of stopping the spread of communism. This book details the Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Cairncross USSR spy ring inside the British intelligence services. This books main theme is trying to increase the roll one of the 5 spy's from one that has been traditionally thought of as a lower level pawn to one of the leader of the whole enterprise. The book basically unfolds as a biography of Blunt, instead of an overall review of the full ring. Blunt being the subject of the book, the author goes out of his way to increase his involvement in the spy ring thus increase the readers interested in the book. He does a good job here, both with the detailed history and the way Blunt interacted with the others in the spy ring. I just did not believe this book that fly's in the face of all the other literature on the topic. I was a little put off by all the detail of Blunt's best know personality trait, homosexuality

Regarding the telling of the story the author does a good job. The book was a bit jumpy, not the best construction of a story. It also tended to drag at times; the author did not have the skill to present a laundry list of facts in an interesting way. The author did do a very good job in documenting his sources. I have read a few books on this topic and this one would probably not be my first choice, I suggest Spy Catcher. This is a good book if you are deeply interested in the topic.

Rating:
Summary: The book's major premise is completely wrong
Review: John Costello's premise in this book is that Anthony Blunt's role in the Soviet Cambridge spy ring was not a minor one but that Blunt was, in fact, the first man of the ring, the lead recruiter of the others including Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Cairncross. I found his theory plausible, yet not perfect, upon my first read of this book. However, Costello's premise is simply wrong, as the author himself admits in a footnote in his subsequent book Deadly Illusions, co-authored with Russian Intelligence Service press officer Oleg Tsarev in 1993. Deadly Illusions was based upon the post-cold war disclosures of the former KGB's files, particularly that of "defector" Alexander Orlov and those KGB files reveal that Philby, in fact, was the principal recruiter of the others in the ring.

Mask of Treachery serves several roles, as a biography of Blunt, as a history of Cambridge and the English upper classes in the 1930's and 1940's, and as a history of Soviet espionage in Britain. Setting aside the book's primary fault, it does provide a thorough biographical and historical view of Blunt and his surroundings. Costello clearly did very thorough research into the background of Blunt and the others at issue and does present a number of facts and anecdotes about the Cambridge Five that do not appear elsewhere in the numerous other sources on this topic. Additionally, Costello has taken very painstaking steps to provide the sources for his information, footnoting frequently throughout the work; Costello's concern for academic-level historical accuracy is in sharp contrast with that of the cursory, more sensationalistic and conclusory writings on this subject by British journalists such as Knightly, West, and Pincher.

Costello does make one interesting suggestion: that Guy Liddell, a senior officer in MI-5, might have been the elusive top level mole sought after by Peter Wright and Arthur Martin for so many years. There is some degree of plausibility to this theory - Liddell spent so much time socializing with Blunt and Burgess during years in which he was emotionally unstable that he could well have been a prime target for recruitment. Liddell also had access to some of the information that was allegedly leaked to the Soviets, although he probably retired too early from MI5 to fit all of the the major "serials" listed by Wright in his Spycatcher. Many of those in MI5 who knew Liddell vehemently denied any suggestions that he could have spied against Britain, but not much of substance has ever surfaced to support those statements of loyalty. If it were possible to obtain such information (perhaps in a decade or two from the old, as-yet unreleased KGB files) it would be curious to learn if there was another mole in MI5.

Ultimately, though, Costello falls into the same bad habit as his journalistic competitors in this field of espionage history: he develops an hypothesis, supports it with some facts, and thereafter treats his theory as the gospel, proven truth. Other specific criticisms of this book are that Costello spends too much time and too many pages describing the aesthetic influences on Blunt from his public school and his days at Cambridge, and spends a bit too much time on describing Blunt's homosexuality, which tend to drag on rather than provide useful, interesting information. Additionally, Costello's organization of this book is not the best, as he tends to change topics without a logical, relevant segui between them.

All in all, this is a mildly important work for serious historians of Soviet espionage in Britain, but readers must keep in mind that Costello simply made a serious overestimation as to Blunt's importance in the Cambridge ring.