Der KGB in Cambridge

Der Historiker Niall Ferguson betrachtet in seinem Buch “Turm und Plätze” eine ganze Reihe von Netzwerken aller Art seit der Renaissance. Darunter das sehr spezielle Cambridge Spionagenetzwerk von hochintelligenten Akademikern, die Tausende von Dokumenten nach Moskau lieferten, wo man sich allerdings gelegentlich wunderte, daß solch brillante Wissenschaftler für den KGB und gegen ihr Land und gegen den Westen insgesamt arbeiteten. Warum sie das taten, ist in der Tat eine ungeklärte Frage. Nicht Geld korrumpierte diese Elite, sondern offenbar ein intellektueller Kitzel. 

Erinnert das nicht irgendwie an die Knaben, die dem IPCC und den Chinesen affirmativ zuarbeiten? Machenschaften können erstaunlich lange unentdeckt bleiben. 

Jeder Elite ist jedenfalls mit Mißtrauen zu begegnen.

“Perhaps the greatest mystery of all about the Cambridge spies – even more mysterious than their going so long undetected – is that they had few illusions about the regime they were serving. In Moscow, Burgess continued with his customary behaviour, drinking, chain-smoking and making a mess, periodically yelling ‘I hate Russia’ at the concealed microphones in his apartment. His verdict on Moscow was ‘like Glasgow on a Saturday night in Victorian times’. Philby wrote a KGB-sponsored pro-Soviet memoir, had an affair with Melinda Maclean, attempted suicide in 1970, and married his fourth wife, a Russian. When he received the Order of Lenin, he compared it to a knighthood – ‘one of the better ones’45 – but it rankled with him that he was never more than a mere ‘agent’ within the KGB. Burgess died in August 1963 of liver failure. Maclean also drank himself to death. Philby’s liver somehow kept going until 1988. The others declined the option of flight to the workers’ paradise. ‘I know perfectly well how your people live,’ Blunt told Modin after Burgess and Maclean had fled, ‘and I can assure you that it would be very hard, almost unbearable, for me to do likewise.’46 After Michael Straight admitted that Blunt had recruited him when he was an undergraduate at Trinity, Blunt confessed to MI5 in 1964 – though he was not publicly unmasked until November 1979.

Ferguson, Niall. The Square and the Tower (S.245ff.). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle-Version.