The spies we cannot forget

Before it has even been screened, a new BBC drama series is under attack for turning the Cambridge spies into glamorous heroes. The spies - Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt - used their privileged positions in the British establishment to pass secrets to the Russians for 30 years.

Hitherto they have been labelled sordid traitors, but the BBC drama, due to hit our screens next month, treats them so sympathetically that one Russian defector, Oleg Gordievsky, says it might as well have been made in Moscow.

The problem is that the Cambridge spies were glamorous. They led extraordinarily adventurous lives and took part in momentous historical events. They sacrificed family, friends and country for a political ideal and died unrepentant before it all collapsed. They were wrong, but in their lifetime they stuck to their youthful, idealistic commitment through thick and thin. Not many of us can say that.

In 1988 I spent a week with Kim Philby in Moscow, where he lived after fleeing in 1963 from the vengeance of the British Secret Intelligence Service. I had conversations and correspondence with Anthony Blunt and two of Philby's four wives. I have written a book on Philby, Burgess and Maclean, and a separate book on Philby.

With this background I can say that the BBC drama is not history. It compresses events, invents others, plays with chronology and puts fictional words into the mouths of the main characters. This is the playwright's privilege. It largely ignores the victims of the spies' treachery - although as Philby told me, "It was a war and people die in wars". But it does not glamorise them beyond reason.

Everyone envies a risk-taker, especially in support of a cause, and these four young friends were not only risk-takers extraordinaire but absolutely devoted to their cause. "I had already decided at 19, after a good look around me, that the rich had had it too damned good for too damned long and that the poor had had it too damned bad and it was time that it was all changed." This is not a line put into the mouth of Toby Stephens, the actor who plays Kim Philby. It is Philby himself, in exile in Moscow in the twilight of his life, looking back on his decision to betray his country and explaining to me what he did and why.

Philby was right that change was needed and it did come after the war. But there was a lot to be disgusted about in Britain in the 1930s - one and a half million unemployed, the Jarrow hunger marchers, the snobbery, the casual anti-Semitism of everyday English life, Fascism on the rise in Germany while the pillars of British society trooped to Nuremberg to hobnob with the Nazis.

Can it be so hard to understand, as the BBC drama sets out, that intelligent, idealistic young men in their early twenties felt an urgent need to do something about the way their world was heading?

As we know, they turned to Communism. "The democratic socialists were unimpressive," Philby said. "They seemed to fold at critical moments. But all the time there was this solid basis of the Left, the Soviet Union. We felt it should be kept there at all costs."

Many others at Cambridge - and Oxford, too - would have taken the same path as Philby and his friends had they been given the opportunity. I think it is understandable and forgivable that the Cambridge spies made the commitment they did, when they did. What many find unforgivable is how they were able to maintain that commitment when the horrors of Stalin's rule became apparent. In particular, how could they remain loyal to Moscow after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939?