Volume 32, Number 4 · March 14, 1985
Newspook
By John Keegan
Too Secret Too Long
by Chapman Pincher
St. Martin's, 638 pp., $19.95
'Too long,' certainly; page after page after page, many laboring the same point—or allegation—and none relieved by fine writing. 'Too secret'? Is it a secret that two British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean, defected to the Russians in 1951? That they had long served as KGB agents? That they had a collaborator, Kim Philby, who defected later? That they had all been at Cambridge together? That there were other Cambridge contemporaries who betrayed their country or were inclined to do so? That three members of the wartime nuclear research team, Fuchs, Pontecorvo, and Nunn May—German, Italian, and British by birth—also conveyed secrets to the Russians? That Sir Anthony Blunt, surveyor of the Queen's pictures and a world expert on Poussin, was more recently revealed to have been a Russian agent and stripped of his knighthood? That there have been half a dozen other lesser British spy scandals over the years since 1945? If any of this remains hidden to anyone who may chance on Chapman Pincher's new book, it will only be because he or she has spent the last thirty years on a desert island or reflexively turns to another section of the newspaper when the word 'spy,' 'missing diplomat,' 'MI5,' or 'MI6' catches his gaze.
Review, 2713 words
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