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PARTISAN REVIEW
tersection between propaganda and espionage. Mtinzenberg's Anti-War
International
was
the propaganda branch of the Soviet espionage appara–
tus. Lehmann had been sent to Vienna as a recruitment test, and in his
squeamishness and probably partly false naivete, he had failed that test. It
was an examination that others passed, and passed brilliantly. One success–
ful candidate, for example, was Kim Philby.
But the mingling of propaganda and espionage among the
Bloomsbury spies is best illustrated in the relation between Blunt and
Burgess. Once exposed, Blunt held a "press conference" over smoked
trout in the board room of the London
Times,
during which he claimed
to have been led and run for the
apparat
by Guy Burgess. It is true that
Burgess seems to have recruited Blunt. And what a very discriminating
choice it was. Yet they
all
worked together, with Philby playing a deci–
sive role and Blunt coolly guiding and tempering Burgess's inveterate en–
thusiasms and excesses.
Though the entire circle was under the control of the NKVD, it
makes some sense to call Burgess the "Mtinzenberg-man" in the group.
His career- his work in broadcasting, his "circle"- forms a classic British
reflection of the Mtinzenberg style. Burgess knew the Miinzenberg legals
very well, and was often in Paris, showing off in front of Goronwy Rees
by invoking the kind of cultural pull only the Paris office could arrange:
dinner with Theodore Dreiser, for example, when the apparatus trotted
out the author of
An American Tragedy
for yet another culture conference.
I've heard it claimed that Burgess was actually presented to Willi. This is
perfectly plausible, though I have seen no proof of it, and Babette Gross
could not remember.
In effect a "Mtinzenberg-man," Guy surely knew Otto reasonably
well; yet he was also an agent of espionage under control. In the early
days, Maly ordered him to pose as a convert to British fascism, working
and sleeping with a fascist fellow traveller and Member of Parliament
named Captain Jack Macnamara, an obvious assignment in covert work,
as was Burgess's war-time work in SOE. That Burgess could be that,
and
simultaneously be so much the Mtinzenberg-man indicates precisely the
interpenetration of propaganda and espionage services which is so often
denied. Burgess moved in the worlds of
both
Maly and Gibarti, and simul–
taneously.
Poor Burgess seems to have been guided at the deepest level by the
cruel muse of failure. He is one of the great and instructive human
wrecks. Such people are often enough found in secret services. The life of
achievement in art and the intellect is not a very forgiving one. What be–
gins as brilliant youth can very easily sink into some awful region between
