My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

the rendezvous empty-handed and leave with a load of painstaking advice, admonition and encouragement. I was often despondent at my failure to achieve anything worthwhile, but the lessons went on and sank deep. When the time came for serious work, I found myself endowed with much of the required mental equipment.
    It was just as well, for my first challenges came in Germany and in Fascist Spain, both countries with a short way of despatching enemy intelligence agents. My reward came during the Spanishwar, when I learnt that my probationary period was considered at an end; I emerged from the conflict as a fully-fledged officer of the Soviet service.
    How did it all begin? My decision to play an active part in the struggle against reaction was not the result of sudden conversion. My earliest thoughts on politics turned me towards the labour movement; and one of my first acts on going up to Cambridge in 1929 was to join the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS). For the first two years, I attended its meetings with regularity, but otherwise took little part in its proceedings. Through general reading, I became gradually aware that the Labour Party in Britain stood well apart from the mainstream of the Left as a world-wide force. But the real turning-point in my thinking came with the demoralisation and rout of the Labour Party in 1931. It seemed incredible that the party should be so helpless against the reserve strength which reaction could mobilise in times of crisis. More important still, the fact that a supposedly sophisticated electorate had been stampeded by the cynical propaganda of the day threw serious doubt on the validity of the assumptions underlying parliamentary democracy as a whole.
    This book is not a history or a treatise or a polemic. It is a personal record, and I intend to stray as little as possible from my main theme. It is therefore enough to say at this point that it was the Labour disaster of 1931 which first set me seriously to thinking about possible alternatives to the Labour Party. I began to take a more active part in the proceedings of the CUSS, and was its Treasurer in 1932–3. This brought me into contact with streams of Left-wing opinion critical of the Labour Party, notably with the Communists. Extensive reading and growing appreciation of the classics of European Socialism alternated with vigorous and sometimes heated discussions within the Society. It was a slow and brain-racking process; my transition from a Socialist viewpoint to a Communist one took two years. It was not until my last term at Cambridge, in the summer of 1933, that I threw off my last doubts.I left the university with a degree and with the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism.
    I have long since lost my degree (indeed, I think it is the possession of MI5). * But I have retained the conviction. It is here, perhaps, that a doubt may assail the reader. It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made the choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course. It is reasonable to ask why.
    It is extremely difficult for the ordinary human being, lacking the gift of total recall, to describe exactly how he reached such-and-such a decision more than thirty years ago. In my own case, an attempt to do so would make appallingly tedious reading. But, as the question will be asked, it must be answered, even if the answer takes the form of gross over-simplification.
    It seemed to me, when it became clear that much was going badly wrong in the Soviet Union, that I had three possible courses of action. First, I could give up politics altogether. This I knew to be quite impossible. It is true that I have tastes and enthusiasms outside politics; but it is politics alone that give them meaning and coherence. Second, I could continue political