The Secret State and the Historians
October 24, 2014 3:15 AM   Subscribe

The UK's National Archives has today released the formerly secret files detailing MI5's monitoring of the British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill [PDF downloads available]. The Guardian reports. An official historian explains.

Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm were leading lights of the Marxist historiographical tradition that was so strong in British postwar scholarship. Hill wrote on the seventeenth century, a "Century of Revolution"; Hobsbawms's work focused on the capitalist world order born of the industrial revolution (I, II, III) - when he wasn't writing about jazz that is. Both Hill and Hobsbawm were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain Historians Group. Hill, along with many others, resigned from the CPGB after the Soviet repression the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, but not before the Historians Group protested against the Soviet actions in a letter published in both the New Statesman and Tribune. Notoriously, Hobsbawm, another signatory to the letter, refused to quit the Party, a decision that was to dog his public life and career - although it didn't stop him becoming a Companion of Honour in 1998.
posted by bebrogued (40 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
In the context of the Cold War, and both being self-professed Communists, it sounds to me like MI5 were just doing their job. If one of them had turned out to be a Soviet spy (as Sir Ivor Montagu, the inventor of table tennis, did), it would have been embarrassing to say the least.

Secretly barring Hobsbawm from the BBC is somewhat more contentious, mostly due to the secret nature of the process.
posted by acb at 3:46 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm fascinated by the other documents released today about the Spanish agent working for German Intelligence who got involved with a double agent conducting "Welsh nationalist operations" and kept a low profile by giving interviews to the Daily Express and indulging in "dissolute behaviour" with dancing girls. This is somewhat different to the picture of espionage I got from John le Carré!
posted by sobarel at 3:54 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


This is somewhat different to the picture of espionage I got from John le Carré!

I suspect a significant amount of espionage organisation involves handling the kinds of adventurers, narcissists and loose cannons who are drawn to it and attempting to make use of them whilst mitigating whatever damage they might cause.
posted by acb at 4:04 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


I'm sure that's true (Soviet intelligence must have had some sleepless nights worrying about the behaviour of the Cambridge spies) but I was just struck by how much more fun this chap was having than Alec Leamas or George Smiley...
posted by sobarel at 4:14 AM on October 24, 2014


If one of them had turned out to be a Soviet spy (as Sir Ivor Montagu, the inventor of table tennis, did), it would have been embarrassing to say the least.

Allowing the reds to obtain the latest table tennis paddle holds would be treason...

Also did you know that wikipedia has a list of Jewish table-tennis players...

This is somewhat different to the picture of espionage I got from John le Carré!

One of the biggest criticisms of le Carre is that he managed to create high opera out of what was more of a farce. Anglo-American "intelligence" in the 20th century has been a playground for upper-class twits, third rate Oxbridgers or Yalies... the same people who go to work at the New York Times. Professional drunks and fantasists with 'shoot-to-kill' orders.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:26 AM on October 24, 2014 [7 favorites]


Very little farce involved in any of this. The state takes ideological threats to its existence, and its total control over media and propaganda, very seriously indeed.
posted by colie at 4:29 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


Also noteworthy in the article is the discussion of the implicit academic blacklisting program -- Hobsbawm never got his Oxbridge chair, for example, but ended up teaching at the LSE. This sort of thing is pernicious: historians are analysts, and if your security services decide to block analysts who follow one particular methodology -- in this case, Marxist analysis -- you are systematically degrading your own awareness of the real world.

Incidentally this interview with John le Carre might prove illuminating: the main enemy of the intelligence officer being boredom ...
posted by cstross at 4:47 AM on October 24, 2014 [9 favorites]


I agree with colie: the state takes media and propaganda seriously. I agree with cstross: I recognise and regret blacklisting and other unofficial actions, reminiscent of the later versions of Soviet oppression.

At the same time, I would observe that to describe state control of the media as "total" is simply inaccurate (so he didn't get to be an Oxbridge chair, only a University of London academic - that's not very total) and what controls were exerted were in the context of an existential threat both to Western society and our existence: fears of a Soviet invasion or nuclear attack were real, and academia was where we both trained our future ruling classes and the Soviets successfully recruited spies.

Given that, perhaps it was sensible to have our analysts use Marxist techniques without actually employing real Marxists - or perhaps we could study the writings of the real Marxists, which indeed seems to be what were doing here!
posted by alasdair at 5:19 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Hard to believe anyone was ever turned down for a job at Cambridge for being a communist. Wrong kind of communist, maybe?
posted by Segundus at 5:30 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


I actually think the interesting thing is that their careers weren't really ruined. I mean, it's terrible that Hobsbawm didn't get his Oxbridge chair, but we're talking about one of the most prominent English-language historians of the 20th century, someone whose work I read as an undergraduate in the US. (I read both of them as an undergrad in the US in the '90s, actually.) Their reputations remained intact, as did their ability to produce scholarship and make a living. I realize that I'm probably minimizing this because I'm coming from a US perspective, and there's no way that Hobsbawm's career would have survived if he'd been the same person with the same background in the US, but it seems to me that the British government doesn't come off too badly here!
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:00 AM on October 24, 2014


fears of a Soviet invasion or nuclear attack were real

Ruling elites knew there was zero chance of the former and very little chance (other than by accident) of the latter. But I do agree there is some elasticity in the system that allows someone like Hobsbawm to function relatively freely as an academic in society - although 25 years ago the newspapers would have mercilessly mocked anyone who suggested these academics were having their phones tapped. It's also likely the secret police realised that such academics were a useful magnet for young radicals and therefore made the process of keeping files on even more people slightly easier.
posted by colie at 6:04 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


In the context of the Cold War, and both being self-professed Communists, it sounds to me like MI5 were just doing their job. If one of them had turned out to be a Soviet spy (as Sir Ivor Montagu, the inventor of table tennis, did), it would have been embarrassing to say the least.

I think this stuff always seems like a better idea in the past, so to speak.

I mean, couldn't we say the same thing about prominent dissidents in the US today? Or prominent conservative muslims? Couldn't we say the same thing about activists? I mean, the government has real, plausible and genuine reason to believe - far more reason, in fact, than that Hobsbawm was going to spy for the Soviets - that particular activists and writers are going to participate in inconvenient, expensive and disruptive actions. Hell, it would be an excellent justification for spying on anyone involved in Wikileaks or the old Independent Media Centers....And of course, all those people do get spied on, and entrapped, and COINTELPRO'd, but that doesn't mean it's right.

I actually know some communists who got profiled and raided by the FBI and put through years of pointless trials on trumped up war-on-terror charges just recently, and it appears to have been motivated by their Palestine solidarity activism plus some local score-settling by the government since they're rather inconvenient and probably responsible for fully 1/3 of the protests in this town. Now, their ideology is not one that I share (what with being an anarchist and all) but anyone who's known them (which I have for years, and which I'd expect if people had been spying on them for years) knows that they're about as likely to have state secrets (much less shop them to our enemies) as they are to sprout wings and fly to the top of the state capitol.

First, this sort of thing always has external costs - you start spying on historians (whose access to contemporary state secrets is limited, after all - I mean, spies have to have something that the enemy wants, right?) and you have to build up an entire spy bureaucracy around that. And second, it requires a sort of moral idiocy, too, where we all have to pretend to believe that Doughty Old Historian is really a danger to the state, instead of accepting that people are spying on him to prove a point and to be bloody-minded and to justify their budgets.
posted by Frowner at 6:09 AM on October 24, 2014 [9 favorites]


I mean, couldn't we say the same thing about prominent dissidents in the US today? Or prominent conservative muslims? Couldn't we say the same thing about activists? I mean, the government has real, plausible and genuine reason to believe - far more reason, in fact, than that Hobsbawm was going to spy for the Soviets - that particular activists and writers are going to participate in inconvenient, expensive and disruptive actions.

Well, the most expensive and disruptive actions that the Soviet Union could have done are launch a full on attack on Western Europe with the largest armies in the world and/or launch a full on nuclear attack on the West with thousands of warheads. It could be said that our own actions contributed mightily to that circumstance, but its a far, far cry from Occupy Wall Street.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:36 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


I wonder how many peeps are assigned to follow Bono around, or just keep an eye on him. Or George Clooney for that matter. Best case would be to simply recruit one of their own security team members, right? Two paychecks are better than one.
posted by valkane at 6:50 AM on October 24, 2014


Why would the security services want to spy on Bono? His shtick is basically providing a fig leaf for neoliberalism, justifying the status quo with content-free but vaguely progressive-sounding slogans that don't actually amount to promises.
posted by acb at 6:55 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]



Well, the most expensive and disruptive actions that the Soviet Union could have done are launch a full on attack on Western Europe with the largest armies in the world and/or launch a full on nuclear attack on the West with thousands of warheads. It could be said that our own actions contributed mightily to that circumstance, but its a far, far cry from Occupy Wall Street.


Yes, but the point is that you have to have some belief that, like, Eric Hobsbawm is going to materially contribute to creating the conditions for a nuclear attack on the UK in order for this to make sense. If you're just saying "well, the guy isn't entirely out of sympathy with certain aspects of communism", that's about as good a rationale as "well, activists sometimes disrupt shipping at the port in Seattle and that's a threat to US security because they could help terrorists". Honestly, the people I know - or know vaguely from around town - who have been persecuted under anti-terrorism laws...well, it was all about "September 11th happened, so if we don't [act against these random people] we could have another terrorist attack".

It's no more believable that the people I know are leading us down the primrose path to September 11 Part 2 than it is that Eric Hobsbawm was going to work toward bringing about Soviet conquest of the UK. This is all well post-Stalin and none of these people were dummies, either.

That's part of what I object to so strenuously in such kind of apologetics - the idea that there was never any ideological change in either the Soviet Union or the marxist left - that the Cambridge spies were exactly the same type of people in exactly the same type of circumstances as Eric Hobsbawm. That's the standard right-wing canard - oh, you're a marxist, are you? Well, that means you'd hand walk over a gulag's worth of dissident Jews to hand nuclear secrets to Joe Stalin if you had the chance, right?
posted by Frowner at 7:03 AM on October 24, 2014 [6 favorites]


These days, when talking about Marx, there's a distinction between the adjectives Marxian (i.e., drawing on Marx' economic and historical analyses and models) and Marxist (i.e., committed to one branch or another of the ideology of Marxism). One can be one without the other; there are Marxists-by-creed whose knowledge of Marx' theories (which, it must be said, are somewhat dry and Germanically rigorous and, in some ways, the antithesis of righteous passion) are on a par with the average self-professed Christian's knowledge of theology.
posted by acb at 7:10 AM on October 24, 2014


It's interesting that when Hobsbawm applied to see his MI5 file in 2009, he was turned down, presumably because MI5 didn't want him to identify the friends and colleagues who had been informing on him. It's hard to see any other reason why the file should have been secret in 2009 and publicly available in 2014.

Also interesting that some of the other members of the Historians Group still haven't had their files released. E.P. Thompson's file, for example, still hasn't been released more than twenty years after his death, possibly because Thompson was a leading figure in CND as well as a prominent historian.

The real irony comes when you look at the people who were spying on Hobsbawm. According to Keith Jeffrey's history of the Secret Intelligence Service, he first came to the attention of the security services in 1945, when SIS asked MI5 to investigate 'a certain Communist in the Army Education Corps named Hobsbawm'. The name of the SIS officer who dealt with the case? Kim Philby.
posted by verstegan at 7:16 AM on October 24, 2014 [5 favorites]


I'm sure MI5 were keen to get military and related secrets from the Soviet Union seeing as they were often ahead in the arms and space race. But this has nothing to do with why they spied on UK academic communists like Hobsbawm.

They spied on him because his Marxist analysis and activism was a powerful tool and inspiration for young radicals who at several times in the late 60s looked like they might join forces with the working class and actually effect some major change in western capitalist societies.

MI5 were indeed 'just doing their job' - their job is proven, time after time as a matter of historical record, to be nothing other than protecting the power of the state machinery and ruling elites - rather than the welfare and liberties of voting and tax-paying citizens, or their elected representatives (MI5 spied on Harold Wilson when he was the Prime Minister).
posted by colie at 7:23 AM on October 24, 2014 [5 favorites]


I understand where you're coming from colie, but 'Just doing their job' does include stopping people from trying to change the state machinery through violence and terror. You could argue that not one of those radical youths would ever consider violence as a possible mechanism of political change, but history suggests to me that keeping an eye on them wasn't necessarily a bad idea.
posted by YAMWAK at 7:36 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


If you're just saying "well, the guy isn't entirely out of sympathy with certain aspects of communism", that's about as good a rationale as "well, activists sometimes disrupt shipping at the port in Seattle and that's a threat to US security because they could help terrorists".

Hobsbawm was rather more than 'not entirely out of sympathy with certain aspects of communism'. That might describe someone like Oppenheimer (and really only barely in his case).

I'm rather a fan of Hobsbawm, I think that after Hungary he certainly wouldn't have spied for the Soviet Union, and I think the threat from Soviet espionage was rather overdone and paranoiac but if being a member of the CPGB who remained personal friends with convicted Soviet spies isn't enough reason to suspect someone I really don't know what is.
posted by atrazine at 7:51 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


Generally, 60s Marxists were totally opposed to individual acts of terror, which they saw as not only pointless and immoral but also as playing into the hands of the state. By contrast, a fair amount of post WW2 terror was in fact orchestrated by the state secretly or simply waged openly in places like Vietnam etc.
posted by colie at 7:53 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


I'm saddened by the apologists for state surveillance here, but Frowner has said what I would have wanted to say a lot more nicely than I would have, so I'll let it go and just mention this very odd sentence from the Guardian piece:

Unlike the very public manifestation of McCarthyism in the US, the discreet British version had its victims.

Surely some editing error? The first word should be "Like" for the sentence to make sense.
posted by languagehat at 8:02 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


apologists for state surveillance

Are you saying that there is no legitimate purpose for security services?

This isn't about hoovering up everybody's Snapchats and GPS traces and sending in the heavies to put the frighteners on protest organisers' roommates; this was about keeping an eye on people in a position of influence who publicly expressed affinities for an ideology self-professedly incompatible with parliamentary democracy and officially supported by a hostile foreign power.
posted by acb at 8:31 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


Surely some editing error? The first word should be "Like" for the sentence to make sense.

Isn't that saying that the British version of McCarthyism wasn't in the public eye? Albeit poorly phrased.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:31 AM on October 24, 2014


"Unlike the very public manifestation of McCarthyism in the US, the discreet British version had unknowing victims" would seem to be what they're getting at with that snarled sentence - the difference between being dragged in front of HUAC and the TV cameras, or having your career hampered behind the scenes with some nudge-nudge stuff. It is The Grauniad after all.
posted by sobarel at 8:34 AM on October 24, 2014


Yeah, the "unlike" is about the difference in publicity not effect. I suspect that slipped through a very rushed writing-up process - the files were actually embargoed until next Thursday, which I would guess was RN-T's original deadline, but when that embargo was broken (by the Metro, I believe) they were released ahead of schedule.
posted by bebrogued at 8:34 AM on October 24, 2014


As an aside, a prominent right-wing tabloid had asked for an exclusive on the story, which TNA quite properly rejected as the files are public property. That newspaper's coverage of the story today is particularly vile, neatly following a similarly vile obituary of Hobsbawm and, most recently, a hatchet job on the memory of that other prominent British Marxist, Ralph Milliband.
posted by bebrogued at 8:39 AM on October 24, 2014


PHILBY!
5 or 6 could not find a mole to save the club. Public? My dear chaps that is simply to be avoided. And I will have you know Lemas was a hoot.
Today, they just record everything and have an army of Connie Sachs sift through the detritus.
posted by clavdivs at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Today, they just record everything and have an army of Connie Sachs sift through the detritus.

There's not enough sherry in all the world for that.
posted by sobarel at 9:04 AM on October 24, 2014


Very little farce involved in any of this.

Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is a good overview of the farcical aspects. The culture of secrecy led to a culture of no accountability, which meant people kept doing crazy things over and over again, and getting the same result.

To appreciate the farce, you have to put aside the unbelievable cost in terms of human life and destroyed international relations (kind of like reading Catch-22), but there were some laugh-out-loud moments for me: The hundreds of attempted raids into Albania, all scuppered because someone was telling Kim Philby the precise drop coordinates of the raids over drinks, week after week. The attempt to start a coup against Sukarno in Indonesia ("[Richard Bissel] had never run paramilitary operations or drawn up military plans. He found it fascinating.") The petulant decision to go around Eisenhower's moratorium on U2 flights prior to US/Soviet peace talks, the resulting U2 crash and collapse of those talks. The ignorance and vainglory which allowed the Bay of Pigs to go forward despite clear indications that it was futilely underpowered. The comic-book attempts to assasinate Castro, and to cover up what the CIA knew of Oswald's Cuban/Russian contacts in Mexico City prior to his assasination of Kennedy.

The really good stuff peters out at that point, I think because the 50-year declassification rule currently stops at 1964. But it would have left me wondering why we don't all speak Russian today, if it weren't for the fact that the book also makes it clear that the Russian leadership knew they never had a chance in an open conflict with the US, and the CIA's greatest failure was that it never understood or reported on just how weak the USSR actually was.
posted by fivebells at 10:07 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


fears of a Soviet invasion or nuclear attack were real

colie: "Ruling elites knew there was zero chance of the former and very little chance (other than by accident) of the latter."

This seems somewhat overstated. The Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer brought us quite close to nuclear war. Now, it's fair to say these were both cases of nations stumbling into a crisis, but that isn't the same thing as an accident proper. An accident is what Stanislav Petrov was dealing with, or the 1979 NORAD training tapes incident.

None of this is to defend McCarthy-ite type treatment of Communist citizens in the US or UK. But nuclear war was a possibility, especially at times of heightened tensions with the Soviet Union.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:47 AM on October 24, 2014


This sort of thing is pernicious: historians are analysts, and if your security services decide to block analysts who follow one particular methodology -- in this case, Marxist analysis -- you are systematically degrading your own awareness of the real world.

Block? Who said anything about being blocked? The guy had steady employment where he could openly and freely corrupt the youth, and produced a staggering bibliography.

Monitored, quite. MI5 was also monitoring British fascists in the 1930s. If you're okay with that, you should be okay with this.
posted by IndigoJones at 10:54 AM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


The UK's secret police may have spied on some fascists in the 30s as things were unravelling in Europe, but in post-war years they've never bothered with the far right much at all because those people constitute less than zero threat to the state - they love the military and the flag.

In the UK you could be a far-right thug and get away with serious crimes throughout the 70s and 80s because pretty much all of the police force agreed with your opinions.
posted by colie at 12:26 PM on October 24, 2014


> Are you saying that there is no legitimate purpose for security services?

No, I wasn't saying that, but frankly I pretty much believe it. Both the US and UK intelligence services were infiltrated by Soviet spies at the very highest level for most of the Cold War, which means their "legitimage" purposes were thoroughly compromised, and yet things went pretty much as they probably would have anyway at the macro (international) level. At the micro level, a lot of innocent people had their lives ruined. I think people with a security fetish vastly overstate the value of "security" and "intelligence" agencies and vastly underrate the value of leaving people alone to lead their lives however they see fit and say what they believe without fear of retribution (yes, even if what they believe is Marxist bullshit).
posted by languagehat at 2:22 PM on October 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


In the UK you could be a far-right thug and get away with serious crimes throughout the 70s and 80s because pretty much all of the police force agreed with your opinions.

Fascists make convenient useful idiots.

The USSR/DDR made similar use of the ideologically flakier extreme-left groups, like the Baader-Meinhof gang; they weren't considered good Communists, but they could throw some money and guns at them and have them make trouble for the other side at relatively little expense.
posted by acb at 3:21 PM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Also, after WW2, fascism didn't pose a threat to Britain in the way it did before WW2. Franco was hardly about to invade Britain or recruit local sympathisers to undermine it and get a puppet government into power, whereas the USSR was more of a potential threat in that regard. The local fascist bovver-boys would have been more a criminal matter than a threat to national security, and the remit of the police.
posted by acb at 3:38 PM on October 24, 2014


Don't cry for me...
posted by clavdivs at 6:35 PM on October 25, 2014


Wow. I'm having a whole new appreciation for my grad school profs' reading choices (Thompson and Hobsbawm)...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:48 PM on October 25, 2014


Languagehat wrote: Both the US and UK intelligence services were infiltrated by Soviet spies at the very highest level for most of the Cold War [...]

So thoroughly infiltrated, too. It was almost like The Man who was Thursday. That being said, and without the benefit of hindsight, It seems pretty obvious that (a) universities were prime recruiting grounds for Soviet agents; and (b) people susceptible to recruitment would very likely have some some association with "out" communists. So it made sense to keep an eye on Hobsbawm, even if he wasn't a threat in himself.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:56 PM on October 26, 2014


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