The history of the Cambridge Spies shows how shrewdly the Bolsheviks understood and penetrated a culture quite alien to them. When Americans think of the British class system they either find it quaint and amusing (Upstairs, Downstairs on PBS ), or are morally outraged at its inegalitarianism. Soviet spymasters, mostly jews not so prone to sentimentality, arrived at two key insights into British society. First, Oxbridge graduates with the right connections were set to climb quickly up the ladders of the diplomatic and intelligence bureaucracies, where they could serve simultaneously as espionage agents and agents of influence. Second, for men of this pedigree, Marxist leanings at university could easily be forgiven by the Establishment as a youthful indiscretion. The mole needed only “sheep-dipping” into respectable right wing circles. Hence Kim Philby was reinvented in Spain as a journalist sympathetic to Franco, and, together with the flaming fag Guy Burgess, joined the prewar Anglo-German Fellowship. The slate was wiped clean.
Cold War intelligence competition with the CIA was similarly to the Soviets’ credit. They were street smart professionals, many hardened survivors of the WWII red “resistance.” The CIA’s WASP leaders, by contrast, were idealistic dilettantes straight from the Ivy League and Wall Street. Anglo bullshit about “the playing fields of Eton” notwithstanding, US covert operations in Eastern Europe were effortlessly rolled up by the communists, the agents slaughtered en masse. Philby’s treachery (then as MI6 liaison) was only part of the problem. As the Cuban fiascoes were to prove, the CIA preppies were better at big picture planning than at mundane tasks like operational security, and were poor judges of people unlike themselves—in sum, they were boys doing a man’s job.
These sources, while not entirely consistent, all point to the essential seriousness of the Soviet side:
Cambridge Spies (TV mini-series 2003)