Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Parker
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. ...—in sum, they were boys doing a man’s job.
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Well summed up but you miss something. The heavily homosexual Cambridge 'goldenboys' of the 1930s were able to enter British Intelligence in various high-level posts due to the second world war. Before the war they were not professional intelligence officers. As has been stated in print, a traditional hardcore of British Intelligence were colonial policemen. Police inspectors from Malaya and India, who might have come back to London and taken a university degree. These were tough, somewhat unimaginative characters, totally reliable, and never known to be traitors to the service. They and the socially higher class Cambridge 'goldenboys' never really got on.
The Ivy League WASPs were similar to the Cambridge brits. I don't know of any caste of ex-cop hardcases in the early CIA.