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Antonia Senior

lines on the record: 32
first: 2026-04-16
most recent: 2026-04-16
sittings or episodes: 1
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“You so much. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Valpato and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full-length recordings, you can become a member at intelligence squared.com forward slash membership. And if you'd like to join us at any future events, you can find our full events program and buy tickets at intelligentsquared.com forward slash attend. You've been listening to intelligentsquared. Thanks for joining us.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would also just like to point out though that another thing about these guys is that they were recruited young, yes, when all these impulses to have neat things and tied up theories and whatever appeal, but they carried on 20 years, you know, when they were no longer young. And Anthony Blunt wasn't even that young when he was recruited. He was in his late 20s. and come to an understanding that it's a kind of solutions are quite messy and difficult. The things that they were willing to sacrifice, including the bodies of women from Eastern Europe for their utopian vision, they just could never and can never be worth that sacrifice. And they never ever come to that realization ever. And that, I think, is, you know, is a warning, a lesson.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That same sort of impulse towards radicalism that these guys had in the 30s, where, you know, to contrast it, we're not, you know, when I was there aged at Cambridge in the 90s, the Berlin Wall had just come down. Nelson Mandela had just been freed. It was a period, economically things were fine. Like it was a period where to be young felt like you had a stake in the future and limitless possibilities. Whereas, and I have, you know, a 17-year-old and below now, I think that their perception of the world is very different and contingent on a much more fractured and economically and politically unstable environment. So that's the echo, I think.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was available. You didn't have to be a mad revolutionary, right? But there was, you know, this is not to downplay the fact there was this swell of fervor. And I think. The thing that I feel is resolent of today is that if you're a young person today, it is entirely excusable to feel that the world that you have inherited from your parents is both more unstable than the world that they inherited from theirs because of the stuff that's gone in the past. And we didn't have World War One, but we have, you know, World War I and the Great Depression, but we have had financial shocks and COVID. It's not a comfortable time to be a young person. And an incoherent sense that we are sliding towards a reckoning with darkness. It's just we all have a different idea of what the darkness is. Right. So these are echoes and why if you're young today, you would have”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is a very, very we're in a very, very different world and actually... Know it's a kind of stranger world now because it's so multipolar. There's so many different kind of competing things. And competing ideologies as well, right? And also sort of non-ideological ideologies. So who can define Trumpism, right? It's actually quite difficult to define. It's just like whatever Heath says on Twitter that morning. So I think there are, you know, echoes. My sense is that so one of the things I make clear in the book is that there was this kind of swell of communist fervor amongst young people in the 1930s. There was also quite a lot of young people in the 1930s who were not engaged with it at all and thought it was ridiculous, right? And there was an alternative leftist tradition in Britain of kind of democratic.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then specifically with these guys, I mean, I did lots on their character because obviously as much as I say, you know, it's been too much about them and not about their victims, it is still about them, right? And they are great stories, fascinating characters, you know, incredible things. But it's also because with these specific guys, you get a combination of a toxic ideology. Horrible narcissism and that combination kind of creates monstrous actions effectively. Is where I came out in the end. So that's another reason to have lots of character math. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that actually struck me as well.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think so. And one of the things that I realized was that there was definitely a sort of sense of belonging to a club about it, right? So it was like a kind of revolutionary club. And it was kind of not only would you lose your sort of, if you recanted of your communism, if you're one of these young... Not only would you kind of lose your intellectual purpose, you would also lose your social circle, you would be considered sort of beyond the pale. Like, you know, there are so many things at stake for them in remaining wedded to an ideology that has defined them that it's actually incredibly hard for them to. Even if”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where actually you could hold a belief that would make you do terrible things. So yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to unpick that and unravel that and work out how they could very happily not let the facts get in the way of their kind of radiant vision. And one of the things I was very keen to do, because another big myth I think about the Cambridge 5 is that they were seduced very young into an ideology that it was impossible to really see the dark side of. So I did a lot of work into how much was known in the 1930s about stylist Russia. And those was known in the 30s. This Russia, but what happens is during the war, because we're now allies with Stylin, we kind of set out to forget. And then in the 1950s We kind of rediscover all the crimes as if they're new. But I mean, this stuff was not hidden. I mean, we didn't know the extent.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding that ideological fervor can cause extraordinary moral blindness, right? Because I think for a long time we didn't have that idea. I mean, when I went to Cambridge in the 1990s and it was a period where it was incredibly embarrassing Very serious Anything. You know, you had to have ironic detachments to everything. The idea that you could be committed to politics in any way, shape or form was laughable. So I thought I was really interested in this completely different moment. Which I felt when I began to approach this book in the early 2020s. We were seeing flickers of again.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lots of people believe really strongly in extreme things, but it doesn't, they don't believe to the point where they do what these guys did, which was not just, you know, I mean, they betrayed, one of their first tests from their handlers was like to betray their people closest to them, to betray their family and their friends and to lie to them. It asks extraordinary things of them and they give those things so willingly. They're so happy to do it. And I was fascinated by this. I was completely obsessed with this. And also, because I was coming to the book at a point where, you know, I felt that we were seeing a resurgence in a kind of...”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love that question because I was obsessed with this idea. This was one of my motivating reasons for writing the book. I felt again that I'd read lots of stuff about the Cambridge Fibre, and it's like, yes, they became communists, and then they betrayed everybody and everything they held dear. And you're like, okay, but that doing quite a lot of work. Like that's quite a lot of heavy lifting.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Released a massive chance of documents in January last year, which was both. Horrible because I didn't want my deadlines to slip, so I was having to go. Of you know, my kids went unfed, the pets went on. It was just like a three week period. My eyes bleeding reading MI5 documents. But I got loads of it in That was just kind of brand. A lot of it kind of quite nu”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no sourceable, like you can't find the origin. So you're like, well, can I put that in? No. So yeah, so this is a very roundabout answer to the story, to your question, that I was conscious of the stories. I was conscious of the limitations of the genre and the problems of writing a biography of people because it creates an incentive to overclaim for them. And I was pretty, I felt because I personally don't carry any baggage in any of these fields, I could just scrap a lot of it, go back to the sources, go back to the original documents and really, really kind of worry at it until I got a version of that was as close as I could get to. The other thing that was really helpful just very briefly, MI5 released loads of documents about these guys in 2022. And then just as I'd finished my first draft, they...”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sort of things have become, you see them in the biographies or whatever, or you see them in the books, and it's like. Somebody else has put them in secondary literature, but the source has been lost along the way, and now it's being repeated as a fact, but actually”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes it like that it all makes a difference and it really matters. Otherwise, what are you doing? Right, you should, it's you know, it's like a self, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If I'm writing a history of a spy group, that spy group has to have had an impact. Otherwise, why am I writing the history? So I was kind of conscious hugely that there are layers of story around these guys and layers of myth around these guys. loads of secondary literature, right? So so many books were written. So I read, obviously, I read them, but then I, as far as I could, stripped everything back and went back to the sources and went back to the original literature because I just, there's been so many accumulated kind of layers of story now that it's quite hard to unpick what's true and what isn't.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it probably helps that I'm a bit of an outsider. So, you know, I approach the whole thing with a slight skepticism actually that spying ever makes that much of a difference. And I think, you know, if you're an intelligence historian or a spy fiction writer, you have to start from the sort of premise that what you do is...”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had been a sort of filmy feeding into a very effective counterintelligence machine. These operations were riddled by this stage with informers and problems. So it was too late. They kept sending men to their deaths and they kept dying. And it's all pretty grisly actually. It's really horrible because it was cynical as well. So yeah, so with those archives, that's what I found. And it was really great.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Razio games across Europe where Soviet counterintelligence set up these fake networks which sent radio messages back to British and American intelligence officers, you know, saying, oh, everything's going great, send more money, send more men, send more arms, but it was all fake. And they would, as people would dropped in and betrayed by Philby, they would turn them and then use them to play these games. So when Philby was forced to resign because everybody knew he was a spy in 1951, actually the Americans and the British then sort of doubled down on these operations because they thought that, oh, well, the reason they've been so horribly unsuccessful and everybody keeps getting caught and killed is because Philby was leaking it all. But actually, he's gone now, so we're fine. Failing to recognize that actually because of the nature of it.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To parachute in to territories controlled by the Soviets or the Albanian communists, and they sent them to their home regions, right? So because the idea was if they went somewhere where they grew up, they would have better access to networks and camouflage. But obviously because Philby was kind of leaking everything, they had their real names as well as their code names. And you can see in the Albanian files where they know people are coming or they know people are being trained and they start preemptively terrorizing their families and friends in order to be ready to receive for when they land. So he doesn't even often have to give the precise landing details. All he has to do is give them the names and where they're from. And the Soviet counterintelligence can do the rest. So I found that and I found what was amazing. They played these.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Files contain notes saying, Oh, the Soviet embassy says this is the British incoming operation. And here are all the men who are on that operation. And the horrible and ironic thing was with a lot of these operations.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they were really helped by having the other side of the equation. So, what I found was the counterintelligence operations that they tried to do in Albania before they really get going and before they have a lot of help from Kim Filby are really, really kind of faltering and not very good. And then as the kind of the British and American operations progress and Philby's more embedded and they're getting more information, these counterintelligence measures begin to really, really work. So what you get is a kind of duet between Philby leaking stuff in London and then Washington and then Soviet counterintelligence measures on the ground. So I found, for example, in Albania, I found in the secret police files a direct link between intelligence coming out of the Soviet embassy in Tirana about the British intelligence operations, so the Sigurumi.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's absolutely brilliant. And she really helped me hold my hands through those archives and we found loads of stuff. So what we didn't find was obviously what you would want to find, which is like a massive smoking gun, like, oh, here is a list of people and it's been sent to us by a man called Kim Philby in London. Obviously, I didn't find that. What I found was, so we knew that Soviet counterintelligence measures against these operations were brilliant, right?”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had this idea that it might be regime change, but mostly it wasn't really about regime change. It was more kind of SOE ish. It was like make some mischief, gather some intelligence, you know, create links with the people on the ground. And Kim Filby was put in charge of loads of those operations or was very close to the heart of loads of those operations. And he became the liaison on loads of those operations with the Americans. So we knew quite a lot of this. What I wanted to do is see if I could find anything from the other side of the equation because obviously they're sending people into Ukraine, into Lithuania, into Estonia, into Poland and into Albania. And I was really, so I got some, I got access to Lithuanian KGB files, which was incredible. And also the Albanian secret police files, the Sigurumi files, opened a few years ago. And I had an absolutely wonderful researcher called Engsey, who, big shout out, she's watching.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So with the Lithuanian and Albanian part of the story, that was really about the activities of Kim Filby after 1945. So Kim Filby gets, is working for British intelligence MI6. And he's basically put in charge of counter-soviet measures across Europe. And at that stage, what that means is parachuting and shipping expats effectively kind of displaced people back into countries behind the Soviet Union and getting them to collect intelligence, sort of set up networks, make contacts with the existing partisans because there was huge amounts of resistance to Soviet rule. And the British and American intelligence were trying to make contact with that and kind of ferment trouble with Albania briefly.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, physically and bodily by the Cambridge Five. And they lived in Central and Eastern Europe, or they came from Central and Eastern Europe. And there was also an awful lot of diplomatic betrayals of those people by the Cambridge Five that has an impact on how Stalin maneuvered in all the years that he was trying to get his hands on these countries. So I just sort of realized that actually we'd kind of in our Anglo-centric obsession with the story and they're kind of like, you know, where they sat in certain circles, et cetera, we'd missed the fact that the real people who suffered from their betrayals were actually the men and women of Eastern and Central Europe who wanted agency, who wanted a national identity, but instead found themselves laboring under Stalin's curse for decades after the war.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During the war, he's obsessed with this idea in ways that I kind of unpick a little bit in the book when he's, you know, when he's fighting on the bat foot against Germany, he's still thinking very clearly about that post-war settlement. So when I sort of realized I wasn't going to get that novel away, I kind of started thinking about what's another way of telling this story. And there's a massive irony that I ended up writing a book about our Anglo-centric narrative about the Cambridge 5, but I had to write a book really with an Anglo-narrative in order to write a book about Poland. So there's lots of ironies there. But yes, as soon as I sort of started unpicking it, I thought, well, actually, you know, there's an extraordinary number of people who were betrayed.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I struggled to get this book away. And one of the criticisms was that it was a bit too Polish, which, you know, was a bit depressing. So then I kind of thought, wow, and then in the course of researching that book, I kind of read a little bit into where the Cambridge V had touched on Polish history and how they had betrayed them in the war. And it got me thinking more about the victims of the Cambridge Five, right? the fact that Stalin's plan was obvious pre-war, right? He becomes allies with Hitler, they have this secret protocol that isn't really a massive secret that effects a few dividing Europe up between them. And Stalin wants to push his Soviet revolution out and beyond the borders of Russia. And that project, again, even during”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the kind of origin story of this book is that I'd actually written a novel about Poland because I became completely fascinated about Polish history during the war, about the idea that, you know, we as a nation have this idea that we won the war. But actually, if you're standing in Poland or you're standing in Lithuania, Stalin won the war, right? And I sort of was fascinated by the idea of the Polish experience of being invaded by Hitler from one direction in 1939 and then Stalin from the other direction in 1939. And then they fought so incredibly bravely for years. And then at the end of the war, they were sort of offered up to Stalin anyway. So I'd written a novel about the Polish experience and about some women and children who were To Siberia. And so my care”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enough. So there's a square being named after him. There's a statue raised to him. There's a kind of government-endorsed new kind of research project, a website, which is kind of looking at the Cambridge 5. And in that version of the story, they are anti-fascist heroes, right? So the fact that they betrayed their country was allowable because they were fighting Hitler, which of course completely ignores the fact that for at least, you know, for a long period of their early betrayals at the beginning of the war, Hitler and Stalin were actually allies. So I felt there was an awful lot still to unpick and I wanted to move away from what I think of as the kind of reform club version of the story, you know, how they fitted into the British class system, how they're betrayals affected their friends. And I wanted to put the story back into its kind of global strategic.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I felt was a really missing piece of the puzzle, which is what did Stalin want from these guys? What use were they to his grand strategic vision for Europe and what he was trying to achieve? Where do they fit into the Soviet story? And actually, as I was kind of beginning to research the book, I realized that there was something else going on. It's just as we were sort of like relaxing into a view of these guys as kind of, you know, almost like Robin Hood figures and how much you condemn them sort of depended on a kind of almost like a kind of slightly boring cultural war type thing, how important do you think it is whether you betray your country or not seem to be the kind of yard stit by which we measured these guys. I realized that there was a sort of parallel mythology happening in Putin's Russia where basically they're being rehabilitated into the national story in a really profound way, particularly Kim Filby interested.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slightly glorious rebel who is sort of hardly done by the establishments and therefore his sort of future betrayal is an understandable thing. I came to feel that there was a kind of sense that these guys had committed like a heist on an establishment that deserved to be humbled and their betrayal was mainly of a country that also kind of in our sort of post-colonial reckoning deserved to be humbled a little bit as well. And I thought that story probably needed a little bit of reassessing. There's elements of truth in it, like all these stories, obviously. But I realized also that I'd read huge numbers of words about these guys. I've been very interested in them for years. And I knew huge amounts about Guy Burgess's sex life. And I didn't know very much about.”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I did feel that they'd been a little overindulged, particularly in our kind of cultural representations of them. If you think of the sort of television versions of their story, you know, it's Alan Bates melancholy in a flat in Moscow and we're invited to feel sorry for him as the guy Burgess figure or the young guy Burgess lightly fictionalized in the brilliant film Another country and again you know he's a sort of”
2026-04-16 · Intelligence Squared · Why Did Elite Cambridge Graduates Become Soviet Spies? Revisiting the Cambridge Five, with Antonia Senior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT