Last month, Britain’s Security Service, MI5, released its latest round of files to the UK’s National Archives (TNA). The release, announced alongside a new major new exhibition on MI5’s history, is just the latest in a series of releases going back to 1997, when the service made parts of its historical archive public, influenced by the ‘Open Government’ initiative of the early 1990s. These latest files, some of which are free to download from the TNA website, include the usual MI5 personnel files (the KV 2s), most notably on the activities of three of the ‘Cambridge Five’ – Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. These men, alongside their fellow Cambridge compatriots, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, were recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, and passed significant information to Moscow – though it was, Moscow’s archives reveal, not always believed.

The Five have achieved a near-mythical status. Journalists and others, informed by the TNA’s slick press releases, were quick to suggest that MI5’s latest batch of files was revelatory. There’s the transcript of Philby’s December 1951 interview with barrister and MI5 officer Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo. Questioned at length, under suspicion of being the so-called ‘Third Man’, Philby was unable to convince Milmo of his innocence. We also get to see the partial transcript of Philby’s recorded interview with his friend and former Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) colleague, Nicholas Elliott, in January 1963 (though extracts were released some time ago). During the meeting in a Beirut apartment (as seen in the 2022 series A Spy Among Friends, based on the best-selling book), Philby gave Elliott (who is redacted from the files) a partial confession wrongly claiming that he had stopped spying for the Soviets in 1946. In reality, Philby’s double life continued for much longer.

The files also show that the Queen only found out in 1973 that Sir Anthony Blunt, former MI5 officer and Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, had confessed to being a Soviet spy in 1964. Her Majesty took it all, records reveal, ‘very calmly’. We also get a transcript of Blunt’s confession. He was given immunity from prosecution, only being revealed as a traitor by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, when he personally admitted to putting ‘political conscience’ first over ‘loyalty to country’. The files also provide insights into the ‘Fifth Man’ – John Cairncross. While the identity of a ‘fifth’ member of the Cambridge Spy Ring had been subject to much speculation in public, Cairncross had been identified as a spy in 1951 (though his status as the ‘fifth man’ was confirmed sometime later). Re-interviewed in 1964, after Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union, Cairncross – then working in the US – finally admitted to spying for the Soviets since 1936.

It’s all very interesting, but it seems more akin to an establishment soap opera than real history; the backroom gossip appears in microscopic detail without answering the bigger ‘so what?’ question. Everyone knows that Philby – a serial philanderer, drunkard and traitor – lied to Elliott in 1963. We know that Blunt had been given immunity in return for a confession. Document releases may provide the minutiae, but we’ve known about the big picture for a long time. Much of what was dismissively called the ‘airport bookstall’ version of intelligence history, produced by journalists with access to key figures in the affair long before the declassification of files, got the bigger picture of betrayal and coverup right. Andrew Boyle’s 1979 book, The Climate of Treason, did much to show the broad essentials. Others such as Robert Cecil, a one-time colleague of Maclean, provided more. There were once intriguing debates around the identities of the fourth and fifth members of the Cambridge spies, but these questions have long been answered.

Though it is true to say that the ‘culture of secrecy’ meant historians often had to carefully mine UK archives for traces of the Five, we now have a deluge of material. More archival releases have not necessarily made the study of the subject more revealing. John Ferris, recently the authorised historian of UK signals intelligence, has commented that new files made the subject accessible, but made others ‘fetishize and sensationalize’ it. The hidden world, he said, was ‘filled with trainspotters’. The story of the Five, as told in large part, falls into this category.

There are wider issues at stake beyond the sense of personal drama. A definitive damage assessment still eludes us, yet historians should attempt to answer this vital issue. While Moscow’s archives suggest that the Five were, for a short period of their double lives, distrusted by their KGB masters, the internal paranoia provoked by the case had ripple effects. The irony is that, while the material damage had been closed off by 1951, and the key members identified after Burgess and Maclean fled to the Soviet Union, continued paranoia set in within Whitehall. The steady drip, drip effect of every new revelation, also brought out repeated statements and new information from the British government. The newest releases mark perhaps the latest twist in a story going back to Burgess and Maclean’s disappearance. The new files should also be read, not for what they explicitly tell us about main characters of the story of the Five, but for what they tell us about security and intelligence in the broader sense.

Neatly packaged document-releases generate headlines, but they give a constrained view. It remains the case that, while we have more information available than ever before, broader questions on the role and influence of the UK’s intelligence community in the Cold War have yet to be studied, let alone answered. We now have authorised histories of MI5, GCHQ, SIS (up to 1949) and the Joint Intelligence Committee, but the broader integration of these accounts and their insights into government needs greater exploration. Intelligence, once described as the ‘missing dimension’ of political and diplomatic history, can now be studied. Diligent work in government archives reveals more of this story. It remains the case that while Russian services laud Philby and others, the UK’s intelligence services enjoyed considerable successes against its counterparts in the Eastern Bloc.

MI5’s latest files will result in yet more coverage of the Five. It is difficult to see any other aspect of UK intelligence history that has been, to use former MI5 Director General Stella Rimington’s words, ‘glamourised and sentimentalised’ in such a way. The longevity of the Five has as much to do with book sales, headlines and television, as it has to do with anything genuinely new about the story itself, which is now a historical playground, part of a heritage culture where familiar themes of old boy networks and betrayal are regurgitated. As the spy and writer John le Carré once wrote: ‘We can discern in ourselves the social attitudes and opinions which account as much for Philby’s survival as for his determination to destroy us’.

Society has moved on. Philby is far removed from the ‘we’ and ‘us’ of today – a generation shaped more by the muddy morality portrayed in espionage series such as Spooks and Slow Horses. The story of the Five is about a bygone age whose ideological struggles no longer resonate with the same urgency. The latest files on Philby et al, should be seen as the beginning of the end of a story that has been told continuously for decades. It is time to seek closure and move to fresh subjects.