Cambridge Apostles

An undergraduate secret society that produced philosophers, spies — and the Cambridge Five.

Let me take you across the Atlantic, to England, to the University of Cambridge, in the year 1820. That year, twelve students founded a private discussion society. Just twelve, which is why, half-jokingly, they called themselves 'the Apostles.' The real name is the Cambridge Conversazione Society, but almost nobody uses it. They met in secret, on Saturday nights, behind closed doors. One member would stand on a ceremonial rug, 'the hearthrug,' and deliver a paper on some deep question of philosophy, art, ethics, or politics, and then the others would tear it apart in debate. Membership was for life. And here's the strange, beautiful part, active members were called 'apostles,' and once you graduated, you became an 'angel.' And this was no minor club. Over two centuries the Apostles counted some of the greatest minds in Britain. The poet Alfred Tennyson. The philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The economist John Maynard Keynes. Writers who would become the core of the famous Bloomsbury Group. If you wanted to map the intellectual DNA of modern Britain, you could start right here, in these Saturday-night meetings. But here's where it gets strange. And this part is fully documented, not legend. In the 1930s, as fascism rose across Europe, a wave of idealistic young Cambridge men drifted toward communism. And several of them were Apostles. Among them was Anthony Blunt, a brilliant art historian, and Guy Burgess, a charismatic, chaotic figure who could talk his way into any room. Both were elected to the Apostles. Both were also, secretly, recruited as spies for the Soviet Union. They became part of what history now calls the Cambridge Five, the most damaging Soviet spy ring in British history. Blunt, Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross. For decades these men passed British and American secrets straight to Moscow, from inside British intelligence, the Foreign Office, and even Buckingham Palace, where Blunt served as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Now, here's the part most people don't know. Not all five of the Cambridge Five were Apostles. Philby wasn't. Maclean's membership is debated. But Blunt and Burgess absolutely were, and the society's ideals, its intimacy, its secrecy, its intense loyalty between members, are part of how historians explain the way ideology and personal bonds pulled these men into betrayal. The society didn't run the spy ring. But it was the soil some of it grew in. That's documented history, confirmed after Blunt was publicly exposed as a Soviet agent by the British government in 1979. So this is the rare case where the secret-society-meets-espionage story isn't a conspiracy theory at all. It's simply what happened. A society built to pursue truth in private, that produced, among its saints, a nest of spies. On our map, the Cambridge Apostles reach out along two threads. One runs across the ocean to America's Skull and Bones, its Ivy League cousin. And the other runs into the cold machinery of the Cold War, toward Crypto AG and the world of secret intelligence.