The Elite Protect Their Own

Kim Philby is arguably history's greatest spy. He spent World War II and the Cold War rising through the ranks of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, including holding the role of head of counter-Soviet intelligence. At the same time, he was a double agent for the Soviet Union, having been recruited into the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring while a student. The secrets he passed to the Soviets compromised countless Western operations. His treachery remained undiscovered for decades, solidifying his reputation as a master of espionage. But, in retrospect, it's amazing he got away with it. All the signs were there.

Throughout his career, long before he was found out and fled to live his twilight years in Moscow, plenty of people had their suspicions. Among them were agents of MI5, the British intelligence agency tasked with domestic security. In his wonderful history of the Philby affair, A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre notes that MI6 downplayed their concerns, in part because the foreign intelligence service drew its members from England's elite, while MI5 was more working class. MI6 thus didn't heed the warnings because they had a class-conscious urge to protect their own, especially when their own were the target of criticisms and accusations by those of lower status. The result was unnecessarily extending the years Philby was passing every important secret MI6 had to the Russians.

The lesson here—don't let elite class solidarity interfere with warranted criticism of members of that elite or the way elite institutions conduct themselves—applies more broadly than the smokey, public school educated confines of Britain's foreign intelligence service. America's journalistic and political elite have their own strongly held class consciousness and culture, which permeates their institutions, and leads them to take less seriously than they should critique of those institutions and their members by critics outside the tribe, and to dismiss as beneath them outside journalists, activists, influencers, and advocates who don't hew to the peculiar standards and practices of elite circles.

Marginalized groups are sneeringly told not to harshly criticize the coverage of them in the opinion pages of the nation's most prominent newspaper. Peaceful protests are condemned as decorum violating disruptions, or when media and governing institutions refused to be challenged by those pointing out how they're not living up to their principles. Those who point out the unserious way the far-right gets covered are told they're not real journalists, while the real journalists stamp their feet at the unseemly disrespect they suffer when politicians don't give them interviews first, or when TikTokers are offered media space at national conventions.

Not every opinion expressed outside the confines of elite circles is correct. Many are quite wrong. But the same applies to those expressed inside elite circles, as well. Civility matters, but it shouldn't be weaponed to brand as "uncivil," and therefore dismiss on matters of form rather than content, any expression one happens to disagree strongly with. We have an incentive to assume the justice and rightness of any hierarchy that places us at the top, and media and political elites are no exception. But hierarchies need critique, and that critique is most likely to come from those at the bottom or outside of its structure, and so not invested in its norms. Institutions can go wrong, but it can take longer for those inside the institution to see the rot than those outside of it. Good-standing members of elite circles can misunderstand or betray the values and goals of their profession, but it's often the people not of those circles who first suffer the harms.

If MI6 had listened to the working class MI5 sooner, even if that meant setting aside their class solidarity and consciousness, much of Philby's harm could've been prevented, and British intelligence could've gotten a head start on necessary reform. America's elite journalism and political institutions, suffering through their own period of failure, would do well to heed that lesson of history.