While the United States unmasked its own share of Cold War traitors—Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs come immediately to mind—the story of the Cambridge Five is less familiar on this side of the Atlantic than in Great Britain, where the defections of Burgess and Maclean and eventually Philby are woven into the fabric of postwar culture. The more I dug into their stories, the more fascinated I became by the complex psychology of each spy—the reasons they betrayed the very establishment that had nurtured them, their continued ideological loyalty in the face of communism’s brutal reality, the torment of leading a double life—and, most marvelous of all, how these men remained undetected for so long inside a privileged caste that simply refused to believe one of their own could betray them. How willfully blind were their friends and colleagues, really? And how did their families cope with and enable their treason and its calamitous consequences?

Of course, the United States has its own privileged caste—Erik Larson memorably dubbed it the Pretty Good Club in his account of prewar diplomacy in Berlin, In the Garden of Beasts—which presumes absolute loyalty as a condition of membership. Certainly, the appeal of communism to the rising young men of the Great Depression was just as shiny in America’s Ivy League as in Oxbridge. I might have made an imaginative leap in creating an American Donald Maclean in Our Woman in Moscow, but not from thin air. And as in real life, the wives and sisters, the mothers and secretaries, play roles untold and even unimagined by official history.

Q&A with Beatriz Williams

Q: Beatriz, you’ve written an incredible amount of historical fiction spanning a range of time periods featuring brave women who make decisions based on duty, ambition, and heart. Our Woman in Moscow takes these same themes but adds in a dash of espionage. What inspired you to write about the Cold War for Our Woman in Moscow? What made you turn to the Cambridge Spy Ring?