by Kimberley Cornish; Century, 1998, $35.

When Deadly Illusions: The First Book from the KGB Archives, by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, was published by Random House in 1993, I snapped it up. Here was new evidence regarding some of the greatest spy stories of the twentieth century, from the disappearance of Sidney Reilly, the legendary "Ace of Spies", in 1926, to the recruitment of the Cambridge spies in the 1930s, documented for the first time from the archives of the Soviet intelligence service. Oleg Tsarev had been a KGB officer himself for many years and his collaboration with John Costello in bringing these documents out of the KGB's archives was pathbreaking. One of the key claims of the authors was that they had, in Tsarev's words, "unlocked the final secrets of the origins" of the Cambridge spy ring, for the new material included the correspondence of the London rezidentura during 1934-35, discussing in detail the recruitment of the Cambridge group by Amold Deutsch and Ignaty Reif, under the direction of Alexander Orlov. There was much else of great interest in the book, but this material was important, since it appeared to settle long-standing disputes about who really recruited Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross.

Kimberley Cornish has a different angle on all this. Without consulting the Soviet archives, he has reached the conclusion that the real recruiter of the Cambridge spies was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He believes that the recruitment took place in 1929, not in 1934-35; that Trinity College, Cambridge, was where the recruitment took place; that the Soviet illegals commonly regarded as the recruiters and case-officers (Deutsch, Reif, Orlov and Theodor Mally) had nothing to do with the Cambridge ring, except that Mally and Deutsch were decoys set up to cover the traces of Wittgenstein; that they were later executed by Moscow Centre in order to cover those traces even further; and that Burgess and Maclean fled England in May 1951 not because of imminent exposure, but because their mentor had died the previous month and this seemed to them reason enough to get out while the going was good. How's that for an original thesis?

There's a lot more where this came from, too. Stuff about the Wittgenstein family's tentacular connections, the music of Wagner, the metaphysics of Mein Kampf, the relationship of Wittgenstein's and Hitler's philosophical ideas to ancient Indian thought, and how they clashed on this high ground in a secret struggle for control of the human mind. The startling notion that Wittgenstein was the spymaster of Cambridge between 1929 and 1951 is, indeed, embedded in a broader argument so sweeping and idiosyncratic that anyone with an interest in twentieth-century history and philosophy should read it at some point as a sort of brain teaser or cross-world puzzle. Based on a photograph which appears to show Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the same year at the Linz Realschule in 1904 and some cryptic allusions by Hitler, in Mein Kampf, to a young Jewish boy...