The torment and contradictions of a former Britishintelligence chief now residing in a depressing Moscow flat are theunclassified subject of Traitor, the first of a pair of works onpolitical betrayal. As the defector Adrian Harris (vividly realized byJohn Le Mesurier) obsessively tidies his drab apartment in preparationfor meeting a group of Western reporters, his mind flashes back to thesterility of his upper-class childhood, his humiliations at prep school,and his first experience with poverty in the Depression. During hisincreasingly drunken interview, Harris rationalizes that his spying forthe Soviet Union made him a traitor "to my class, yes, to mycountry, no, no, not to England." Though many critics believed thatthe teleplay was informed by the scandalous defection of British civilservant Kim Philby, Potter's intention was not to re-enact an historicalblunder, but to explore the cultural wrongheadedness that creates suchbetrayals. "The worst traitors are the dogmatists who think it aweakness to change their minds," Potter remarked, a judgment he haselsewhere aimed at the inflexibility of upper-class breeding.