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When actor Toby Stephens' mother, actress Maggie Smith, sent him off to prep school, he heard whispers that Kim Philby had also attended the school back in the '30s. But that shameful fact was never mentioned in polite company.

Philby, you see, cost British citizens dearly by passing secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War. Recruited by Communists when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Philby and three classmates -- Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean) -- became Soviet agents in 1934. Over the next two decades they burrowed deeply into Britain's intelligence community to provide their handlers in Moscow with a gusher of highly classified documents.

"It's comic, because you weren't actually allowed to discuss the fact that Philby went to the school," says Stephens, speaking from his home in London. "I only found out through rumor and eventually confirmed the fact with my parents. It was a huge disgrace.

"Their names are completely synonymous with treachery," says Stephens. "These people are seen as traitorous swine and there's a whole generation in this country who literally won't speak about them."

The quartet's infamy still sparks outrage among many Brits. So why make a miniseries about them?

"I think it's very dangerous when you represent people as straightforward villains," says Stephens, who stars as Philby in "Cambridge Spies," a five- part miniseries airing on BBC America. "There are reasons for what they do. One has to look at the historical context in which these men existed, and I think that's what the series attempts to do."

Stephens, best known in America for playing James Bond's fantastical nemesis Gustav Graves in "Die Another Day," worked with a cast including Tom Hollander (playing Burgess), Samuel West (as Blunt) and Rupert Penry-Jones (as Maclean). In the '30s, Communists decried the Nazis' rise to power while middle-of-the-road democracies remained silent, Stephens notes. "The rise of the right wing in Europe was perceived by the intelligentsia in England as a real threat. Philby believed utterly in Communism as an antidote to the Fascism that was sweeping through Europe."

Additionally, the Cambridge undergrads despised England's class system. "The notion of loving one's country but loathing its governance is really what they felt," Stephens says. "They were deeply patriotic, but they hated the way the country was run and desperately wanted to get rid of this old-school class system."

Many intellectuals and artists embraced the Communist Party in the '30s and later simply changed their allegiance when the full truth about Stalin's tyranny emerged. Philby, Maclean, Blunt and Burgess didn't have that option.

"These guys were recruited when they were young and idealistic, at the apex of their naive passion," Stephens says. "The thing is, once you've taken the step of becoming a Russian spy, you can't suddenly turn around years later and say, 'Actually this is not all it's cracked up to be.' You're in a situation where you have to justify your actions to yourself. The last thing you want to do is admit you were wrong. After killing God knows how many people, it must be so difficult to admit to yourself, to then say, 'It's a load of rubbish.' "

Philby never admitted any wrongdoing. Before defecting to Russia in 1963, he ran counterintelligence for MI6, Britain's CIA equivalent. In that position,

he arranged the assassinations of spies allied with England and even provided the KGB with names of British agents he himself had trained.

"You do kind of marvel at how he could be like that. It's inhuman, almost," says Stephens.

But Philby was a natural. "He was the most adept agent," Stephens says. "They were all heavy drinkers -- Burgess and Maclean were renowned for turning around to someone in a bar and saying, 'I'm a double agent.' Whereas Philby never did, which I found fascinating: He never lost control, even when he was plastered. Philby so despised the old-school people who ran the country. I think he derived a great pleasure out of hoodwinking them for that long."

As much as Philby and company hated England's rigid class system, it was precisely their high-born pedigrees that allowed them to rise through the ranks of England's ruling establishment.

"The further they got, the more easily they could stay under cover, because of the school tie, because of the school jacket," said Stephens' cast mate West, speaking to reporters in Los Angeles last summer. "The thinking was, you know, 'This man went to Cambridge. He couldn't possibly be a Communist.' "

Remarkably, West's character, Anthony Blunt, was knighted in 1956, five years after helping Burgess and Maclean flee to Russia. In 1964, Blunt admitted his treachery to the Secret Intelligence Service but continued to serve as "Surveyer of the Queen's Pictures" for 16 more years to spare the royal family embarrassment. Blunt was finally exposed as a spy in 1979 with the publication of Andrew Boyle's "The Climate of Treason."

Stephens says young people in England are intrigued by the series' peek at Britain's secret service in the wake of a recent scandal revolving around British weapons expert David Kelly, who was found dead in July under mysterious circumstances.

"In Britain at the moment, there's all these revelations about how the secret service works," Stephens says. "It's a piece of machinery very few people understand. So when you put this in contrast to the 'Cambridge Spies' story, there's the idea that this very closed shop is still going on."

"Cambridge Spies" sparked considerable controversy when it aired in England last spring. "There were articles in all these papers asking, 'How can they glorify these people?' " Stephens said. "But we're not glorifying them or saying these men were heroic in any way. The series does not propagandize what they did, and we're not saying it's quite cool to be a double spy."

On the contrary, Stephens says -- these characters led miserable existences.

"It's a choice these people made, and it ruined a lot of people's lives, including their own. That's part of the tragedy of Kim Philby, and with all of them, really. What kind of life can you really have if you're constantly being duplicitous?

"In the end, they were still traitors," Stephens muses. "This series is not apologizing for them. But you can't see traitors simply as evil people. You have to somehow make sense of why they made these choices. That might be a rather grandiose thing for a TV series to attempt, but unless you get to the root of the problem, you're not dealing with it and you're in danger of opening up yourself up to the same thing again."