Helen Fry
The Cambridge Spies, Part 1

Dr. Helen Fry - The Cambridge Spies, Part 1

- I’m going to take a look this evening at the Cambridge Spies. We’ve got a two-parter today and on Thursday at 5:00. I’m going to just unpack some of the mysteries that still, and the unanswered questions that still surround the Cambridge Five. This evening, I’m going to be talking about Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt. There’ll be a little mention of John Cairncross and a mention in passing of Kim Philby because Kim Philby, of course, on his own could have at least, well, they could all have at least one or two sessions. So let’s see how far we get with them this evening and to sort of weave into here some of the unanswered questions because I think even over 50 years later and we’re over 30 years since the end of the Cold War, there are still so many unanswered questions and the stories of these Cambridge Five in particular continue to enthral us. There seems to be so much interest in spies and espionage. So I’ve started there with this. The Cambridge Spies, they had everything. They were the gilded elite who still betrayed their country. And perhaps that’s part of the fascination, the horror really at what they could do, that they had everything. They had a comfortable lifestyle, the high-class education, Cambridge University, Eton College, Eton College First and Cambridge University. They came from incredibly privileged backgrounds and yet perhaps with no small amount of arrogance, they felt that they could just take the secrets of their nation and pass them to Soviet intelligence so that why did they betray their country? Next slide, please.

We’re going to take a little look first at the background of Guy Burgess. The photograph on the right, I think, says it all really. He sort of was incredibly relaxed about life. He didn’t have a very easy life psychologically later. He was troubled in all kinds of ways. But it was that whole kind of sense that they’d come from a privileged background, born in 1911 and died in 1963, died actually the year that Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Next slide, please. So he’s born in Devonport in Devon, studied at Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Not many people know that actually. So Devon born and bred, and then he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. And this is where he begins to meet, mix with the parties, the cocktail parties, quite outrageous in many ways, the parties and the lavish lifestyle that went on at Cambridge. This cocooned world away from reality really. And in that bubble where ideas are being discussed and that age of, I don’t know if it’s relative innocence, but certainly we mustn’t forget that in the 1930s, which is when early late 20s, early 1930s, which is when the Cambridge Five are in Cambridge, they really have no choice between the far right, the rise of fascism and communism, and even the far left. There was no middle ground. And in that cocooned world of Cambridge, they stake their mark that they are very firmly going to be in the communist camp.

And many of them were part of the communist or members of the Communist Society of Great Britain. It was quite common at that time. They were inducted into what was called the Cambridge Apostles. And this had a membership of just 12. It was incredibly elite, obviously mirroring the apostles in the Christian New Testament. And there’s a sense of secrecy of a secret society. And Guy Burgess is certainly one of those. He’s part of one of those. In 1934, and this is an interesting twist, he actually renounced his communism. Does he really renounce communism? That’s the thing. And he joins the Anglo-German Fellowship. The Anglo-German Fellowship, as I put, there’s a pro-Nazi group. They are pro-German, but also pro-Nazi. So they’re interested in all things supporting Nazi Germany. They have groups up and down the country, but particularly based around London. In fact, it’s not a topic for today, but MI5 actually managed to penetrate with several of its agents, some of them women, the Anglo-German Fellowship, to actually monitor what was being said, what threat they posed within Britain. 1936, so two years later, he’s actually, Burgess is working for the BBC. In 1939, the outbreak of war, just for two or three years, he’s actually seconded temporarily to MI5, and he’s working actually on propaganda. And there’s a lot of propaganda being put out at this time. It’s in the form of posters, smuggling literature into parts of Europe. He didn’t necessarily go abroad, but he’s actually working on aspects of propaganda. Next slide, please.

But by this time, it is believed that he’s already been recruited for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. And what we know of him, of course, his sexuality has been up for a lot of discussion, particularly in the new biographies about him, that in being homosexual, which at that time was not legal, he was also indiscreet about it. And if you’re working in any aspect of intelligence, this was a sort of marker, a red flag, if you like, if someone’s going to be indiscreet. And of course, it was later in the 1950s, a lot of indiscretions at parties that caused huge issues. He ends up working not only for the BBC, but also for the Times newspaper. In parallel with Kim Philby, he covers some of the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War is raging 1936 to 1938. And that is the Franco-fascist conflict with the communists. Burgess is actually being part of that world, covering it. Kim Philby is actually masking as a supporter of Franco, as being pro-fascist, so that he can get close to Franco. In fact, Franco, in the end, ends up trusting him. And he gets all kinds of insights into Franco’s inner circle. So in this period, they are already working for Soviet intelligence. During the Second World War, then primarily Burgess is working in propaganda. And at the end of the war, he’s posted to Washington. 1947, he’s based in the British Embassy as one of the secretaries, attaches in Washington there. Next slide, please.

So he is, that’s his cover. He’s actually in the embassy, but he is actually an intelligence officer. He’s officially a foreign office official, but actually he’s there on intelligence. And we don’t actually know what exactly his role was. But what’s particularly difficult is that during his time in Washington, in the early Cold War, and even before the Cold War, he is beginning to pass secrets to the Russians. And I’ve listed there some of the items that he’s actually passing. Because one of the difficulties for historians over the last few decades in writing about the Cambridge Five is to ascertain what exactly did they pass to Russia? And yes, we can say in very broad terms, they passed information on atomic secrets, but we don’t really know the full scale and the precise documents. It’s incredibly difficult to have a link between what they actually passed over so that we can assess just how damaging they were. We know that they were damaging, but just the full extent of what they had access to and what they gave Russian intelligence would be really interesting to try and analyse. And I’ll come back to declassified file shortly. So what is he passing to the Russians? Files, information from the foreign office, as well as MI5 documents. MI5 is actually tracking threats within the UK, although sometimes their work takes them outside the UK, particularly today, I guess. We know from the news reports that they do work outside of the country, but primarily MI5 is involved in this country. So they are tracking the threat. In the 1930s, it was not only from communists working in Britain, but also from German spies, from Nazi spies. And during the Second World War, we were looking for spies, which we picked up, trying to turn them as double agents.

So he could well have been passing not only intelligence files about information that MI5 has gathered, but he might well have passed information on individuals that MI5 was following. He also passed on files that described, this is obviously during the Cold War period now, NATO military and economic strategy in Europe. This is a time when Europe is coming out of the Second World War. There is still rationing. We have slid almost without a break, even before the Second World War finishes, we’ve slid into the Cold War. And of course, NATO was protecting strategy and economic rebuilding of Germany. And this was being passed, this information was being passed to Soviet intelligence. He was also smuggling documents out of the foreign office just for one night. And you do wonder how he wasn’t stopped, how he could actually manage to successfully smuggle documents out. He would go, next slide please, to his handler in Bayswater, where they would actually be photographed. And then the following day, he would bring the documents back. Now, while he was working in Washington after the war, because he spent his time at a short time in Washington and then was back in London, he actually lodged with Kim Philby. They were quite a pair really, partying and frequently getting drunk. Burgess’s controller was actually Yuri Modin. And we’ll come back to Yuri Modin later because he actually spills some of the beans later. And Burgess, of course, is a risk, not only from his several lovers, he’s having a lot of sexual liaisons, he’s actually drinking heavily, but his brawls. And when he’s back in London, he falls down the stairs of the Royal Automobile Club, RAC Club in Palmau. And he is just seen as a complete liability. He has though a longstanding stable lover, Peter Pollack. Next slide, please.

And Peter Pollack, an interesting part of the story actually, lived here. And this is Shardalow’s Farm. This is in Flaundon in Buckinghamshire. Actually, I think Flaundon’s in Buckinghamshire. It might just be on the Hertfordshire border. They keep changing the borders, but it’s out towards Hammersham, Chesham. And this was where he used to go quite frequently and stay with Peter Pollack. And this is interesting, because when we come to his defection, next slide, please. Yeah, this is the Green Dragon at Flaundon. They do fabulous food, by the way. Always worth going out to the Green Dragon at Flaundon. This is just a couple of doors away. It’s on the same side of the road as Shardalow’s Farm. So he goes and stays with Peter Pollack. But they also go into the pub quite a lot, and it’s one of the places they frequent. And what’s interesting, when I’ve been doing a lot of research in the Buckinghamshire countryside over the last 10, 20 years, it’s actually not far from one of the wartime eavesdropping sites that you’ve heard me, many of you, talk about before, Latimer House. And it’s while I’ve been giving talks, of course, sometimes people come up with anecdotes about the Cold War period, and it’s not really a period I touch into very much in my books at the moment. But one of the rumours that came out was that this pub, the Green Dragon, was the last public sighting of Guy Burgess before he defected.

And I went and visited the pub, and inside, it’s gone now, but not the pub, but the notice, there was a notice which said this was the last public sighting of Guy Burgess. And I always think it’s important to take oral tradition seriously and try and find the paper trail. And why it was quite controversial, because I would just say occasionally to people, in particular, a couple of Burgess’s biographers, oh, you know, the last public sighting, it’s wonderful, Green Dragon in Flondon. No, no, no. The last public sighting, they said, of Burgess was in a village in Kent. He then went from this village in Kent to the docks in Southampton, and that’s where he defected with Donald Maclean. But this oral tradition kept niggling away, and I kept being told that this was Guy Burgess’s last sighting. And I thought, well, I’ll just drop it. Next slide, please.

But interestingly, it’s probably about five years ago now, because time goes so quickly, the government released, quite rarely, a truncheon of files into the National Archives to do with Burgess and Maclean, 400 files. Historians are still trying to work their way through them. I often say, if you want to inundate historians and perhaps even hide secrecy, all you need to do is just dump a whole tonne of archives into the National Archives, and we’ll be so bogged down for years, we will probably never look properly and even find what we’re not supposed to find. But when these 400 files came out, those biographers were working on the material, and it said officially that the last sighting of Burgess the night before he defected was the green dragon at Flaundon. So it’s really interesting. For me, I think that’s a very interesting point, because this places him at least 100, 200 miles away from where the official story happened. And it really underlines that whole smoke and mirrors of this Cambridge Five. I don’t know if we’ll ever work out the complete trail and the complete truth. But by May, 1951, and we’ll come to Maclean shortly, Guy Burgess actually accompanies Maclean. Maclean is about to defect. But it’s said that when Burgess arrived at the docks with Maclean, Maclean looked at him and said, you’re coming too. And we’ve never really been quite clear why Burgess defected. It’s certainly clear now that he didn’t want to defect. He was deeply unhappy in Moscow. And as I’ve put there, Burgess wasn’t actually under suspicion. So did he panic? Well, Maclean just looked at him and said, you have to come too. So his defection was not planned, interestingly. All he was supposed to do was drive Maclean to the port. So why does he defect? And whilst in Moscow, he does suffer all kinds of instability and difficulties and spends most of his time in a sanatorium. Next slide, please.

Genrikh Borovik, who’ve written the Philby files, worth thumbing through if you want to borrow from the library. He maintained that Burgess was tricked into coming to Russia. Now, was he tricked by Maclean? Did the Russians say to Maclean, he has to come too? We currently don’t know. Next slide, please. But what Borovik did say is that like so many brilliant minds, Burgess sought to escape in drink and drugs and ultimately exile. His last years in the Soviet Union are no less entertaining than those early years spent at Eton and Cambridge. I mean, he did link up with the Cambridge, they weren’t the other Cambridge spies, well, apart from Blunt, of course, who was still in England, but they did see each other now and again. I highly recommend the last biography that’s been written, “Stalin’s Englishman” by Andrew Lownie. Absolutely brilliant. He worked on Burgess’s biography for over 20 years, incredible research, and I believe it may well have now been updated in the light of the 400 files. Next slide, please.

So life in Russia for Burgess was not what he’d anticipated. He still wore, as you can see there, his Eton tie. He could never really give up England. And there were points at which he thought about redefecting, it wasn’t possible. He wanted to come and see his mother when his mother was desperately ill and dying and he was not allowed to return. So life for him was deeply miserable. He took more and more to drink. He didn’t even bother, unlike Maclean, who learned Russian, he didn’t even bother to learn Russian. I’ve put there his homosexuality may have been a problem, although the Soviet intelligence services were open-minded in that they would supply young lads for him or young men for him. He did have some of his furniture sent over from London. I think it indicates the fact that he couldn’t really start a life again. I think of all of them, he was the one that was the most unhappy about being in Moscow. He never really settled, was never happy. And he died at the age of 62, but his body was brought back to England and he was buried in West Mion in Hampshire. Haven’t actually seen the grave. So if I’m anywhere near there next time, I might look it out. I always think if you’re going to visit a graveyard, you see things you’re not expecting, and particularly in inscriptions on tombstones, it’s always a place to get a sense of place and to understand. Next slide, please.

So we have Burgess who, according to his colleague, Harold Acton, said the most vindictive of these guys at Cambridge Five was Guy Burgess, later to win notoriety as one of the missing diplomats, though nobody could have been less diplomatic. In fact, before his defection in 1951, he’d actually spent time in Tangier in Algiers and he would frequently attend parties there. He’d gate crash on parties. He went with his mother and he would gate crash, get drunk. He was spilling the beans on all kinds of intelligence operations. Next slide, please. They had to throw him out of Tangier. So nothing really changed in his pattern of behaviour. If we look at Donald Maclean, similar sort of age, though of course he lives about 20 years longer, he’s a son of liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean, highly respected figure in his field, educated in Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He’d actually studied modern languages. Like Burgess, he joined the Communist Party. In fact, Maclean was recruited by the same recruiter as Kim Philby, Arnold Deutsch. And when I started, Arnold Deutsch came from Austria. He came from Vienna. He was in London by 1934 and he actually recruits Kim Philby on a park bench in Regent’s Park. And of course he also actually recruits Donald Maclean. And there’s a subtle difference actually between what they were recruited for. It’s a very fine line. Donald Maclean was not recruited as a double agent. While he was working for the intelligence services, he was actually not, he was turned, that’s true, but traditionally double agents end up being turned to work for the other side. But the Russians very specifically wanted him as what’s known as a penetration agent, a penetration spy. And that’s when they typically are not already working for British intelligence or any intelligence service, but they’re recruited specifically to try and get a job in the intelligence services or high up in the diplomatic world in foreign office and actually to penetrate those circles and to steal secrets.

So there’s a very fine line between double agent and penetration spy, but that’s very specifically what the Cambridge Five were doing. They were to penetrate the higher echelons of British society, and in particular diplomatic intelligence circles, military intelligence circles, and to pass those secrets back to Russia. And of course it took so long to unmask them, quite scary, really. So he himself, the Maclean, is actually part of the British diplomatic service. He’s engaged by the foreign office as early as 1934, the same year that Kim Philby is recruited by the Soviets. Next slide, please. But by 1937, it’s a little bit treacherous. Like with Kim Philby, there were phases where he loses contact with his Russian handlers. And in 1937, we don’t really know why, he sort of refuses to meet his handler. So he doesn’t show up to various meetings. And then the Russians decide to change his liaison person, the woman named Kitty Harris, and she sort of turns up one day to see him and says, you hadn’t expected to see a lady, had you? No, he says, but it’s a pleasant surprise. Over the next two years, he also starts smuggling documents out of the foreign office. It’s said 45 boxes of documents, and he visits her flat in Bayswater. And those documents are gradually, over a two-year period, that’s a heck of a lot of boxes of files to be smuggling out. One does wonder how he managed to get away with it. Next slide, please.

Then he’s actually posted to Paris. Paris is an important intelligence station. He’s posted to the British embassy, and it’s there that he meets his future wife, Melinda Marling, and she becomes Melinda Maclean. She’d already managed to escape the Nazis in France in 1940. And then he also has a period in Washington. It slightly overlaps with Guy Burgess. He’s there from, Maclean is there from 1944 to 1948, initially as second secretary, and then as first secretary in Washington. And undercover, he’s sort of working in intelligence. But he and his wife become part of that social scene. They’re very close to American intelligence. And of course, what they go on to do, these Cambridge Five, severely places strain on the Anglo-American intelligence relationship that was so closely brought together in the early days. A first meeting, if I’m not mistaken, was at Bletchley Park in 1940, even before the Americans were in the war, before Pearl Harbour. There is this forging a very close Anglo-American relationship, which comes under severe strain with the outing of this, the defection of the Cambridge Five. But Maclean has very easily blended into the social scenes. His wife is part of that too. Next slide.

So it’s one of the trickiest periods is when he becomes secretary of what’s called the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Energy. And there are all kinds of names for different committees historically. And if you’re a historian wanting to research a particular period, then you would put, you would search for Combined Policy Committee, actually, very specific names, and hopefully those files would come up. But importantly, he becomes, as I’ve put there, Moscow’s main source of information on atomic energy, on the information that’s coming out of this committee. He doesn’t pass any scientific technical information, but he is able to give them an overview to report the progress and the development of the atomic weaponry. And in particular, they would need to know how much plutonium is being used in the Fat Man bombs. And he’s able to pass this kind of broad information but no technical information to enable the Russians to build their own, which, of course, they’re in the process of doing. He shares information on key meetings between US intelligence, UK, and Canadian intelligence. I mean, this is devastating. This is an insider betraying that top layer of secrecy. And then in 1948, he’s posted to Cairo another really important staging post, because it’s here, very important, during the Second World War, there were all kinds of double agents working out for us out of Cairo.

But even in the early Cold War period, it becomes an important staging post because here, Britain and America have their representatives and they are planning various strategies against Russia. Next slide, please. But the life that he was leading, as with Guy Burgess, full of excess, parties, drinks, he actually starts to be quite brash about his life as a spy. And if there’s one thing that we understand if one’s working as a spy or intelligence, you are part of that shadowy world. Your face isn’t known, you live quietly, you’re quietly in the shadows. But this Cambridge Five, and he in particular, with Burgess, become quite reckless and they start to throw out all kinds of information of life as a spy. Maclean is actually, like Burgess, a liability. And there’s one particular incident where he actually smashes up the apartment of one of the U.S. Embassy staff. He has this brawl. Burgess has his brawl in the Royal Automobile Club in central London. Maclean has his brawl in the U.S. Embassy apartment. And as a result of that, he’s recalled to London. In fact, his wife is so concerned about him now that she asks him to return to London. And at this point, they don’t quite, but the Americans are really close to discovering that Maclean is the mole inside, one of the moles inside British intelligence. Next slide, please.

And one of the journalists that was following him, Cyril Connolly, said that Maclean had lost his serenity. His hands would tremble. His face was usually a livid yellow. He was miserable and in a very bad way. In conversation, a kind of shudder would sort of fall as if he had returned some basic and incommunicable anxiety. I mean, it is interesting, isn’t it? You’ve got Burgess and Maclean, both of them, having difficulties psychologically with that life, that secret life of espionage. I mean, although he’ll be drank, one doesn’t get the same sense that he’s psychologically perturbed in the same way as Burgess and Maclean. One wonders if, next slide, please, that that defection to Moscow ultimately, that had its tragic consequences. And of course, they just disappeared overnight. And it took five years, astonishingly. And I have worked on some of the early Maclean files and a reward was put up by the British government to find the diplomats, 1,000 pounds. That’s a lot of money in the 1950s. When you think that in the late 1960s, you could buy, say, a bungalow for 3,000. So this is a hefty reward, but there is complete silence. And in the declassified files, you can see this sort of frenzy. Where are they? Nobody seems to know where they are. There is a suspicion that, you know, have they defected to Moscow, but there’s no evidence. They leave no trail. And after they’ve defected, they go via France, by the way. The French authorities are alerted, but it’s too late, they’re already out. And there is just this cold trail. Burgess, sorry, Maclean does not go with his wife. His wife is left behind. She doesn’t come for another year. So he’s left his wife and his family. And we don’t know if she always planned to follow him, but she does eventually. Next slide, please.

Burgess, interestingly, had been suspended from Washington of what’s called, I’ve got a spelling error there, my apologies, Venona Codes. This is really interesting because the Americans amounted a counterintelligence operation to try and decrypt Russian codes. So a parallel to Bletchley Park, yeah? And if I’m not mistaken, linked to Bletchley Park. There’s very little written about Venona, actually, that I’ve seen, but it operated from 1943 to 1980. And this was to try and decrypt, to decode the messages, transmissions that were coming from, well, first of all, the NKVD, these are parts of military intelligence, Russian military intelligence, later the KGB. And these would be decoded and always signed off by a particular name, which they eventually transferred back and realised that the mole was actually in Washington and he was working undercover in the diplomatic service. Burgess is suspended. They think it’s Burgess. He comes back from Washington and it’s after this Washington visit that he has that brawl in the RAC club. And he comes back via Southampton docks. It’s Anthony Blunt that comes and collects him. And Anthony Blunt that shelters him for a time in his flat in London. Blunt, of course, during his famous interrogations later, actually denied ever helping Guy Burgess. It’s really difficult to sort of untangle when you’re working through declassified files, the twists and turns of the stories and who’s doing what. But it’s Southampton, ultimately, that Burgess, as I said, and Maclean defect and they go via France. Maclean, next slide please, does settle in to life in Russia, but he’s not, as we know, happy. His wife joins him, next slide please, a year later. And as I’ve put there, it was five years before Khrushchev admitted, the Russian leader admitted where they were. Extraordinary that for five years they completely vanished. There were all kinds of theories and conspiracy theories that they could well have been in Russia, but they were not totally confirmed until Khrushchev did five years later. Next slide, please.

But Melinda Maclean’s interesting in herself. She does arrive in Russia, in Moscow with the children. She’s also disappeared. And there are various things in the archives about where she’d gone. She goes out through a quite circuitous route. If I’m not mistaken, she sort of takes an unusual route through Spain and Portugal, but that could be my memory. And she says at one point, I will not admit that my husband, the father of my children, is a traitor to his country. Because ultimately that is how we remember those Cambridge Fives as traitors to their country. And I put a question mark there that I’m not the only one that’s raised this. Was she acting in some ways an accomplice to him? And I just throw that out there. Later, interestingly, she becomes a lover of Kim Philby. That’s while they’re in Russia. Next slide, please. So after Burgess and Maclean’s defection, and as we know, it’s five years before we know exactly where they are, but we pretty much know that they have defected, some of the suspicion falls on Anthony Blunt. And things are beginning to sort of unravel. He is interrogated the following year in 1952 by MI5. It’s a whole series of interrogations. I haven’t seen all of his interrogation reports. In fact, it may be that some of those are in those 400 files that were declassified about four or five years ago, but we’ll get around to those at some point. But he gives nothing away. And if we think about his position, he has really risen in the social climbing, and he is close to the royal family. He’s been made Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1956, so five years after the defection of his colleagues, and this is by the late Queen Elizabeth II. Next slide, please.

So what do we know about him? I’ve given you his dates there. He’s British art historian, son of a vicar, born into a well-to-do family. Though his father was a vicar, his antecedents, he’s third cousin of the Queen, the late Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Not many people know that, Bowes-Lyon. Professor of History of Art at the University of London. He becomes Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, that prestigious institute in Central London. And he rises to become, this is probably where we remember the time when all the controversy arises. He becomes Surveyor, first of the King’s Pictures in London, but then the Queen. Next slide, please. He is a member of one of the elites, or was of the elite societies in Cambridge, the Society of Amici. Historian, I don’t know if he’s perhaps unkind, really, but John Edward Bowle wrote this of him. “He was an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas. He had too much ink in his veins and belonged to a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded academic puritanism, puritanism.” He is also one of those Cambridge Apostles, that 12 exclusive secret group. A self-confessed homosexual, like Guy Burgess, and would actually categorise himself more towards Marxism. Next slide, please.

And he becomes Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. He’s in the Royal Court, or in and out of courtier circles for over 40 years, four decades. He’s actually a Russian penetration agent. He’s actually as close as you can possibly be within those royal circles and within the court. And between 1956 and 79, he is a Knight of the Realm. Of course, it’s removed from him in 1979. And it was said that in regard to his homosexuality, I mean, primarily Guy Burgess had one long-term lover, but he had other liaisons. But it was said that Anthony Blunt would pay for some of his sexual liaisons, and described himself often as a self-confessed spy. You can see these guys are kind of highly risky. Next slide, please. Anthony Blunt, during the Second World War, was a member of the Intelligence Corps, and was then attached to MI5. Did MI5, in its vetting process, miss his communist views? Blunt was part, yes, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and MI5 was compiling lists and tracking communist members in Britain. Did they miss him? How could they have missed Blunt? And he actually ran the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1941, still in the wartime then, he’s in charge of Allied diplomatic missions in London. And his role in that diplomatic mission was liaison with other key organisations, and that includes MI6. It would include Special Branch, Air Intelligence. It could include diplomatic correspondents for communications. It would also be eventually liaison with American intelligence. And as part of that Allied diplomatic mission, the Allies were monitoring diplomats of neutral countries and looking to see whether the Nazis had penetrated those circles.

So they were keeping an eye on diplomats of neutral countries, particularly at parties and cocktail parties, just gaining a view of their political views, whether there’s any change in the country’s policies, just basically keeping an eye, because those neutral countries were really crucial for espionage networks in the Second World War. And I will be talking more about that in the autumn when I do something on my Women in Intelligence book. In 1945, he’s actually in charge of a section from London, diplomatic section, which is in charge of the Far East. So he has access to a whole raft in his career of information, of intelligence. He’s at the heart. Next slide, please. But why was he dangerous, I want to ask. Next slide, please. Why was Blunt dangerous? Not sure if you’re aware, actually, but what he passed to the Russians, I had a really good go at trying to work out and to track down, what is it about these Cambridge Five? What did they pass to the Russians? And in Blunt’s case, he actually passed the results of ultra-intelligence from decrypted Enigma intercepts of German army radio traffic that was coming from the Russian front. So essentially, the ultra-intelligence, the enigma messages that we are decrypting at Bletchley Park, and specifically, those relating to the German army that’s working on the Russian front, those messages are actually being passed back to the Russians. And you’re probably thinking, but as they did, what’s the issue in the wartime?

Because after June, 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, the Russians were on our side from there. And for these Cambridge Five, the dilemmas seem not so exaggerated, not so treacherous. And many of them, as did some of the other spies and double agents that you can read about, Sonia and others, Ben McIntyre’s written about her, they believed that the Soviets, the Russians, deserved to have this intelligence. And if the Allies weren’t sharing it, as they were part of the Allied forces, then this was wrong. But it was not their place, of course, to make individually the decision of what could be passed to the Russians. But there is no evidence that the intelligence and the Enigma material from Bletchley was being shared officially with the Russians. There’s no evidence, and it wasn’t. It’s the same for the eavesdropping programme that I’ve written about in the war on Soviets. We did not share that intelligence with the Russians, even though they were our allies. And the Cambridge Five clearly had an issue with that. So they passed information that’s coming, essentially, out of Bletchley Park, the Enigma. Details of German spy rings operating in the Soviet Union. And you might think, well, that’s okay, they’re our allies. But in a sense, it also can betray, it makes it very, very fragile. It can betray sources of intelligence, agents which we promised to protect their identities. And the full, well, I’ve put here, entire Operation Ultra that was only really fully known by four people, it’s said. One of those four people worked at Bletchley Park, of course, was John Cairncross. And why Blunt was so dangerous was that ultimately, he was risking the whole Bletchley Park intelligence operation. And if the Germans had found out that we cracked their various Enigma codes, well then, I mean, they were always developing and changing.

But if we could no longer read their messages and the movement of their forces, the instructions from their high-level commanders that were the high-level decryptions, decoding of messages between Hitler and his top generals and commanders, if we could no longer read that, we are fighting blind, so to speak. Our survival depends on the intelligence coming out of Bletchley Park. And Blunt has compromised this by sharing it with the Russians. Next slide, please. But by 1950, so the year before Burgess and Maclean defect, Blunt is already coming under suspicion of being a Russian spy. He is now confirmed, MI5 have sort of woken up. He’s a member of the Communist Party, but they’ve ignored it. Why did they ignore this information? And that’s something which historians have been asking for decades. Why was Blunt’s suspicions of being a Russian spy? Why was it ignored? Even his NKVD controller, his Russian controller became suspicious. And he was suspicious because of the sheer amount of information. It was genuine intelligence that Blunt was passing their way, but they then started to think and to wonder whether he was actually a triple agent. And as far as we can tell, there’s no evidence that Blunt was a triple agent. And a KGB officer later described him as an ideological shit. Blunt was one of those Cambridge spies who for this ideological reasons, it wasn’t for money, it wasn’t for women or power. He, for ideological reasons, thought it was appropriate to work for Russian intelligence to actually be passing them secrets. And the KGB officer just calls him an ideological shit. I don’t know if Blunt really, would he, did he understand the implications of what he was doing? Next slide, please.

There are a number of unanswered questions. Are there, with all of them, how was Blunt recruited? We still don’t really know fully who was his Russian case officer. I don’t know if there are any files in Russia now which have been released occasionally. Their historians are allowed into the archives. Obviously not at the moment, it’s been a bit tricky. Why did he and his circle who were from a privileged background turn traitor? Of course, they wouldn’t have seen themselves as traitors. Hopefully, I’ve partially answered that in saying that they’re ideologists, but also they’re believing that Russia as our ally was entitled to this information, certainly in the Second World War. The tricky period, of course, is either side of that, the 1930s, and especially the Cold War. That is a particularly relevant question then, and they are most firmly to be seen as traitors. How did the Russians recruit the others? What was this really important? What was the extent of Russian penetration? Because some historians have actually postulated that there weren’t just five Cambridge spies, there could have been seven or eight or even more. And I believe historians are writing about that or researching further. Next slide, please.

Blunt’s own public confession was that he said that Burgess converted him to the Soviet cause after both had left Cambridge. Next slide, please. And it was John Cairncross embedded in Bletchley Park, working there for MI6, who also is believed to be one of those Cambridge Five passing secrets to the Russians. Blunt eventually did admit in his interrogations, he finally admitted to having recruited John Cairncross for the Russians. Next slide, please. Blunt led, it’s said, a life of high scholarship and low treachery. He preferred any risk in this country rather than to defect to Russia. And of all of them, he is the one that showed most fear when he was told, basically, you need to defect to Russia. He absolutely refuses to defect to Russia. And so he’s prepared to accept the consequences here. Next slide, please. And he says, as a newspaper article headlines, Blunt saying, I take any risk to avoid Russia. Next slide, please. So he is not ultimately going to defect to Russia. But he says, it’s a very famous quote that you’ve probably heard a number of times, if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. His KGP officer said, remember that he was an ideological shit. And this is a man, let’s remind ourselves, who has climbed incredibly high in the social circle and is close to the royal family. Next slide, please.

But by 1963, all guns are out. The establishment is gunning for Blunt. There’s this whole witch hunt. The spy capture right is actually tasked by the intelligence services with tracking down the moles within British intelligence. And one of the interrogators, Arthur Martin, he arrives at the Courtauld Institute, and this is where Blunt is at the time, and he arrives to actually start questioning Blunt. And thereafter, Blunt is subjected to eight, on and off, to eight years of questioning. But through all this intense questioning, he absolutely refuses to betray his friends. He said, Burgess was one of my oldest friends, and to denounce him would not be the act of a friend. But in the end, Blunt couldn’t hold out, and he does agree to confess. I mean, I think it’s about time Netflix or BBC or ITV did something on Blunt. It’d be great to have a drama on Blunt. There’s been stuff recently on Philby and the others, but on Blunt would be really good. But he actually manages to negotiate immunity from prosecution. That was his fear, that he’d end up in jail. But as long also as his identity as a spy, as a traitor, would be kept secret for at least 15 years. Next slide, please.

So Blunt, in his confession, says, what I did not realise is that I was so naive politically that I was not justified in committing myself to any political action of this kind. The atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense. The enthusiasm for any anti-fascist activity was so great that I made the biggest mistake of my life. And so we’re back to that, aren’t we? We’re back to this fight against fascism, which gave ideologists like Blunt no choice in his, excuse me, in his eyes. Next slide, please. So I’m just close to rounding up for today. We’ve got about five more minutes. An SIS, otherwise today known as MI6, it is said had its suspicions about Blunt in the 1950s. So why did MI6 not act? At one point, the Russians had boasted 30 agents in Britain during the wartime. And the sheer volume of intelligence that’s given to the Russians is really concentrated in these five key Cambridge spies. It’s extraordinary just how much damage the five spies did. And Gordon Corera, a fabulous journalist, he’s written fabulous books as well. He’s written on MI6 and other intercept operations, Bletchley Park. He wrote, “Soviet penetration of Britain’s intelligence services may have been more serious than officially admitted.” Next slide, please.

But there was some hint actually to Blunt’s treachery. Very famously, Andrew Boyle wrote, “Climate of Treason.” It’s still available. You can still get it secondhand. He wrote this in 1979. And we’re just on the border of the 15 years that was promised to Blunt when he would not be exposed as a spy or a traitor. And Blunt is just referred to under the pseudonym Morris. And E.M. Forrester’s novel, “Ernest,” is actually based on Blunt. So it might be worth now going back and reading that even. Blunt himself privately tried to take legal action to have both of them banned because now he could really feel the pressures on. The 15 years is coming up. And famously, on the 15th of November, 1979, in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher very publicly exposed Anthony Blunt as one of the Cambridge Five, one of the Cambridge spies. He actually, very shortly afterwards, loses his knighthood. Next slide, please.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation in all of this, and certainly according to Gordon Corera, is that MI6 in particular, wonderful building headquarters, I love that design, MI6 preferred to brush scandals under the carpet than expose the traitors in court. Because one of the greatest fears was that if you bring these guys to trial, all kinds of things, it might get out of control in the courtrooms, and all kinds of secrets might come out that were not meant to come out. So not only around them, but other things as well. And so you find perhaps that’s why he was offered diplomatic immunity. Next slide, please.

But there’s another deeper reason why Blunt was never prosecuted, and this has come out in recent years, because in the final days of the Second World War, he was sent on a top secret mission, and some of you might already know this, a top secret mission to Schloss Friedrichshof in Germany. And it was there that there was this collection of letters between the Duke of Windsor and Hitler. We don’t know what’s in the contents of those letters. They were brought back to Windsor, and they are now deposited in the Royal Library at Windsor. And to the best of my knowledge, no historian has been given access to those, even less have they been published. So we don’t know how many letters, but that was his mission, that they had suspicions about him at the end of the war by 1950. But if he was exposed, if he was prosecuted, did he threaten to actually reveal the existence of these very sensitive letters that have only been reported about in the last few years? Next slide, please.

And my final few comments. Elena Modrzhinskaya, she worked in the headquarters in Moscow. At one point, she became a little bit suspicious of the Cambridge Five, what they were passing their way. She assessed the material. And she noted that, in fact, what they produced was an extraordinary wealth of information on German war plans. But if you looked at the other stuff, nothing really on how far the British have penetrated Soviet intelligence in London, Moscow, or in any other of Moscow’s embassies. And I suppose that’s one of the challenges for historians over the years. What exactly did they pass to the Russians? We know some of the material, as I’ve, in broad terms, I’ve outlined today. But there are obviously still that kind of murky area where we haven’t been able to properly evaluate just how much they’ve passed to the Russians. And of course, we don’t know if what she’s saying is a smokescreen in itself to sort of divert attention. But I leave two further questions. Could SIS MI6 really be so foolish as to fail to notice suitcase loads of papers leaving the office or any of the institutions? How could they have also overlooked Philby’s communist wife? Next slide, please.

And I know we haven’t concentrated much on Philby this evening, but there are all kinds of indicators in the background. But perhaps it was as simple as to say that MI6, MI5, its vetting services were not as thorough as perhaps we are led to believe today. And that in many ways, these were men who were living in high-privileged society who came from that elite old boys network, that it was believed they could be trusted. Perhaps it was unimaginable to even consider that they could be treacherous, that they could betray their country. But of course, that is exactly what they did. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you on Thursday for more spies.