SEE ALSO:
Stalin’s
Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie – review
Burgess –
charming and often drunk – was a much more dangerous and effective spy than has
been assumed. Here are the latest revelations about the Cambridge spy ring
Richard
Norton-Taylor
Thu 10 Sep
2015 09.30 BSTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.08 GMT
Is there
anything significant left to say about members of the Cambridge spy ring,
Moscow Centre’s “magnificent five”? The answer, judging by this book, is a
resounding yes. Guy Burgess is often dismissed as the least useful member. “No
one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people
in high places,” wrote Alan Bennett in the introduction to Single Spies and
Talking Heads.
Andrew
Lownie’s argument, and it is convincing, is that, far from being a relatively
minor figure, an irritant and merely a source of embarrassment to Maclean,
Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, Burgess for years passed on thousands of
classified documents to Moscow, many containing extraordinarily useful
information, including the west’s position on key issues and negotiations at
the start of the cold war. Burgess helped to get Philby a post in MI6, and
persuade the Russians to recruit Blunt and Cairncross. He was the leader of the
group, Lownie says, and held it together.
Burgess not
only spied for Moscow, but on behalf of competing factions within the British
government. He spied on Neville Chamberlain for MI6 and the Foreign Office. At
one stage, he wangled himself into MI5, not as an officer, but as one of its
agents. MI6 suggested he should penetrate the Russians by arranging to get a
Communist party post in Moscow, and at one point he was simultaneously running
agents for both British and Soviet intelligence. Moscow Centre thought MI6’s
suggestion was too risky for the mercurial Burgess and, Lownie notes, “a
distraction from the main target of penetrating British intelligence”.
Along the
way, as an extra reward for his 30 years of research, Lownie, an indefatigable
literary agent, discovered a published memoir in Oxford’s Bodleian library by
Sir Patrick Reilly, in which the former chairman of Whitehall’s Joint
Intelligence Committee describes Wilfrid Mann, an atomic scientist who worked
for MI6 in Washington, as a Soviet spy. (Lownie claims Mann confessed and in
return agreed to spy for the CIA, though Mann himself always denied it.)
How could
Burgess, someone so indiscreet, a homosexual (at a time when homosexual
relations were illegal), someone so promiscuous, frequently extremely drunk,
with breath smelling of booze and tobacco and egg stains on his jumpers, with grime
under his finger nails, and who committed a number of drink-driving offences,
not just survive in the bohemian circles of the British establishment (that
included Victor Rothschild, Harold Nicolson and Clarissa Churchill, Winston’s
niece, among many others), but thrive among senior MI5 and MI6 officers and
diplomats in the very centre of Whitehall and its powerful and influential
decision-making?
Stalin’s
Englishman tells the reader as much about the culture of a British elite in the
1930s, during the war and immediate postwar years, as about spying. Burgess, a
spoilt child, was indulged as a “licensed jester”. Lownie quotes a Cambridge
contemporary: “He was very open about his communism and homosexuality but one
didn’t believe most things Guy said. A very amusing talker, but he was a
natural liar.” A natural cover for a spy.
He seemed
to charm anyone he sought out, including Churchill, and attracted an
astonishing array of contacts, as well as lovers, as he flitted between MI5,
MI6, the BBC and the FO. His open defiance of security procedures – not the
normal behaviour of a spy – was indulged because, Lownie says, the FO at the
time “felt like a large family – many of the staff had been educated and grown
up together – paternalistic and trusting. Because they thought they acted
honourably, they assumed everyone else did as well”. One top FO official put
Burgess’s behaviour down to “innocent eccentricity”.
Given the
sheer quantity of information he, and other members of the Cambridge spy ring,
passed on to their Russian handlers, it is not surprising that Stalin, paranoid
at the best of times, at first suspected them of being agents provocateurs
planted by British intelligence. Basing his claims on a wide range of sources,
Lownie reckons Burgess revealed to Moscow many secrets, including prewar
arguments over appeasement, details of the planned Sicily landings in 1943 and
the decision to postpone an invasion of France until 1944, the British and
American position on the postwar status of Berlin, early negotiations leading
to the setting up of Nato, and advance notice of US military plans in the
Korean war.
Some of the
Russian sources (including Yuri Modin, Burgess’s Russian controller), and the
KGB archives (for which Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain with an
immense cache of papers, was responsible), may have exaggerated, bragging about
the intelligence they collected. But even taking this into account, Lownie has
made a convincing case, demonstrating that even now the story of the Cambridge
spy ring can continue to shock.
In 1951,
Burgess was kicked out of Washington, where almost unbelievably he had been
given a posting at the British embassy, after further bouts of outrageous
drinking and after being caught speeding three times in one day in his Lincoln
convertible. He arrived at Southampton in May 1951 and immediately told Blunt
what Philby had found out about the investigation of Maclean. Burgess and
Maclean fled to France a few days later. They ended up up in Moscow, where
Burgess died in 1963.
A panicking
Whitehall establishment mounted a desperate damage-limitation exercise, denying
and then playing down the significance of the Cambridge spies. Philby was
forced to leave MI6, but his friends there continued to protect him. He fled to
Russia in 1963. Blunt and Cairncross were offered immunity from prosecution
before being outed many years later. But we may not have heard the last of
them. More than a million FO files are still being kept secret. They
include 19 boxes on Burgess.
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