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Podcast Transcript
In the 1950s and 1960s, the British Intelligence community was rocked by a series of high-profile defections to the Soviet Union.
These defections proved to be devastating to British intelligence during the Cold War and may have led to the death or imprisonment of hundreds of undercover British operatives.
These defections changed Western intelligence gathering forever in ways that can still be felt today.
Learn more about the Cambridge Five and how they influenced the Cold War on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Cold War was cold because it never got to a point where both sides engaged in a large-scale shooting war.
That being said, there was a great deal of competition between the two sides that was just below that level. There were proxy wars that were fought in third-party countries, there was competition in sports, and there was competition in intelligence services.
Both sides ran extensive intelligence operations trying to gather information about the intentions and capabilities of the other side. A major part of intelligence operations was trying to get assets, or double agents, who were trusted figures on the other side who had access to high-level intelligence.
This was far easier said than done.
Turning an agent from the other side was difficult and often took years.
In many respects, turning someone from the East Block to the West was relatively easy. I’m not saying it was easy, only comparatively so. Western nations could offer the promise of freedom and a better life for them and their families. Most people in the East were very much aware of the repression they lived under and what life was like in the West, if only by rumor.
Getting someone to go from West to East was another matter. The way the Soviets turned Western operatives was usually either greed, love, or ideology.
The spies who are the subject of this episode, who are known as the Cambridge Five, were all turned because of ideology.
The story starts in 1929 at Cambridge University. Universities like Cambridge became hotbeds for ideological communism.
The communist revolution in Russia was still fresh, and many idealistic students felt that the experiment unfolding in the Soviet Union was going to be the future of humanity.
Many of these students saw communism as the best response to the rising threat of fascism in Continental Europe.
This was a prime breeding ground for the Soviets to recruit assets to work on their behalf. Agents of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, were placed in universities like Cambridge and Oxford to recruit promising students who were ideologically committed to the communist cause.
During the period from 1929 to 1935, Soviet agents identified five promising students from upper-class families who had become committed ideological communists: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Kim Philby.
These students knew each other, but despite the name Cambridge Five, they were not an organized group acting in unison. They were simply five men who were all recruited by the Soviets at the roughly same place and time and who all shared the same ideological sympathies. Not all of them were recruited while they were attending Cambridge, some of them were approached after they graduated.
These five men were all extremely long-term projects. They were instructed to infiltrate British government institutions while pretending to be staunch anti-communists.
In 1936, John Carincross joined the British Foreign Service.
When Britain entered the war in 1939, positions opened across the civil service. In 1940, Kim Philby joined MI6, Guy Burgess joined MI5, and Donald Maclean joined the Foreign Office.
MI6 is the British equivalent of the CIA. They are responsible for foreign intelligence.
MI5 is closer to the equivalent of the FBI in that they are responsible for domestic intelligence.
During the war, the men were responsible for the passing of an enormous amount of intelligence to the Soviets. Given their positions within the government, they were able to get their hands on highly classified information.
In 1942, John Carincross began working at Bletchley Park, where the work on cracking the German Enigma code was taking place, and in 1943 he moved to MI6.
For the most part, the five thought that what they were doing was acceptable because the Soviets were the allies of the British during the war. So, whatever they did was simply helping their side of the war.
While they brought a lot of high-level intelligence to the Soviets, the Soviets didn’t necessarily think highly of them. The Soviets saw Maclean and Burgess as drunks. All of them often had the intelligence they brought to the Soviets ignored because they weren’t sure if it could be trusted.
All the while, the five men were getting promoted in their respective services.
In 1944, Kim Philby became the head of MI6’s anti-Soviet section. The man whose job it was to protect British agents from the Soviets and who led efforts to recruit Soviet agents was himself a Soviet mole who was passing along secrets.
In 1945, Anthony Blunt was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. While this sounded like a relatively innocuous position curating the royal art collection, it gave him access to the royal household.
That same year Blunt secretly retrieved sensitive documents from a captured Nazi intelligence officer and handed them to the Soviets.
In 1948, John Cairncross leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets, which were related to the Manhattan Project. These documents allowed the Soviets to accelerate their nuclear program.
By the end of the 1940s, the number of classified documents that were given to the Soviets numbered in the thousands. It included the identities of British agents working in the Soviet Union, many of whom were killed or sent to the Gulag.
By 1950, there were concerns that something was wrong. This concern was raised by the Americans, not the British.
The Americans had been running an operation since 1943 known as the Verona Project.
The Venona Project was a top-secret U.S. counterintelligence program by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, which later became the NSA, to decrypt Soviet diplomatic and intelligence communications. The project successfully intercepted and partially deciphered thousands of Soviet messages sent between Moscow and Soviet embassies worldwide.
Via the communications intercepts, the Americans knew that there was a high ranking mole in the British Intelligence Service.
By early 1951, cryptographic work from the Venona Project had partially identified Donald Maclean as a Soviet agent, though they had not yet gathered conclusive proof.
Kim Philby, who, again, was in charge of Soviet Counterintelligence, gave word to the Soviets that Maclean was about to be discovered.
Guy Burgess, who was stationed in Washington as part of the British Embassy staff, had recently been recalled to London due to his erratic behavior and reckless lifestyle.
This provided an opportunity for the Soviets to extract both Burgess and Maclean.
On May 25, 1951, the two men abruptly disappeared. They traveled by ferry from Southampton to France and then made their way through Europe before reaching the Soviet Union. Their disappearance caused a political and intelligence scandal in Britain, as it confirmed the presence of Soviet spies at the highest levels of government.
It also raised the question, how could this have happened?
Attention immediately turned to the head of Soviet Counterintelligence in MI6, Kim Philby. Not only was it his job to find moles, but he also was known to socialize with both men.
While there was no hard proof against Philby, the suspicion was enough that he was forced to resign later that year.
No one knew what had happened to Burgess and Maclean. For years, it was assumed that the two had been killed. However, in 1956, the Soviets revealed they had defected to the Soviet Union and now lived there.
More on that in a bit.
Philby, having resigned, didn’t sulk off to live in obscurity. He moved to Beruit and began a career as a journalist writing for the Observer and the Economist.
While working as a writer, he continued to funnel information to the Soviets for years.
By the early 1960s, new evidence emerged implicating Philby. A former Soviet intelligence officer, Anatoliy Golitsyn, defected to the West and provided clues about a high-level British mole.
Under renewed scrutiny, Philby was confronted by MI6 in January 1963 and, realizing his capture was imminent, fled to the Soviet Union on January 23, 1963. He was officially granted asylum in Moscow, where he lived under the protection of the KGB.
While there had been suspicion about Philiby for over a decade, his defection was a bombshell as he knew everything about anti-Soviet intelligence, at least as recently as 1951.
The Americans, by this point, had become extremely hesitant to share any information with the British, who clearly didn’t have their house in order.
However, the total scope of the damage still hadn’t been totally uncovered.
The information from Anatoliy Golitsyn and further decryptions from the Venona Project pointed to the existence of yet another high-level mole within the British establishment.
By 1964, MI5 had gathered enough evidence to confront Anthony Blunt. In a secret interrogation, he confessed to his espionage activities in exchange for immunity from prosecution, an arrangement that allowed him to avoid the fate of his fellow spies.
For years, his treachery remained a closely guarded secret, but in 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly exposed Blunt’s espionage in the House of Commons. The revelation caused a national scandal, leading to his removal from royal and academic positions and the stripping of his knighthood. Though he lived the rest of his life in disgrace, he never faced prison time.
After the revelation of Anthony Blunt, he and the three defectors became known as the Cambridge Four.
However, there was one more.
John Cairncross was the least known member of the Cambridge Five but was responsible for leaking some of the most sensitive intelligence to the Soviet Union.
Unlike Kim Philby or Donald Maclean, Cairncross did not openly associate with Soviet sympathizers, which helped him evade suspicion for a long time.
By 1964, Cairncross was identified as a potential spy, and MI5 confronted him. He confessed but, like Blunt, was granted immunity in exchange for silence. He lost his government positions and lived mostly in exile in France, avoiding the public scandal that engulfed the other members of the Cambridge Five.
His treason wasn’t made public until 1981.
Anthony Blount died in 1983, and Carincross died in 1995. Both lived the ends of their lives in disgrace, yet neither were prosecuted or served any time in prison.
The three men who made it to the Soviet Union, Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, had very different lives than they probably expected when they defected.
Burgess, who was flamboyant and openly gay, was miserable in the Soviet Union. He deeply missed British life, from its social clubs to its culture. He even asked Western visitors to bring him British newspapers, clothes, and food. He never learned Russian properly, making it even harder to integrate into Soviet society.
The Soviets never trusted him and never allowed him to participate in intelligence efforts.
He drank heavily and died in 1963, aged 52, from alcohol-related health problems.
Unlike Burgess, Maclean spoke Russian fluently and was given a serious role in Soviet foreign policy analysis. He worked at Moscow’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations, advising the Soviets on British and American diplomatic affairs.
Like Burgess, Maclean drank heavily, a sign of underlying stress.
Maclean never publicly renounced communism, but he seemed less enthusiastic about the Soviet system as time went on. Some sources indicate he considered defecting back but ultimately stayed in Moscow until his death in 1983.
Philby lived in Moscow for the remainder of his life. Although initially treated with suspicion by Soviet authorities, he eventually integrated into Soviet society, marrying a Russian woman, Rufina Pukhova. He received several honors from the Soviet government but never held a prominent role in intelligence work again.
Despite being a hero in Soviet circles, Philby struggled with disillusionment, alcoholism, and feelings of isolation.
Like the others, Philiby never renounced communism, but his later life suggests a degree of regret and disillusionment with the Soviet system.
He remained in Moscow until his death on May 11, 1988.
The damage done by the Cambridge Five is difficult to comprehend. Combined, the men likely gave the Soviets between 20,000 and 25,000 classified documents.
All of the British efforts to hide their secrets from the Soviets were for naught, given that the person in charge of keeping the secrets was working for them.
The defections severely damaged British credibility with the United States, leading to a period of distrust between MI6 and the CIA.
The full extent of the betrayal of the Cambridge Five took years to unravel, but their actions had a lasting impact on Cold War intelligence, Anglo-American relations, and Soviet geopolitical strategy.
The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.
Today’s review comes from listener Seby12STS over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write.
Best Show ever
Dear Gary, this is the best podcast I have listened to, and I love i,t but how do I get into the completionist club in Texas? And In General, please tell me how on this episode pls, my dude it is so cool, and I want to know
Thanks, Seby! Getting into the completionist club in Texas is a very simple two-step process.
Step one: Listen to every single episode of the podcast. As of this episode, there have been 1677 episodes.
Step two: Live in Texas.
Once you achieve these two things, you too can join the Texas Chapter of the Completionist Club. Brisket is served on the weekends.
Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read the show.