Sir Robert Vansittart was the first head of the Foreign Office to give his full trust to intelligence material.
Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Leninist MP for Leyton East, was later an agent of influence for imperial Japan.
Jack Hayes, the MP whose Vigilance Detective Agency was manned by aggrieved ex-policemen who spied for Moscow.
MI5’s agent M/1, Graham Pollard, may have been first cultivated at a Putney school sports event.
Agent M/12, Olga Gray, was first approached while playing clock golf at a Birmingham garden party.
Percy Glading, leader of the Woolwich Arsenal and Holland Road spy ring, which M/12 penetrated for Knight.
Wilfrid Vernon, the MP who filched aviation secrets for Stalinist Russia and admired Maoist China.
The Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb was a dedicated communist proselytizer among undergraduates of the 1930s.
‘A. Blunt was the life and soul of the party,’ said Lytton Strachey, who took this snap of a boating party on the River Ouse in 1930.
Moscow’s talent-scout Edith Tudor-Hart first spotted Philby’s potential, and later worked with Glading.
Cambridge spies and MI5 officers alike endured the Blitz in London. This scene in Pall Mall is yards from the Athenaeum, Reform and Travellers clubs, of which the Cambridge quintet were members.
Andrew Cohen was a pre-war Oxford communist who later came under Peter Wright’s indiscriminate suspicion. Here, as Governor of Uganda, he shares a dais with the Kabaka of Buganda.
Philby’s early associate Peter Smolka, who (as Peter Smollett) worked for Moscow in the wartime Ministry of Information.
Alexander Foote – author of A Handbook for Spies – spied for Moscow before defecting to the British in Berlin and cooperating with MI5.
The revelations of Igor Gouzenko, the Russian cipher clerk who defected in 1945, signalled the start of the Cold War. Previous Soviet defectors had been killed on Moscow’s orders, so when he met American reporters he had to make himself unrecognizable to Soviet informers.
Donald Maclean perched on Jock Balfour’s desk at the Washington embassy, with Nicholas Henderson and Denis Greenhill.
Special Branch’s Jim Skardon (left; on his way to testify at Klaus Fuchs’s trial) was the prime interrogator of Soviet spies, and of their associates, office colleagues and families.
Lord Inverchapel, as ambassador in Washington, appreciating young American manhood.
A carefree family without a secret in the world: Melinda and Donald Maclean.
Dora Philby and her son in her Kensington flat after he had been exonerated in parliament from being the Third Man.
Many people fell for Philby’s charm. None felt more betrayed or broken by his duplicity than his wife Aileen – here facing prying journalists at her front door.
The betrayer of atomic secrets Alan Nunn May, after his release from prison, enjoys the benefits of the Affluent Society.
The exiled Guy Burgess lies festering beside the Black Sea.
John Vassall was a pert, wily urban survivor whom the official story misrepresented as an inexperienced, vulnerable man open to blackmail.
George Blake returns from his incarceration in North Korea bursting with energy and primed to spy and betray within SIS.
Despite George Brown’s scorn for diplomats, he was appointed Foreign Secretary. The job’s burdens and refreshments made him stumble.
Although Richard Crossman was a master propagandist against the Establishment, he was not a populist at ease with the Common Man.
The Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer was thought in the Foreign Office to be doing Moscow’s dirty work.
Maurice Oldfield of SIS – here with his mother and sister outside Buckingham Palace – became in retirement the object of calumny