Returning to Cambridge for a fifth year, Burgess was back at M2 in Great Court, supposedly working on his thesis and supervising first-year students, but he was more involved than ever in political activities. The dispute with the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company, over union recognition and conditions, had come to a head in October 1934 and Burgess continued to be involved in organising early morning pickets of the bus garages and supporting the striking busmen. Such activity gave him a focus, when he had lost purpose in his professional life and lacked a feeling of belonging in his private one.
His relations with his family, never easy, were becoming steadily worse. He complained to Dadie Rylands in August 1934 that, rather than go on holiday with Victor Rothschild and a fellow Cambridge communist, Gerald Croasdell, he was having to stay at home ‘with my family with whom I do not get on’.1 Jack Bassett, an archetypical retired colonel, was an honourable man but rather old-fashioned, and the two men had little in common. There was a strong element of jealousy on Burgess’s part towards this man who had taken the place of his father and he took every opportunity to annoy him, deliberately passing the port the wrong way and giving toasts to ‘Uncle Joe’. ‘The relationship with the stepfather was absolutely intolerable,’ Nigel Burgess remembered. ‘It was very bad indeed and very much encouraged by my mother – the friction – she enjoyed the friction between the two of them – Guy could do absolutely no harm in her eyes.’2
Eve indulged Burgess, who was her favourite, and he manipulated her shamelessly. His relationship with his younger brother was more distant and the two brothers saw little of each other. Though Nigel had followed his brother from Lockers Park and Eton to read History at Trinity, they were very different. A talented musician, Nigel was a leading member of the Cambridge Footlights, writing the lyrics and music for many productions and acting as musical director for the 1933 and 1934 reviews. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit remembered how he ‘had a nice, easy manner with the piano and really had a tunesmith’s talent’.3
‘Guy was highly intelligent and I wasn’t. I think this was one of the reasons why we were not close,’ remembered Nigel. ‘And he was very socially aware – which I wasn’t. He would pick as friends useful people,’ adding that despite ‘great charm, wit and high intelligence … you never knew with Guy what was true and what was invented’.4
Kim Philby had spent the year since leaving Cambridge acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party, after an introduction from Maurice Dobb. There he had met and married a young communist divorcée, Litzi Friedmann. On his return from Vienna in May, he had tried to join the CPGB, but the party was still wary of middle-class members and told him it would take five weeks.5
At tea with a contact of Litzi’s, Edith Tudor Hart, an Austrian communist who ran a successful photographic studio specialising in children’s portraiture, Philby expressed his desire to continue his work for the party. Unknown to Philby, Tudor Hart worked as a courier and access agent for Soviet intelligence and reported back favourably.6
There would normally have been careful checks before a first covert approach to an agent, but Soviet intelligence in London was operating under a policy of making contacts with promising students that did not require approval from Moscow Centre. A meeting was arranged in Regent’s Park the following month for Philby to meet Otto. In reality ‘Otto’ was Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet ‘illegal’ agent – he was not a member of the Soviet trade delegation or embassy – who had arrived in London in the spring of 1934, ostensibly to carry out research in psychology at University College, London.
A member of the Austrian Communist Party since 1924, Deutsch had graduated with a distinction from the University of Vienna four years later with a doctorate in chemistry – though he had also studied physics, philosophy and psychology.
A handsome man, blue-eyed with fair curly hair, and a notable linguist – he spoke German, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian and English – Deutsch had subsequently worked as a clandestine part-time courier for the Comintern’s ‘International Liaison Department’ in Romania, Greece, Syria and Palestine, before being recruited by the Foreign Section of the NKVD as an ‘illegal’ and working underground with the resistance in Vienna.7
Soviet intelligence had charged Deutsch with its new policy of targeting brilliant young students from Britain’s leading universities, who might then move as sleepers into positions of power, and he did so spectacularly, recruiting some twenty agents between 1934 and 1937, most of whom remain unknown to this day.8
At that first meeting with Deutsch, in which the two men spoke German, Philby agreed to work for the Soviet Union. The recruitment, as with all the future recruitments, was a false-flag operation in which the recruits merely thought they were working for the international communist movement, though it must have been quickly clear to Philby that his work involved more than that. He was later to write, ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.’ He was given the codename SÖHNCHEN and one of his first tasks was to report back on his father.9
He was told to have nothing to do with British Communist Party headquarters, which gave him quiet satisfaction given their reaction to his application, to publicly renounce his flirtation with communism, and to find a job that might prove useful. Given his political record, a career in government service was unlikely but, using his father’s contacts, Philby managed to secure a job on a respectable small-circulation news journal, The Review of Reviews.
Deutsch then asked Philby to recommend some of his Cambridge contemporaries and some Oxford contacts who might be amenable to cultivation and, though members of a university cell, had not joined the CPGB.10 Top of his Cambridge list was Donald Maclean, who had just graduated with a First in German and, having abandoned ideas of postgraduate study and going to teach in Russia, was studying for the Foreign Office. Almost six feet four, handsome, clever, athletic – he had played rugby for his college and captained its cricket team – Maclean had been one of Philby’s closest allies in CUSS.
At a further meeting with Philby in October, Maclean agreed to work for the Russians and shortly afterwards became an agent. Ignaty Reif, a Soviet illegal, codenamed MARR, reported, ‘that SÖHNCHEN has contacted his friend [Maclean], the latter has agreed to work, wants to come into direct contact with us. MARR asks for consent.’ Maclean, whose father had recently died, was given the codename WAISE, meaning orphan.11
Burgess was the last of the seven names on Philby’s list of potential recruits. Reif reported back to Moscow Centre in October, ‘Burgess is the son of very well-off parents. For two years he has been a party member, very clever and reliable (ideologically speaking), but in ‘S’s opinion somewhat superficial and can occasionally make a slip of the tongue.’12
According to his later KGB memoir, Philby had such strong reservations about the suitability of his friend that he had put a row of four question-marks after Burgess’s name. ‘While Burgess is, of course, a very ideologically strong man, his character is that of an “enfant terrible”.’13 But Guy Burgess’s flamboyance was in many ways his greatest strength. His NKVD file reveals that as early as the summer of 1934, during his visit to Russia, a Soviet intelligence officer, Alexander Orlov, had considered him as a strong possible recruit. The Soviet intelligence service had discovered that the penalties for homosexuality in Britain meant that homosexuals had to live part of their lives in secret and formed a tight and loyal network, which if penetrated, could be very fruitful. It was felt that Burgess’s knowledge of, and contacts within, the homosexual world could prove very useful, and this assessment was proved to be correct.14
Philby later wrote:
Burgess was a very special case … I was not so worried about discretion, since his sense of political discipline would probably look after that. His drawback was his unfailing capacity for making himself conspicuous … But we reckoned without Burgess himself. While we were talking, he was drawing conclusions and acting on them. He convinced himself that Maclean and I had not undergone a sudden change of views, and that he was being excluded from something esoteric and exciting. So he started to badger us, and no one could badger more effectively than Burgess. He went for Maclean and he went for me … He might well be more dangerous outside than inside. So the decision was taken to recruit him. He must have been one of the very few people to have forced themselves into the Soviet special service.15
By revealing to Burgess, an inveterate gossip, that he was secretly working for Moscow, Maclean had made himself hostage to Burgess’s discretion and created a potentially dangerous situation for the new network. The Russians had no choice but to recruit Burgess to keep him quiet. Late in December 1934, Maclean arranged for Deutsch to meet Burgess and sound him out. Burgess, who loved intrigue, couldn’t have been more delighted by this new adventure and opportunity to serve the party, and said he was ‘honoured and ready to sacrifice everything for the cause’. Guy Burgess was now officially the Third Man, after Philby and Maclean, and given the codename Madchen, meaning Girl.16
Burgess’s recruitment had been made unilaterally by Deutsch and because of difficulties in communication, the Centre knew nothing until Deutsch’s January 1935 report. They were, however, concerned that the three members of the Cambridge network knew each other – a serious breach of the rules of Konspiratsia that required agents to be compartmentalised from each other – and Orlov was ordered not to proceed with Burgess’s recruitment.
Deutsch defended his decision, explaining that Burgess ‘was recommended by SÖHNCHEN [Philby] and WAISE [Maclean], who describe him as a very talented and adventurous chap, capable of penetrating everywhere’ and he himself vouched for his new probationary agent as ‘a former compatriot of a Cambridge group [i.e. member of a university Communist Party cell], an extremely well-educated fellow, with valuable social connections, and the inclinations of an adventurer. Though I rate him lower than SÖHNCHEN and WAISE, I think he will come in useful.’ Below, someone had handwritten: ‘MADCHEN is a pederast but he works on both fronts.’17
The ban lifted on the cultivation of Burgess as a probationary agent, Deutsch began his training. He found Burgess an enthusiastic recruit – and in a psychological profile written in 1939, Deutsch later concluded:
Many features of his character can be explained by the fact that he is a homosexual. He became one at Eton, where he grew up in an atmosphere of cynicism, opulence, hypocrisy and superficiality. As he is very clever and well-educated, the Party was for him a saviour. It gave him above all an opportunity to satisfy his intellectual needs. Therefore he took up Party work with great enthusiasm. Part of his private life is led in a circle of homosexual friends whom he recruited among a wide variety of people, ranging from the famous liberal economist Keynes and extending to the very trash of society down to male prostitutes. His personal degradation, drunkenness, irregular way of life, and the feeling of being outside society, was connected with this kind of life, but on the other hand his abhorrence of bourgeois morality came from this. This kind of life did not satisfy him.18
The first assignment given to probationary agents was to supply a list of friends and contacts and Burgess responded enthusiastically, supplying over two hundred names in a four-page letter, ranging from Cambridge acquaintances such as G.M. Trevelyan, Dennis Robertson and John Maynard Keynes, and Foreign Office contacts such as Peter Hatton and Con O’Neil, to the Conservative MPs Harold Nicolson, Jack Macnamara and Angus Hambro, and various London prostitutes. There was also a separate list of homosexuals, which included Tom Wylie at the War Office, and Werner von Fries, an attaché at the German embassy.19
The Soviets immediately tried to exploit these connections, focusing on Dennis Proctor, a fellow left-wing member of the Apostles, who by 1935 was a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Soon, however, their attentions moved to someone they felt to be a more promising cultivation – Tom Wylie, private secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary of War, Sir Herbert Creedy.
Wylie, a brilliant classicist, had been a King’s Scholar at Westminster with Philby, before going on to Christ Church, Oxford. In 1934 he had joined the War Office and Philby had renewed contact, with the view of cultivating him as a useful source.
The following summer Wylie, now a resident clerk in the War Office, had given Philby a secret internal review of the British military intelligence organisation prepared by the War Office, which revealed the names of officers assigned to intelligence duties. Philby then decided that, with his heavy drinking and homosexuality, Burgess might be a more suitable agent runner for Wylie. He later wrote how he had ‘arranged a (small) cocktail party, inviting both Wylie and Burgess. I introduced them and left them to it, drifting from guest to guest as a good host should. Soon loud voices were raised in the Burgess-Wylie corner; all was clearly not well. I caught Burgess’s eye and he bounced aggressively across the room. “Who,” he asked loudly, “is that pretentious young idiot who thinks he knows all about Proust?”’20
Wylie was given the codename HEINRICH and then MAX and did supply Burgess with information, including the identity of the head of MI5 – as a result, the Russians put a tail on him and identified other senior MI5 officers – but his recruitment was halted when it was decided that he was too heavy a drinker and homosexual philanderer to make a trusted and effective Soviet agent. Wylie was soon after transferred to the Ministry of Works, due to his alcoholism, from which he died aged thirty-eight.
The NKVD files disclose that during his probationary period, the puritanical chiefs in the Lubyanka also had their own reservations about Burgess. Deutsch noted:
MADCHEN has imagination and is full of plans and initiative, but he has no internal brakes. He is, therefore, prone to panic easily and he is also prone to desperation. He takes up any task willingly, but he is too unstable to take it to its conclusion. His will is often paralysed by the most insignificant of difficulties. Sometimes he lies, not maliciously, but because of fear of admitting some minor error on his part. In relations with us he is honest and does everything without objections and sometimes produces an impression of a person who is too readily subdued. Though he dresses very scruffily, he still likes to attract attention. This is a generally characteristic feature of his. He craves to be liked and only reluctantly acknowledges his weaknesses.21
The Russians quickly realised that this craving for acceptance held part of the key to running their new agent.