Burgess returned to Cambridge for the Lent term 1935, and continued to play a full part in the Apostles. On 8 February he hosted a supper for the brethren and the following week he acted as a moderator in the discussion ‘Anthony or Lenin’, with Grey Walter, David Champernowne and Alister Watson supporting Lenin, Burgess supporting Anthony, and Victor Rothschild supporting both.
Burgess had now reinvented himself, not the first time he would do so in his life, resigning from the Communist Party, much to the bemusement of his friends, and disgust of his Cambridge communist contemporaries, who regarded him ‘as a traitor, because he took care to advertise his alleged conversion to right-wing views as soon as he had gone down’.1
Burgess, now almost twenty-four, realised that his future lay outside academia, in spite of an attempt by G.M. Trevelyan to secure a Fellowship at Pembroke for him.2 Too old to take the Foreign Office exams, he applied for a job teaching at Eton, but when the headmaster wrote to Dennis Robertson for a reference, Burgess’s former tutor supposedly replied, ‘I would very much prefer not to answer your letter.’3 There were also approaches to the Conservative Research Department run by Joseph Ball, a wartime MI5 officer, and through Victor Cazalet to Conservative Central Office, which ostensibly came to nothing in terms of a full-time job, but introduced Burgess to Ball – a man who was to play an important future role in his life.
By April, Burgess had abandoned Cambridge and his academic research and come to London, where he first took rooms at 21 Talbot Square, near Hyde Park, and then rented a flat at 38 Chester Square, near Victoria Station, financing himself through an allowance from the family trust and the odd payment from the Russians. For example, in June 1935 he was paid £12 10s, compared to Maclean’s £10 and Philby’s £11, suggesting Burgess was regarded as a more valuable asset.4 Burgess had been writing for The Cambridge Review since the beginning of 1933. Now, under the pseudonym Guy Francis, he was also reviewing a wide range of history books regularly for the New Statesman: on 8 June, The Life and Letters of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Wester Wemyss; on 22 June, Japan and the Pacific, Militarism and Fascism in Japan and The Puppet State of Manchukuo.
His flat was on the top floor of an elegant white stucco terrace, looking on to St Michael’s Church, and consisted of two rooms, with a bath at the back of the kitchen. Burgess decorated it patriotically in red, white and blue, though there is some debate about the exact combination. Goronwy Rees suggested white walls, blue curtains and a red carpet, blue sheets and a red counterpane – whereas another account describes it as ‘painted white and Guy had a blue carpet, curtains white with blue backing, and a blue settee with red cushions’, a decor, which he claimed, was ‘the only one which any reasonable man could ever live with’.5 Here he often spent weekends in bed – he claimed the carved wooden headpiece had once belonged to Stendhal – reading and living off red wine and a saucepan filled with porridge, kippers, bacon, garlic and onion. When asked, he would reply that all he needed to be content was wine, books and the News of the World.
His affair with Jackie Hunter continued and through him he met the actor and director Frith Banbury. ‘I’d say I met Guy about seven or eight times in all over a span of eighteen months. When that relationship broke up and my friend decided to go straight and get married, Guy went out of his life and out of mine at the same time. I never saw him again. I have to say that I found Guy both charming and amusing and had he chosen to continue the acquaintance, which in those circumstances he did not, I’d have been glad to do so.’6
He was seeing old friends such as Kim Philby, now living with Litzi in Kilburn. Tim Milne, a Philby school friend, meeting Burgess for first time at the Philbys, remembered how, ‘He made an immediate impact – as he did, I imagine, on everyone who met him. I once nourished a theory that Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal was partly based on Guy, if one ignores Guy’s homosexuality, but the dates do not fit well. Kim and Lizzy’s scuffy little dog was called Guy after him.’7
He was returning to Cambridge to see Rylands and Blunt, where on one trip in May he met the poet Louis MacNeice, who immediately wrote to Blunt, ‘As for Guy B, he is quite the nicest of your pals by a long way.’8 Burgess had also renewed his friendship with Goronwy Rees, who had resigned his All Souls Fellowship and was now an assistant editor on the Spectator, and lived only a few minutes’ walk away in Ebury Street. At one of Rees’s parties Sally Graves, the niece of the poet, met Burgess, who was showing off a pair of American trousers with a zip fly – a novelty in those days. She could not make out whether he was on the Left or on the Right, she told Rees. He replied that Burgess had described himself as a ‘Conservative Marxist’.9
In June, the Russians had instructed Burgess to apply to London University’s School of Slavonic Studies to study Russian and try to befriend fellow pupils, who might be MI6 officers, and also Elizabeth Hill, a relative of General Miller who led the anti-Bolshevik Russian General Military Union based in Paris, as ‘MADCHEN sure knows how to make friends’.10 Burgess went to the Institute of Slavonic Studies, asking them to recommend him a teacher, and by good fortune he was sent to Hill, who gave him one lesson privately.
Burgess soon built up a good relationship with her and learnt that the Institute did indeed teach a large number of MI6 officers, the school’s director was a former MI6 officer who was planning to return to the Soviet Union, and his secretary was known to be a communist. Burgess was quickly showing that he could deliver useful intelligence.
Burgess, a regular visitor to the Rothschild home at Tring, had impressed Victor’s Hungarian mother, Ruzsika, with his knowledge of current events and how they fitted into an historical framework. He had once told her that railways in a Latin-American republic were going to be nationalised and that the Rothschilds should sell. He was proved right when New Court, the family stockbrokers, had said no. A year earlier he had anticipated the rise in the value of armaments shares and suggested to Victor he should invest in Rolls-Royce, which he did with great success. Distrustful of the advice she was receiving from her advisers, Lady Rothschild put Burgess on a retainer of £100 a month, a large sum if true, in return for a monthly report as an informal personal financial adviser.11
Victor’s sister Miriam, however, claimed the monthly retainer owed more to her mother’s kindness than Burgess’s financial skills.
‘I cannot tell you exactly how long my mother discussed finances with Burgess, but I would not think more than a few months. He never acted for my mother, he merely discussed the gold standard with her and gave her information about investment in Brazil. Burgess was not employed by my mother, she was a very generous person and sympathised with young men who found it difficult to make both ends meet and she, therefore, gave Burgess some help in this direction, as indeed she did to many other people.’ She added, ‘I never got the impression he was remotely interested in the gold standard, but [he] appreciated good cooking and had a weakness for claret!’12
This sort of allowance was quite unnecessary, as Burgess benefited from a trust fund and was not impoverished. According to a Cambridge contemporary, Michael Straight, there was perhaps rather more than met the eye about the arrangement:
My assumption became that it was the Rothschilds who launched G.B. on his career of espionage. They sent him into the Conservative Right to spy on the developing liaison with the Nazis, which was a matter of intense concern to the Zionists and to all Jews. The payment, nominally for financial advice, was of course for some very different services. G.B. proved to be very successful in his infiltration, and this was promptly used by the USSR. This tie between the Rothschilds and the Soviet intelligence service was, in my opinion, the skeleton in the closet which drove V.R. to fund Wright, in writing a book in which the role of the Rothschilds would be wholly excised.13
Burgess had also met Harold Nicolson, probably through his son Ben and mutual friends at Oxford, who was to prove an influential mentor and probably an occasional lover. Cherubic, urbane, slightly portly, and with a neat moustache and twinkling eyes, Harold Nicolson was an author and former diplomat who had just been elected as the National Labour MP for West Leicester. Though married to Vita Sackville-West, Nicolson was homosexual and was immediately attracted to Burgess, who was the same age as his sons and with whom he shared similar interests.14
From the spring of 1936, Nicolson’s diary is filled with references to lunches and dinners with Burgess, including with John Maynard Keynes on 17 March. There were even plans to appoint Burgess as Nicolson’s private secretary. ‘He will look up a few things for Daddy and get political experience in exchange – no money transactions,’ wrote Ben Nicolson in his diary.15
It was either through Harold Nicolson or Joseph Ball that Burgess was introduced to Jack Macnamara, a former army officer, who had just been elected as the Conservative MP for Chelmsford in the November 1935 General Election. Macnamara, six years older than Burgess and gay, took him on as a mix of secretary, travelling companion and personal assistant, or as Rees put it, his ‘duties combined those of giving political advice and assisting him to satisfy his emotional needs’.16
Macnamara had an intelligence background, having been arrested on charges of espionage by the French in Tunisia in 1926, before serving in India between 1927 and 1933 with the Royal Fusiliers, where his knowledge of Hindustani and Assamese proved useful. A man of strong pro-German views, on his return he had become secretary of the Anglo-German Club. He was also involved with the Anglo-German Fellowship, which had been formed in October 1935 and whose objectives were ‘to promote good understanding between England and Germany and thus contribute to the maintenance of peace and the development of prosperity’.
The Anglo-German Fellowship was financed by a group of Conservative businessmen, who saw Germany as a bulwark against communism, and drew its membership from businesses such as Unilever and ICI, as well as large numbers of aristocrats and members of both Houses of Parliament. Though it claimed not to approve of National Socialism, its purpose was to exert German influence in Britain, which it did through lavish receptions at the German embassy and the Mayfair Hotel, and by September 1936 it had 347 members.17
Burgess brought Philby into the Fellowship, and he soon began to ghost speeches and articles for prominent members such as Lord Mount Temple and Lord Redesdale, and to edit the Fellowship’s magazine.18
Burgess’s association with Macnamara and the Anglo-German Fellowship, useful for gauging Germany’s international intentions and disguising his communist past, in turn brought him into contact with Edouard Pfeiffer, secretary general of France’s Radical Socialist Party and chef de cabinet to Edouard Daladier, subsequently French war minister from January 1936 to May 1940, and prime minister from April 1938 to March 1940.
Pfeiffer, a sado-masochist and leading member of the French scouting movement, in turn introduced Burgess not just to useful contacts in the world of European politics, but also to the homosexual delights of Paris and boy scout rallies in Cologne.19 Burgess would regale friends with stories – some of them perhaps true – of ping-pong matches played in evening dress with a naked young man as the net, and orgies in Parisian brothels.20
Through Pfeiffer, Burgess began to contribute articles to a ‘controlled’ newspaper financed by Otto Abetz, a German later appointed as the Nazi’s ambassador to Occupied France. It’s been suggested that Burgess also contributed to a City newsletter produced by Rudolph Katz, who worked for the Rothschilds, but the timings are unclear.21
Goronwy Rees described him during this period as ‘acting as a correspondent for various papers though what they were I did not discover. But his work took him abroad a good deal. He spoke vaguely of trips to Paris and, as always, he seemed to have plenty of money.’22
Paris was a centre for both Soviet intelligence and the Comintern, and it was at this time that Burgess met Willi Muenzenberg, the Comintern’s leading propagandist in Western Europe. A short, squat man with a large forehead and deep-set eyes, he was to inspire the character of Bayer in Christopher Isherwood’s novel of Berlin in the 1930s, Mr Norris Changes Trains. Born in Thuringia in 1898, he had been a newspaper proprietor and German Communist MP. Fleeing Germany, on the night of the Reichstag fire, he proceeded to organise the world crusade against fascism, using various popular front committees from his new base in Paris.
One of Muenzenberg’s aides was Otto Katz, who operated under the cover name André Simon. A talented writer – he had written a book on the Reichstag fire, published by Gollancz – his job was to plant pro-communist stories in the press. Fluent in French, English, Russian and Czech, Katz was often in London, where his movements were closely monitored by MI5.23 Within a year of leaving Cambridge, Burgess had therefore found himself in the twilight world of Comintern spies, agents of influence, and international diplomacy.
It was about this time, through Christopher Isherwood, that he met Gerald Hamilton, the Arthur Norris confidence-trickster figure in Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains, a man sometimes regarded as ‘the wickedest man in Europe’. Hamilton, who had met Isherwood while working for The Times in Germany, was working as a fixer for Katz, though it was never clear where his allegiances lay beyond his own immediate self-interest.
Incarcerated during the First World War for his pro-German and anti-British sentiments, Hamilton had also spent time in French and Italian prisons for swindling a Milanese jeweller out of a pearl necklace, and served sentences in Britain for, amongst other things, bankruptcy, gross indecency, and being a threat to national security.
At one time he had lived with the ‘Great Beast’, the occultist Aleister Crowley, the two men informing on each other – Crowley supplying information on communists, German nationalists and Nazis to British intelligence, whilst Hamilton reported on Crowley’s activities to the Nazis. It was Hamilton who introduced Crowley to Burgess, who drew information from both of them.
Interviewed by MI5 in 1951, Hamilton would claim, though he could never be totally trusted, that he saw much of Burgess in the four years immediately before the Second World War, describing him as ‘one of the most dirty and untidy people’ he had ever met, with ‘deplorable table manners’.24
Hamilton later wrote of one meeting with Burgess in Belgium at this time. ‘Though dissipated, Burgess was never violent; he could drink the whole night through without becoming aggressive. I remember one Sunday morning he turned up, very early indeed, at the villa which I occupied at Ucce, looking, even for him, peculiarly grubby and dishevelled.’ Hamilton understood he had just come from Mass, which surprised him, until Burgess made clear ‘he was referring not to Holy Mass but to Maas, a singularly louche night haunt, near the Gare du Nord in Brussels’.25
Burgess appeared to take on his new political colours with relish. As his friend Cyril Connolly noted, ‘Still sneering at the bourgeois intellectual, he now vaunted the intensely modern realism of the Nazi leaders: his admiration for economic ruthlessness, and the short cut to power, had swung him to the opposite extreme.’26
Edward Playfair, a few years above Burgess at Eton and Cambridge, and now working in the Civil Service, wrote to Julian Bell on 15 November 1935:
I met Guy Burgess for a couple of moments the other day; he has not got his job at the Conservative Central Office, but is eking out a livelihood by writing political reports about England for the Comite des Forges. He tells me that he still thinks that Marx is right, but that the only way that collectivism is likely to come to England is through the Conservative Party. He is a queer fish.27
Running into Goronwy Rees in the London Library at about the same time, Burgess explained to him that:
The only people who really believed in holding India, and had the will to do so, were the Right of the Conservative party, led by Mr Churchill … Their only hope of success was in alliance with the extreme Right in Europe, as represented by the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists, who had no objection to a strengthening of British rule in India, so long as they were given a free hand in Europe … It was as if Guy, like a deep-sea diver, had plunged into the great ocean of communist dialectics and come up with weapons which would enable him to demonstrate the precise opposite of what he had previously believed and now professed to deny.28
Though Burgess had now made a complete public volte-face renouncing his student communism, it deeply upset him. Blunt was later to write in his diary:
The intellectual somersault that Guy had then to perform, his pretence of sympathy with Nazism and his joining the Anglo-German Fellowship, have been described, but it has not, I think, been brought out how much agony he went through in performing them. He would much rather have remained an open party member … But his belief in the cause of communism was so complete that he accepted without question that he must obey the order …29
Throughout 1935 Burgess had been exploring various job options and had secured a month’s trial in January 1936 as a sub-editor on The Times – the standard method of entry in those days. A colleague, Oliver Woods, later remembered how ‘he conscientiously travelled by tube from Victoria to Blackfriars station every afternoon to take his place at the very bottom of the subs’ table. Burgess behaved impeccably for once, wearing a suit and staying sober, but … after four weeks in the frigid gloom of Printing House Square, he was told that The Times considered him unsuitable.’30
In the spring of 1936, Burgess made a trip to Germany, under the auspices of the Foreign Relations Council of the Church of England, ostensibly looking at the persecution of Jews in Germany. The trip was organised by John Sharp, the heir to a Dundee jute-mill fortune and newly appointed Archdeacon in South-Eastern Europe, who served on the Council and whom Burgess had met through Macnamara. Burgess and Sharp were accompanied by Macnamara, who had been taken up by Sharp as a child, and Tom Wylie.31
Burgess didn’t hesitate to exploit the opportunities the trip presented, both for his own personal pleasure and his espionage career. Compromising photographs of the MP and the Archdeacon, with their arms around a succession of handsomely endowed specimens of Aryan manhood, were later delivered by Burgess to Deutsch. They are preserved to this day in the MADCHEN file in the Soviet intelligence service archives.32