Burgess officially started in the News Department, then based in the Ministry of Information, on a temporary posting as a press officer, at the beginning of June 1944, though he had taken most of May off from the BBC as holiday entitlement and had been working two days a week at the Foreign Office from 1 May.
The Department had been headed since 1941 by William Ridsdale with a staff of ten, who all worked in a large room on three long tables. Alan Maclean, brother of Donald, who worked alongside Burgess, remembered:
There was also a small room leading out of the arena which boasted of desks and telephones, a Reuters ticker-tape machine which chatted out hot news and round-ups from all over the world, and a safe for the daily batch of incoming telegrams. One of us came in early to read through them and mark up the interesting bits. There was hardly room enough for us all to be in the room at the same time but we had no need of desks of our own and no paperwork. All our work was done on the telephone or face-to-face and we travelled very light.1
Ridsdale himself conducted three briefings a day. At 12.30 p.m. the diplomatic correspondents of the Manchester Guardian, Reuters, the Daily Herald, the BBC and the News Chronicle would gather for a briefing on whatever subject they chose. There was a further briefing at 3 p.m. and then one at 4 p.m., when The Times diplomatic correspondent had his own private briefing. For the rest of the staff, Alan Maclean later wrote:
The Twelve Thirty was the central point of our day. A short list of ‘topics’ was made up first thing in the morning after someone had done an early trawl through all the morning newspapers. We could make an educated guess at what would be the main stories on which we might be asked for a reaction. If the Department concerned authorised a formal statement which could be attributed to a Foreign Office spokesman, we all had a copy to keep handy. But the Twelve Thirty was a free for all and everything said by the man in the chair was on the record.2
Burgess’s job was to liaise with foreign editors, diplomatic correspondents and London correspondents of the foreign press, explaining government policy and reacting to events in the news, but sometimes he would have to take the press conferences in the absence of a more senior figure. It meant that everyone on the staff, including Burgess, spent the morning being briefed on the expected news of the day, or reading Foreign Office telegrams. As events unfolded, the News Department would obtain the Foreign Office opinion from the relevant expert, a statement would be agreed and then released to the press. It also meant that Burgess saw almost all material produced by the Foreign Office, including telegraphic communications both decoded and encoded, with keys for decryption, which would have been invaluable for his Soviet handlers.
This was a post for which Burgess was admirably suited, given his wide range of journalistic contacts and interest in politics. As Goronwy Rees later wrote:
He liked the feeling of having an inside knowledge of British foreign policy and the considerations out of which it emerged. He liked expounding that policy to others, and employing all his ingenuity in showing that British policy was rational and coherent and corresponded to long-term historical interests. He liked and understood journalists, and sympathised with them, because he shared their passion for news, and he enjoyed being on intimate terms with them and exchanging with them that kind of backstage political gossip which was the breath of life to him.3
The recollections of most his colleagues are not, however, so flattering. William Hermondhalgh, who on inheriting Burgess’s desk found the middle drawer locked and inside a bottle of gin and a book on flagellation, remembered him as always wearing his OE tie. He was ‘left-wing, but I didn’t realise a communist, pale-faced … grubby and slovenly and constantly chewing garlic, which he thought good for his health’. Often, Hermondhalgh noted, Burgess would disappear to the Reform for lunch and return drunk, but even then he had a prodigious memory. He also noticed Burgess would use make-up in the morning if he’d had a particularly bad night. ‘Unreliable, often late, louche, but always engaging, Burgess wanted to be the insider and have power over others.’4
The cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, who also worked alongside Burgess, thought him, ‘Disastrous, unadulterated hell. A fabulous drunk. Very intelligent until six in the evening. He had charm and had been very good-looking, but the booze had done its work. When he was in his cups, he made no bones about working for the Russians.’5 Another colleague, Richard F. Scott, son of the Guardian editor C.P. Scott, recollected, ‘He smoked incessantly. He was very dirty. When he wished, he had considerable charm, but he was not an easy colleague … He was a Bolshie in both senses of admiring the Russians and being bolshie in everyday life.’6
Lord Arran remembered Burgess stopping a cab outside Buckingham Palace to symbolically urinate against a statue and how he took the role of licensed jester, often enlivening boring news briefings by handing around half-naked pictures of his latest male conquest.
Peregrine Fellowes, father of the writer Julian Fellowes, claimed that, ‘Some of the stuff he and Burgess had to decode and analyse was top secret and they used to have to do it in a locked room, where no one could interrupt them. There, Burgess used to sit on top of a kind of safe – or security cupboard – and read out the frequently hilarious messages in a variety of comic voices making [Peregrine Fellowes] howl with laughter.’7 Alan Maclean summed him up. ‘Guy knew everybody. He was notorious. He liked trouble. He enjoyed being scandalous … Guy tended to cause chaos wherever he went and delighted to do so … He was clever enough to realise he couldn’t be top, so preferred to be bottom … He was very clever. His opinions were always very interesting.’8
In a department that was busy and short-staffed, Burgess quickly made himself useful, offering to work Saturday afternoons, when no one else was around, and by August had received permission from Ridsdale to take documents home at night. He made good use of the freedom. That month he supplied telegrams from Duff Cooper, then the British representative on the French Committee of National Liberation in Algeria, suggesting the creation of a strong Poland to counter-balance the Soviets, though the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, insisted that British policy must continue to be co-operation with the Soviet Union.
On 1 Sept the rezidentura reported that ‘MADCHEN has for the first time brought a large number of authentic materials. We have photographed ten rolls of film, six of them decrypted telegrams’,9 and the following month, Boris Merkulov, the Commissar for State Security, authorised a £250 bonus to Burgess as he was so productive. Moscow Centre’s suspicion of their Cambridge agents was over. It had been a massive miscalculation, based on ignorance of how British Intelligence worked. By 24 October the Centre was reporting that ‘in the course of only several months, MADCHEN has become the most productive source … now he gives most valuable documentary material’.10 Six weeks later, the rezidentura was asking of their Cambridge spy, whose codename had been changed, ‘whether HICKS uses sources unknown to us, because information received from him is wide in scope and deals with a variety of questions’.11 According to one of the files examined by Mitrokhin, of the Foreign Office documents provided by Burgess in the first six months of 1945, 389 were classified ‘top secret’.12
An indication of the quality of intelligence Burgess was now supplying can be seen in Harold Nicolson’s diary entries. In February 1945 he wrote, ‘I dine with Guy Burgess, who shows me the telegrams exchanged with Moscow. It is clear that the Ambassadors’ Commission is not to be a farce in the least.’13 The Commission, which consisted of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the British and American ambassadors in Moscow, was to settle composition of the new Polish Provisional government. It’s clear from the fact that Nicolson saw them that Burgess had access to Foreign Office cables between London and the Moscow embassy, and was able to remove them and pass them to Moscow, allowing Molotov to be well-briefed in negotiations. On 4 March, Burgess’s Soviet handler Boris Kreshin, ‘Bob’, reported he had brought several Foreign Office telegrams and ‘had also written an agent’s report on the procedural conduct of debates in parliament on the Polish question’.
But Burgess was becoming careless. In March, Kreshin reported ‘a rather unpleasant incident’ to the Centre:
Recently I have been meeting HICKS in the street. But on 4 March it was raining and HICKS suggested going into a pub for a short while. We went inside where we spent no more than fifteen minutes. Having left the pub, I noticed that HICKS was picking up materials on the floor. Without entering the pub I waited in the street until HICKS came out. He announced that when he had approached the door, the ZAKOULOK [Foreign Office] materials had fallen out of his briefcase onto the floor. The telegrams had fallen face downwards and nobody paid attention, because the door was screened from the pub by a curtain. Only one telegram had become dirty. HICKS claims that he thoroughly inspected the place and not a single document remained on the floor.14
Kreshin delivered a lecture on personal security, but when Burgess returned to collect the copied documents with his briefcase tied up with string, he dropped them again. ‘It was good that there was no one else in the lavatory and the floor was clean,’ Kreshin commented dryly’.15 Shortly afterwards, at a meeting with ‘Bob’, Burgess was ‘approached by a police patrol, who suspected that the bag contained stolen goods. Once reassured that the two men had no housebreaking equipment and that the holdall contained only papers, the patrol apologised and proceeded on its way.’16
The material he was supplying was dynamite. A report of the meeting of 4 March listed amongst much else: a report by Burgess on the debates in parliament on the Polish question, telegrams on the San Francisco Conference the following month that set up the United Nations, and the British position on the division of Germany, which went against what the American delegation had proposed at the Yalta Conference a few months before. A May 1945 Chiefs of Staff report for General Ismay, which set out plans for war between the British Empire and Soviet Union – Operation Unthinkable – was passed to Moscow, probably by Burgess. The report accepted a three-to-one superiority of Soviet land forces in Europe and the Middle East, where the conflict was projected to take place, but did nothing to allay Russian suspicions that the wartime alliance was clearly over.17
During the autumn, Burgess accompanied Ridsdale to the Paris Peace Conference, which prepared the draft peace treaties with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland, staying in the Hotel George V. Ridsdale attended many of the meetings where policy was being formulated. Alongside him was Burgess.18
In June, Churchill had forbidden a delegation of eight British scientists from travelling to Moscow for the twentieth anniversary of the Academy of Sciences of USSR, confirming Russian concerns that relations were becoming increasingly hostile and suspicious – information Burgess duly passed to the Russians.19 The opening shots of the Cold War came with two important defections in September 1945 – defections that revealed the full extent of Soviet espionage against the West while supposedly allies, and threatened the whole Cambridge network.
On 5 September Igor Gouzenko, a twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, appeared in a Canadian newspaper office with a shirt stuffed with secret documents revealing a major spy network in Canada, and that the highly secret atomic bomb project had been betrayed. Gouzenko worked for Soviet military intelligence, GRU, and therefore knew nothing of the Cambridge Ring. However the other defector did.
On 20 September an agitated Burgess delivered an urgent message for Moscow Centre, which Philby had hand-delivered to him at the Foreign Office, saying that in late August an NKGB officer stationed in Turkey, Konstantin Volkov, had contacted the British vice-consul in Istanbul seeking an appointment. After he had no response, Volkov, deputy chief of Soviet intelligence in Turkey, had presented himself at the embassy on 4 September and in return for political asylum for himself and his wife and £50,000 (almost £2 million today) offered a list of 314 Soviet agents in Turkey and details of a British one, fulfilling ‘the duties of the chief of an otdel [department of the English counter-intelligence directorate] in London’ – almost certainly Philby.20
The revelations were passed to the British head of Soviet counter-espionage, Kim Philby, who immediately saw that Volkov could expose him, Maclean and Burgess. He arranged to go to Istanbul to deal with the walk-in, but he deliberately took his time. By the time he arrived on 26 September, Volkov and his wife had been exfiltrated to the Soviet Union, and executed. It had been a close call.