In the autumn of 1947, Yuri Modin met Burgess for the first time. Having been involved in translating and analysing the ‘product’ of the Cambridge Ring at Moscow Centre, he had now been sent on his first overseas posting. ‘It was eight in the evening, at dusk,’ he later wrote:
The venue was an outlying part of London, the weather was fine and you could see people clearly a long way off. I waited alone at a crossing: exactly on time, I saw Korovin approaching with my new charge. After the briefest of introductions, Korovin turned on his heel and left us together; no doubt he had left his car nearby, a risky thing to do. Burgess and I walked off side by side. He carried himself well, a handsome man in fine clothes, starched shirt collar, gleaming shoe and well-cut overcoat. He was the image of a smooth British aristocrat, with a free and easy manner and a firm step. In the half-darkness, his face was barely visible.1
And so began an important partnership. The two met again at the same spot the following week. ‘He was once again right on time for the second rendezvous. I saw him a long way off, wandering tranquilly among the trees, a folded newspaper under his arm.’2 Burgess was keen, however, to switch their meetings to one of his favourite pubs in Soho, as he explained that he hated leaving the centre of London, but Modin had his way, insisting they always met in streets parks and squares – a favourite was one in Ruislip. If caught together, he suggested he should simply pretend he was asking for directions. Burgess had another suggestion.
‘I’ve a better idea. You’re a good-looking boy, and I’m a fiend known all over London for my insatiable appetite for good-looking boys. All we need to say is we’re lovers and looking for a bed.’ Modin, newly married, was not amused.3
Modin was to be Burgess’s Soviet contact for the next three years. He remained impressed by him:
Guy Burgess was punctual to a fault, took all the customary precautions and again and again gave proof of his excellent memory … To my surprise Burgess turned out to be an extremely conscientious worker. He answered my questions as best he could. He took no notes, because his memory was faultless: for example, he could remember word for word something you asked him three months earlier. And from the first he treated me with kindness and consideration. When he passed me documents, he unfailingly told me which should be sent to the Centre without delay, and which could wait till later.4
But he was also intrigued by him, not least by his appearance:
His shoes fascinated me: I never saw such unbelievably shiny ones, before or since. His shirt was always as perfectly white as at our first meeting. But as I got to know him better, I noticed that his jacket and trousers tended to be stained and wrinkled, and he never seemed to have them pressed. His clothes were definitely odd; they caught the attention of people in the street and, on occasion, of the police. I never could fathom why he looked like a tramp at close quarters, even though his clothes came from the best tailor in London.5
It became clear to Modin that Burgess was an ideological spy. ‘Guy Burgess believed that world revolution was inevitable. Like his Cambridge friends, he saw Russia as the forward base of that revolution. There was no alternative, of course: he might have his reservations about Russia’s domestic and foreign politics, and I often heard him berating our leaders, but in the end he saw the Soviet Union as the world’s best hope.’6
‘He was a naturally gifted analyst,’ Modin remembered.7 ‘His reports were thoughtful, layered and clear – easy to translate. He was by then a great pro, despite his reputation as a disreputable, drunken, homosexual philanderer.’8
Modin realised his job was to encourage and support Burgess. ‘I kept reinforcing his importance, the value of his espionage and his reports. He was very flattered when I told him how good I thought his writing was. I used to say he should write novels. He liked that idea, and I think dreamed of retiring to do so.’9
Sometimes, at particular moments of international crisis, the two met on a daily basis. If they needed to meet, Burgess would dial a number that was manned day and night by a Russian agent, to whom Burgess would give a code number before hanging up. The code meant that within an hour either Modin or his colleague Korovin would meet Burgess at a prearranged rendezvous. For example, during the London Conference of November 1947, Burgess was able to supply, at a late night meeting with Korovin, the British and American position on the status of Berlin. The Soviet foreign minister Molotov received the information well before the British delegates, who had to wait until they convened the following day.10
At the insistence of the Centre, Burgess was supplied with money to buy a car as it made communication with him easier. He immediately bought a second-hand two-seater gold Rolls-Royce with folding top from a dealer in Acton, and then offered Modin a ride. ‘The two minutes that followed were among the worst in my life. Guy gunned the engine and the Rolls leapt forward, reaching a very high speed within seconds. Guy drove like a maniac, looking neither right nor left.’ Modin was terrified and asked if Burgess always drove through crossroads without looking if other cars were coming. ‘“You’re quite right. I really don’t look at all. And that’s one reason I bought this old banger, because even if I write it off, I won’t get hurt. Rolls-Royces are very sturdily built you know.”’11
In December 1947, Burgess attended with McNeil the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London, with delegates from the United States, Soviet Union and France, where again the future of Germany was discussed. During the period from 6 November to 11 December, he passed across more than three hundred various documents to his Russian contacts, for which he received a £200 bonus.
It was then that he drew the two-headed beast, which was later widely reproduced in the media. ‘Guy intended his two-headed beast merely as a savage embodiment of Anglo-American policy,’ his authorised biographer later wrote, ‘but it may certainly be agreed that his own condition was at this time painfully schizophrenic – split as his mind was between duty to the nation’s service and conviction that the nation was being led towards catastrophe.’12
Burgess had found himself increasingly at odds on policy, as much as with colleagues. ‘He was shocked to find how far Bevin was now committed to the most reactionary elements in the Foreign Office, and how unprotestingly McNeil allowed himself to be dragged along by his powerful chief … but he had no choice but to stay.’13
The pressures of his double life were beginning to affect Burgess, who oscillated between hyperactivity and depression. He was drinking whisky throughout the day from a flask kept in his desk, eating cloves of raw garlic as if slices of apple, and passing around pictures of various youthful conquests. Rees noted:
He was now perpetually taking sedatives to calm his nerves and immediately followed them with stimulants in order to counteract their effect; and since he always did everything to excess, he munched whatever tablets he had on hand, as a child will munch its way through a bag of dolly mixtures, until the supply has given out. Combined with a large and steady intake of alcohol, this consumption of drugs, narcotics, sedatives, stimulants, barbiturates, sleeping pills, or anything, it seemed, so long as it would modify whatever he happened to be feeling at any particular moment, produced an extraordinary and incalculable alteration of mood.14
Robin Maugham, who had met Burgess through Harold Nicolson, recognised his dual personality. ‘In drink, Guy could be unpleasant and malicious, but his nature was essentially generous.’ But Maugham was nonetheless shocked to see him drunk at a lecture Maugham gave at the Royal Empire Society in 1948, where Burgess, sitting with a boyfriend in the third row, sought to correct him on a matter of detail:
Afterwards there was a small party at my sister’s house. Guy arrived with a young friend. By then he was very drunk. His blue eyes were a little watery. His curly hair was dank. But with his inquisitive nose and sensual mouth he never lost his alert fox-terrier expression – nor his energy. There he sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace. He wore a very old tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. And very old, very dirty, grey flannel trousers. His shoes were cracked and dusty. His fingernails were uncut and grimed with dirt. His talk was wild and extremely pro-Russian. Suddenly his conversation switched and he began to quote and re-quote E.M. Forster’s dictum to the effect that if he had to choose between betraying his country and his friends, he hoped he would choose to betray his country.
‘I believe Guy Burgess is a communist,’ my sister Kate said to me later. ‘Nonsense,’ I answered. ‘If he were a communist surely he wouldn’t act the part of a parlour communist so obviously – with all that communist talk and those filthy clothes and filthy fingernails.’
‘Perhaps it’s a double bluff,’ my sister Kate suggested.15