Having described himself as ‘an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century, dogmatic atheist, not an agnostic’,1 Burgess grew to respect those who were religious. Driberg remembered on one of his visits accompanying Burgess to Novodevichy:
A choir was singing in the distance beyond the screen – one of those poignantly resonant Orthodox choirs, its cadences liquid yet lingering like honey, its harmonies almost unbelievably profound and rich … It was at this moment that, glancing at Guy to see if he were bored and wanting to move on, I noticed to my astonishment that his eyes were glistening with tears, and that he was standing rigidly still, as though riveted by the music. When we came out of the church, he was still too much moved to talk; he muttered an excuse, and went and sat by himself for some minutes on a gravestone.2
In London, Burgess’s main expenditure had been on drink and cigarettes and, as he had told Driberg, one of the pluses of Russia was they were so cheap. Modin admired Burgess for his intellect but worried about the constant drinking. ‘When I told him it was against the unwritten laws of England to drink before noon, he just laughed at me. I’m not in England, comrade.’3 He kept in touch through numerous British newspapers and magazines, which reached him a few days after publication. He ate little – preferring to smoke, drink and talk – though his housekeeper insisted he always had a large breakfast of eggs and would sometimes produce partridge, pheasant, wild duck and other game from the black market.
His mother sent him a hamper from Fortnum’s several times a year. ‘Burgess attacked these hampers like a Billy Bunter, first gobbling up everything that took his fancy, such as the pâté and the chocolate biscuits, and finishing up with items he didn’t particularly care for, such as the dried prunes and tinned fruit. Everything was washed down with slugs of cognac and squeaks of “goody-goody gum drops! What’s next?”’4
His life was circumscribed. He had a series of guards – whom he sent on errands to buy food – his flat was bugged, he wasn’t allowed to go out until he had received a phone call each day about 4 p.m., and when he ventured outside he was followed.
Whereas Philby and Maclean were under the control of the First Chief Directorate, because of his homosexuality, Burgess for security reasons came under the auspices of the Second Chief Directorate. A promiscuous homosexual in Britain, now he was in Moscow he carried on exactly as he had before, in spite of homosexuality being a criminal offence and the fact he had a live-in lover, casually picking up men on the street. The KGB watchers responsible for following him, astonished at how easily he seemed able to pick men up, quickly learnt to turn a blind eye. He received a small income from the KGB and they would lend him a car with a driver when he needed it. ‘He was at ease in Moscow because his needs were being met,’ claimed Sergei Kondrashev, a KGB officer who supervised him.5
Burgess delighted in wearing an Old Etonian bow tie, often at the same time as the Order of the Red Banner, which he claimed to have been awarded by the Russian Foreign Ministry. ‘It helps in the restaurants,’ he used to say, without specifying which of these distinctions he meant.6
He had a regular group of correspondents, such as Roy Harrod, Wolfgang von Putlitz and Harold Nicolson, who then shared his letters with other mutual friends such as Robin Maugham and Peter Pollock. Harrod, who described Burgess as ‘a very dear friend of mine, one of the persons whom I have loved most’, sent him several of his books including Foundations of Inductive Logic, remembering Burgess had ‘made very intelligent comments on it. Indeed, I think that his were the best comments I had on that book.’7
A flavour of his life can be found in this extract from a long and chatty letter to Pollock, by now happily settled with Paul Danquah:
I am writing this late at night, exhausted, & with my Paul buzzing about, putting the 9th Symphony on, dancing & asking questions on every subject from Stravinsky to Irving Berlin with Rimbaud thrown in and quotations from Maupassant’s Bel-Ami which every Russian seems to know better than you or I, just as they do Mark Twain, Galsworthy & sometimes Shakespeare and always Dickens. I told Tom Driberg that I would pay for the HI-FI radio-gram system he is organising for me and that he should get the money off you. I thought this would save you trouble and Tom has contacts. So give him any money he asks. If it is more than you have out of the 150 I sent you I will send more.
I despair of receiving BOOKS from you. Have you sent any? I have opened an account at COLLETS, Charing Cross Road, so please hand the lists I sent to you to them. (Wait a week after you receive this or account may not be yet open.)
I don’t know quite yet whether my Paul will be a Paul or only a Michael. I think a Paul. A great relief, as you know as well as I – or better. At the moment he is singing the ‘Drinking Song’ from Traviata and complaining sharply that I am writing – Paul or Michael? We go to the Bolshoi theatre Figaro tomorrow & I shall think of you. Do you remember the many occasions on which we played or saw it together. On one occasion interrupted by Tom Wylie’s snores.
Now Peter I shall consult Leonard Cassino tomorrow a.m. at dawn or thereabouts & send you a list of records I would like you to buy for me. Please do this & give them to Tom Driberg to send with my furniture. I think his telephone number is LEE GREEN 8035. But I will ask him to ring you also …
What a bad letter. I really am very well & things are going much better for me here than I ever expected or asked – and as you know I expect & ask a lot. A visit from you would be lovely but for the reasons you wrote & I wrote had better be left in cold storage as regards actual arrangement ‘for’ as A. Marshall wld say, ‘the nonce’. What about you & Paul coming together I think I could bear it. (Jealousy wld be no obstacle of course – but discretion of behaviour by Paul would be v important – on the other hand anyone of his race is v popular here …
What Jane Austen calls ‘my instrument’ (i.e. piano) is now being played on con brio. At the moment, Verdi, but I am promised ‘One of Beethoven’s latest quartets’ at any moment …
Life as you see is full of incident & curiosity & I’m very glad I came.8
It was a lonely existence and Burgess took every opportunity to mix with Western visitors, lingering in haunts where they might be found such as hotel lobbies or the Bolshoi, though he was often annoyed at how few visitors noticed him. In July 1957 an American lawyer from Memphis, William Goodman, found himself sitting beside Burgess at a performance of La Traviata. Burgess, who was with a woman and young boy, explained he was in Russia ‘preventing World War III’, though refrained from going into exact detail how he was doing so. Wearing a dark pinstripe suit and his Old Etonian tie – to which he immediately drew attention – Burgess introduced himself as ‘one of the two missing British diplomats’ and reminisced about his time in the USA during the three twenty-minute intervals. When Goodman asked Burgess what job he had, Burgess only smiled mysteriously, showing a stainless steel front tooth, and evaded the question with a hint that he was doing ‘rather important work for the Soviet government’.9
Burgess was not just working for peace and at the Foreign Language Publishing House, but he also appears to have written a training manual for KGB recruits about the British way of life. Modin claimed, perhaps mistaking the analysis Burgess had written some twenty-five years before at Cambridge, ‘Towards the end of the 1950s, he embarked on some research for the Centre, notably a study of British students in the 1930s, with a discussion of their behaviour and their political and social aspirations. This work included a brilliant analysis of the methods used by the Soviets to recruit young Britons at the time, in which Burgess showed quite clearly how and why the NKVD had succeeded in creating a network of absolutely crucial importance.’10
Interviewed for this book, Modin claimed that in the late 1950s:
Burgess was writing a book, a book about spies. You cannot find it; it’s in a secret library … I gave him the idea to do that. The authorities were nagging me to come up with how to better use him. The book produced great commotion. He greatly criticised us in the book, how we behave ourselves, where we are right, where we are wrong, and where is our weakness, why we fail more often than win. So it means that he gave a deep analysis. When the head of the intelligence agency found out about it, it appeared that he was shaken for a long time …11
Anatoly Golitsyn claimed in his unpublished memoirs that Burgess had also been used in recruitment operations from 1953, and in 1954 was sent to Peking as part of a homosexual blackmail operation against a friend serving in the British mission there.12
From 1962 Burgess also worked closely with Sergei Kondrashev, a former rezident in London and Berlin, where he had run George Blake, and according to the CIA officer Pete Bagley, Burgess:
bubbled with suggestions for active measures. Kondrashev would bring him plans that were being worked out in the Service, and Burgess would make constructive and thoughtful comments. He took drafts of articles the Service were preparing to float in the English-language press abroad and edited them into native English. He helped them to counterfeit British or American official documents. And he helped forge letters ostensibly from private citizens to British MPs and to British and American newspapers, and hate letters to be sent to religious organisations, with the aim of stirring discord.13
His training in the Joint Broadcasting Committee and Information Research Department was being put to good use.
Kondrashev enjoyed his contact with Burgess and was impressed by his grasp of foreign and domestic affairs, his lively imagination, and his intuition about people, but he was not an easy man to work with. He could be moody, wilful and petulant, and would keep Kondrashev, a dozen years younger than him, waiting whilst he finished playing his clavichord before settling down to work, or insist they have a few drinks first. Once Kondrashev was forced to stand in the corridor outside his flat whilst a young man, still half-dressed, was hastily ushered out. But Kondrashev valued Burgess as a unique asset. ‘He was far more useful than the other defectors from the British establishment who were then living in Moscow.’14
This is a view confirmed by Modin. ‘They used him, and he made a very large positive contribution … he predicted a lot of things correctly in foreign policy and also in intelligence.’15
In September 1957 Burgess wrote to Peter Thorneycroft, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, asking for monies from his bank account to be paid to him in Russia, so he could settle bills with the grocer Fortnum & Mason, his shirtmaker New & Lingwood, his tailor Tom Brown and the bookseller Collet’s. He reminded Thorneycroft, whom he addressed as Peter, much to the disgust of civil servants, that he had invited him on to The Week in Westminster more often than the Conservative leadership might have liked, complaining his income from a trust fund paid into the St James’s Street branch of Lloyds was being monitored by the Treasury. It worked and Burgess was allowed access to his bank balance of just over £1,000. His furniture was also shipped to the USSR.16
Two months later, Burgess was designated as a non-resident British subject, which meant money could be sent to him and he wouldn’t be in breach of foreign exchange control regulations. When this became public, there was an outcry in the press and parliament, with suspicions that he had been given special treatment because of friends in high places, and that other fugitives were not treated as well.17
One of Burgess’s closest confidants was his old mentor Harold Nicolson, to whom he felt he could write openly about both politics and his private life:
Your letter, the second letter, from the ‘shameless port’ of Famagusta reached me here in one of my favourite places – Tiflis – to you and me and many Russians, but now officially what it always was to the Georgians, Tbilisi. I think the Georgian word just more expressive of this lovely, romantic, gay, open-hearted, sly, secret-living, friendly (to foreigners, less so to Russians) place, with I should think the highest standard of living and eating, of clean, thick cream daily, silk tunics, belted round waists which seem immune to the expansive effect of litres of wine, anywhere in the Soviet Union – higher indeed than many West European towns we both know. I won’t go into the reasons for this.
I am writing this in the late morning. The early morning was spent lying in hot mineral water (natural hot) in a Georgian bath in what has been both a Christian and Mohammedan place of worship, being scrubbed, washed in a way only Orientals wash (but I refused depilation) by a youth whose nationality I don’t know, tho’ not a Russian or Georgian? A Circassian? with apparently waterproof Mascara round his eyes, an individual of great experience and technique and judging by the jealous grunts of a vast Armenian, obviously a regular visitor, who had unfortunately for him arrived 5 minutes after me and missed that bus this morning, of great popularity. I went to the bath early because last night I was ‘with Georgians at a party’ (see drawing by Sir Harry Luke in, I think, his ‘Cities and Men’).
My dear Harold, what a nice letter yours was, and so full of information. I was very touched and grateful. Gossip is apart from the Reform Club, the streets of London and occasionally the English countryside the only thing I really miss.18
Now that Modin was back in Moscow, he often met Burgess and he saw the two sides of Burgess’s character. When Modin ran into trouble with his superiors, after writing a critical report on his London colleague Nikolai Rodin, Burgess intervened with a forthright letter to Ivan Serov, president of the KGB, which saved his former handler from being sent to Siberia.19
But he was never popular with those entrusted to guard him. ‘Those detailed to look after Guy Burgess suffered acutely, for he was unpredictable, aggressive and provocative to them by turns. I remember one counter-espionage agent who had been with Burgess in a KGB holiday camp in the south, who told me how odious he had been. For example, he derived a warped satisfaction from dragging an inflatable bed along the beach, brushing past the people sunbathing and spraying them with sand. He was roundly abused, of course, but didn’t give a damn.’20
Terence Lancaster, whilst he was in Moscow for the Express in November and December 1957, saw Burgess most days, usually about 9 a.m. before he left for his job at the Foreign Languages Publishing House. He had been told Burgess was vain and lonely and only too happy to talk. ‘He had a dissolute look about him, but always clean shaven and in an OE tie,’ he remembered. Lancaster enjoyed their encounters, finding Burgess had great charm, was a good conversationalist and listener and could be funny, even about leading Soviet figures. They dined several times, including at a Chinese restaurant, and Lancaster noticed him keen to shock, but also fascinated to hear political news and social gossip. ‘He was very funny at imitating people, particularly Churchill and Macmillan, but not so good on Gaitskell.’
Burgess told Lancaster that he had not intended to go to Russia, but ‘one thing led to another’ and ‘always his feeling for England cropped up. His conversation, his friends, his talk, even his appearance dated Burgess as a man of the thirties.’ Lancaster felt Burgess never forgave Britain for Munich and he still firmly believed in the communist system, even with its faults, whilst having no illusions about the Soviet system. ‘You are operating in the Soviet Union and the principles of free speech do not apply here.’21
When Lancaster left Moscow, Burgess asked him to post some Christmas cards to his old school-friend, the diplomat Con O’Neil (‘Hope I didn’t cause him any problems’) and Hector McNeil’s widow, and requesting Tom Driberg to send him some indigestion mixture. He also gave him £1 to repay Thomas, a waiter at the Reform Club, and asked Lancaster, the product of Salisbury Modern School, to buy half a dozen OE ties. Entering the shop, embarrassed by the bizarre request, the newspaperman, not a frequenter of such outfitters, explained, ‘They’re for a friend.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ the assistant replied acidly.22