I find it hard to drum up any patriotic indignation over Burgess or Blunt, or even Philby. No one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people in high places. Because he made jokes, scenes and most of all, passes, the general consensus is that he was rather silly.1
Alan Bennett, introduction, Single Spies and Talking Heads.
In October 1955, a damage assessment memorandum for the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that:
(a) Burgess and Maclean were Soviet agents for many years prior to their defection. They were apparently protected from exposure and dismissal for a long time by other highly placed officials of the British government, particularly the Foreign Office.
(b) Maclean had access to practically all high-level plans and policy information that were Joint US/UK/Canada projects. As Code Room Supervisor, he naturally had access to all the UK diplomatic codes and ciphers as well as the opportunity to scan all incoming and outgoing communications.
(c) In the fields of US/UK/Canada planning on Atomic Energy, US/UK postwar planning and policy in Europe and all by-product information up to the date of defection undoubtedly reached Soviet hands. Probably via the Soviet embassy in London.
d) All UK and possibly some US diplomatic codes and ciphers in existence prior to 25 May 1951 are in possession of the Soviets and of no further use.
Insofar as US security implications are concerned it would appear that very nearly all US/UK high level planning information prior to 25 May 1951 must be considered compromised … It may be more appropriate to assume total compromise as of the defection date.2 Maclean’s devastating impact is clear but Burgess’s treachery is less apparent. The following year the Senate sub-committee on Internal Security looked again at the Burgess and Maclean case. They interviewed many of the key participants, including Maclean’s sister Harriet Sheers, looking, in particular, at whether either diplomat had affected the war in Korea through their revelations.
A note from the State Department, as part of the evidence, concluded, ‘The Department has also failed to bring to light any information which would justify it in stating that developments affecting the security of the United States could be traced to Burgess during the period of approximately nine months when he served as second secretary of the British Embassy in Washington’ and ‘There is no information in the Department’s records which would indicate that Burgess, in his position in the Far Eastern Department of the British Foreign Office in 1948, furnished information valuable to the Chinese communists and injurious to the United States.’3
We know some of the material that Burgess passed to the Russians, and that it was so extensive that much of it was never even translated – the Russian agent Kislytsin talked about Burgess bringing out suitcases of documents and at one point Burgess requested he be supplied with a suitcase. But we know only what the Russians have chosen to share in authorised books such as Deadly Illusions and The Crown Jewels, fascinating accounts but which have to be treated carefully as the Russian authorities often had another agenda. There are certainly still shelves of material on the Cambridge Spy Ring that have not been released. What we do know, according to The Crown Jewels, is that from 1941 to 1945 Burgess passed 4,604 documents to Moscow Centre.4 These documents included, amongst much else, telegraphic communications between the Foreign Office and its posts abroad, position papers and minutes of the Cabinet and Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff.
However, even when we know what documentation was taken, we don’t know who saw it, when, and what they did with the material. The irony is that the more explosive the material, the less likely it was to be trusted, as Stalin and his cohorts couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a plant. Also if it didn’t fit in with Soviet assumptions, then it was ignored. Much of the material Burgess supplied, out of practical necessity for security reasons, was oral briefing, which could easily be misinterpreted as it was passed on.
What could Burgess have passed to the Russians? Clearly anything he drafted himself, but also anything that came across his desk or he asked to see. In particular, as Hector McNeil’s private secretary and as a Far East expert, he would have seen very important and secret documents, especially crucial during the Four Powers conferences, when the British negotiating position would have been known to the Soviets during the conferences themselves. He was known to work late and at weekends and had access to secret safes, but even plain texts of enciphered cables were useful for code-breaking efforts. We can certainly surmise that he passed across information about the post-war peace conferences and founding meetings of the United Nations, NATO and OECD, plans for the reconstruction of post-war Germany and the immediate negotiating positions at conferences such as that creating the Brussels Treaty.
Guy Burgess was also a magnificent manipulator of people and trader in gossip. He was highly social and almost always out at dinners and night clubs – usually paid for on expenses or by others. In the Foreign Office, he is remembered for always attending the group tea at 4 p.m. and popping in and out of other people’s offices. He knew how to extract material through charm, provocation, his own powers of argument and knowledge and, when required, blackmail. Here was a man who supposedly kept every love letter in case it could be useful and who was happy to lend his flat for assignations. People liked him and confided in him and Burgess took every advantage.
As Goronwy Rees noted, ‘Guy possessed an appalling fund of information to the discredit of numerous persons in this country. Collecting it was one of his private hobbies; it was a native instinct in him and it was done primarily, I think, for purposes of gossip and private amusement; but I believe … it constitutes a formidable weapon of pressure and blackmail.’5
Tom Wylie, Dennis Proctor and Fred Warner may not have been Soviet agents, but they might as well have been as they showed Burgess the interesting papers that crossed their desk. One can only speculate at the information he may have gleaned from his friends in intelligence, Guy Liddell and David Footman, on their weekly visits to the music hall. And there was always the excuse at various moments that Burgess was working in the cause of anti-fascism, that Russia were our allies, or it was for some hush-hush British organisation.
Apart from actual documents, he could provide lists of agents when he worked for MI6 and MI5, he could interpret policy and human nature, and he could provide insights into character that might allow others to exert pressure on a particular individual.
Rees later wrote:
The very existence of a secret service was for Guy a challenge to curiosity and certainly he showed a persistent determination to penetrate its secrets which had nothing to do with his official duties. It is quite certain that during the period after the war, both in London and in Washington, he acquired a remarkable knowledge for one in his position, both of the personalities and of the working of the security services … What is difficult to exaggerate is the amount of information which he had acquired about the machinery and methods of our security services, their organisation, and the names and positions of those who worked in them.6
Indeed the very word ‘secret’ was like a call to battle for Burgess, a challenge that he never failed to accept; he hunted out secrets like a hound after truffles.
He was also an agent of influence, most notably in the BBC and during his time on Far East affairs, where he helped shape British policy to recognise Communist China when America refused to, but also later in Moscow working on Soviet disinformation. Then there were all the agents he was responsible for recruiting – Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Michael Straight – and the agents they in turn had recruited and all the information they supplied to the Russians. And these are just the agents we know about.
One of the most damaging legacies was the defection itself, which undermined Anglo-American intelligence co-operation at least until 1955, and public respect for the institutions of government, including Parliament and the Foreign Office. It also bequeathed a culture of suspicion and mistrust within the Security Services that was still being played out half a century after the 1951 flight.
Guy Liddell retired from MI5 in 1953, aged sixty-one, having never made Director General. Though guilty only of a friendship with Burgess, he continues to be accused of being a Russian agent. David Footman moved in the same year to a fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Esther Whitfield’s service was terminated in 1951, though MI5 accepted she was not responsible for the leak. She had a series of jobs emigrating first to Rhodesia, where she worked for Rio Tinto, and then Spain, and never married. Alan Maclean was forced to resign from the Foreign Office and became a publisher. Fred Warner’s career stalled for a time, though he eventually became ambassador to Japan.
Milo Talbot became the temporary head of the Foreign Office Security Department in July 1953, but six months later abruptly resigned. He served briefly as consul-general and then ambassador in Laos, until taking early retirement in May 1956. He died in mysterious circumstances, aged sixty, and his papers were destroyed. Many of Burgess’s circle, such as Victor Rothschild and Dennis Proctor, remained under suspicion. Anthony Blunt, in return for immunity, only confessed in 1964, but was not publicly revealed until 1979. John Cairncross was also exposed that year, having been allowed by MI5 to move abroad in 1952.
Burgess was the first of the Cambridge Spies to die and history has not been kind to him, with a succession of books depicting him as some sort of tragic-comic figure, who achieved very little, but to the intelligence professionals he is seen as the major figure in the group. Yuri Modin was later to write ‘… the real leader was Burgess. He held the group together, infused it with his energy and led it into battle, so to speak. In the 1930s, at the very start, it was he who took the initiatives and the risks, dragging the others along in his wake. He was the moral leader of the group’, adding, ‘He was the most outstanding and educated among all the five.’7
Sergei Kondrashev, a KGB general who worked with Burgess on disinformation measures, agreed. Asked who was the most important of the Cambridge Spies, he immediately replied, ‘Burgess. Definitely.’8 It’s been assumed that Burgess’s most damaging period was the four years he spent in the inner sanctum of the Foreign Office, as private secretary to the deputy Foreign Secretary, but Kondrashev revealed that in Russian eyes, ‘One of the most important periods of his service was just before the German War’, when Burgess was acting as middleman between the British and French in the crucial days immediately preceding the Second World War.9
It’s a view shared by the doyen of spy writers, Nigel West. ‘Anthony told me that Guy Burgess was the genius in the network, the key man. He was the person everybody had to go to for instruction, help and advice. Guy was always in touch with the Russians and could make decisions and could counsel other people.’10
The question that continues to baffle writers and intelligence professionals alike is why did Burgess do it? Why did he agree to work for a foreign power, of which he knew little, as a student, and continue to serve it until his death some thirty years later? Why did this apparently most British of figures leave behind all the things he most cherished, such as the Reform Club, gossip, his circle of lovers and friends, and his mother, to whom he was devoted, for a lonely exile in Stalinist Russia?
Burgess was a product of his generation. Born a few years earlier or later, his life would have taken a very different course, but he came from a generation politicised during the early 1930s that felt it needed to stop theorising and do something, even if this call to action took many forms and led few to beat a path to Moscow. David Haden Guest went to work with the young Communist League in Battersea, and John Cornford to serve the party among the Birmingham working-class, before both died in the Spanish Civil War. Maurice Cornforth gave up philosophy to become an agricultural organiser in East Anglia, whilst many, such as Eric Hobsbawm, became communist intellectuals.
For Burgess, serving the Communist Party in Battersea or Birmingham was less attractive than trying to shape political events at the highest level. It played back to his school-day fascination with Alfred Mahan theories of great power blocs and Marxist teachings. Burgess needed a moral purpose, to do something positive in the struggle against fascism, and at a vulnerable point in his life, the Russians provided the opportunity.
Writing to Harold Nicolson in 1962, he quoted Stendhal’s ‘The Pistol Shot in the Theatre’ on the importance of timing in shaping political and personal decisions:
You were born too early to be hit by this at the age at which one acts, & the intelligentsia of the 40s and 50s were both too late. I was of the generation of the pistol shot in the 30s. I notice the intellectuals of the 60s, the young at Aldermaston, have again been hit by the continuing fusillade. I notice this with pleasure, one greets others getting into the same boat; and with sorrow that they don’t know how rough the crossing is.11
He refused to believe that his God had failed him, as it had Koestler, Spender and the other fellow travellers. Like Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth working for the victory of Spain, or indeed the sleepers of Islam now, there was a certainty in the correctness of the choice. It was, as Graham Greene would write of Philby, ‘the logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments’.12
Burgess was guided by a strong sense of history, which he then misread. Goronwy Rees would write, ‘The truth is that Guy, in his sober moments, had a power of historical generalisation which is one of the rarest intellectual faculties, and which gave conversation with him on political subjects a unique charm and fascination. It was a power which was, I think, completely native and instinctive to him. It might have made him a great historian; instead it made him a communist.’13
Just as the nineteenth century had belonged to the British Empire, Burgess felt the twentieth century would belong to Russia. George Weidenfeld, at one of Baroness Budberg’s drinks parties, remembered how Burgess accused him of ‘sitting on the fence’ by supporting a pro-European policy for Britain. ‘There is no such thing as a European policy,’ he pontificated. ‘You’ve either got to choose America or Russia. People may have their own view which to choose, but Europe is something wishy-washy that simply does not exist.’14
In Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent a character says, ‘You choose your side once and for all – of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.’15 The same can be said of Burgess.
No account of Burgess’s life can be written without an understanding of the intellectual maelstrom of the 1930s, especially amongst the young and impressionable. In An Englishman Abroad, Burgess is asked why he became a spy. ‘At the time it seemed the right thing to do,’ he replied. For Burgess and others, their conversion had strong political roots, but most fellow members of the Cambridge cells did not spy for the Russians and indeed lost their communist fervour in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1956 with the invasion of Hungary, or simply because they had to get on with the business of earning a living.
So why did Burgess stay the course? Partly because, having picked his football team, he loyally stuck with them through thick and thin, capable of all sorts of intellectual somersaults to keep in step with the changing situation. He stayed because he was flattered to feel he did have a real chance to affect events and from a perverted form of imperialism, that having witnessed the death of one empire, he decided to attach himself to another which he felt less materialistic. He also stayed because the Russians wouldn’t let him stop and because he actually enjoyed his clandestine role, hunting with both the hare and the hounds.
Burgess was a spoilt child, indulged by his mother and with an absent father – a characteristic of several of the Cambridge Ring – and he had never been given boundaries. His mother, who refused to set them, seemed to be grateful to first Dartmouth and eventually the Soviet Union for so doing. Without a strong moral compass, he was vulnerable to the blandishments of the highly sophisticated Soviet recruitment techniques, which offered excitement and a sense of worth. The Soviets recognised his desire for clandestine danger in his private life, but also his guilt and desire for some sort of redemption, and simply utilised it for their own ends.
The Apostles proved to be fertile recruitment ground, because the society drew men attracted by secrecy, by apparent higher loyalties, and a feeling of superiority. Burgess was perhaps a classic example of his acquaintance Cyril Connolly’s theory of arrested development, a Peter Pan figure who never grew up. Cyril Connolly noted that ‘the child whose craving for love is unsatisfied, whose desire for power is thwarted or whose innate sense of justice is warped … eventually may try to become a revolutionary or a dictator’.16 Service to the Soviet Union gave Burgess a cause after he had failed with many of his other ambitions. A sense of purpose, a new beginning after rejection, the opportunity to create a heroic role for himself.
Guy Burgess wanted to be someone and shape events. Knowing he would not make it as a Cambridge don or high-flying mandarin, the role offered by the Russians seemed attractive. Malcom Muggeridge, a shrewd judge of character, reviewing the Tom Driberg biography noted ‘the vanity, snobbishness, romanticism, weakness masquerading as defiance, retreat from reality somehow made to seem an advance upon it, which constitute him. One senses the influences which played upon him, the perky, half-baked longing somehow to be someone.’
Part of the fascination with Burgess is his complexity and paradoxes. No figure could have been more British and Establishment with his Eton and Cambridge education, membership of London clubs, expensive clothes, love of British literature, hunting scenes on the walls of his flat, and final wish to be buried in Britain. But this was only one part of him and any analysis of his character and motivation needs to be aware of his second world – with the romance of Russian music and literature and his respect for the ruthlessness of its history and political system.
Spies live double lives, sometimes out of necessity, but generally from choice. Burgess wasn’t torn between his various lives; they existed in parallel and even together. Marching with the hunger marchers he wore his Pitt Club scarf and Old Etonian tie, just in case such protective clothing was required. The order of Britain and the wild danger of Russia were simply the yin and yang of his personality.
Burgess was not unaware of the purges in the 1930s, the failure of Collectivisation, the labour camps, and so on. After all, he lectured on the evils of communism at the Foreign Office summer schools and made his reputation as a British propagandist against the Soviet Union, notably in the Information Research Department. But though an intelligent man, he was also politically naïve – a not uncommon combination – and he simply chose to ignore what did not suit him. Any change, such as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, could instantly be explained away in view of the bigger picture.
He had learnt to compartmentalise his life and feelings as a child and he carried this through into adulthood. Like an actor, he played each part as required, but he was a Janus. To his close friends, and in particular women, he was kind, loyal, stimulating company, a good conversationalist, thoughtful and charming. Miriam Rothschild remembered, ‘He had slightly protruding top teeth (like a baby thumb-sucker) which made him youthful-looking and appealing. And he was always in sort of high spirits – like a school girl.’17 Whilst Rosamond Lehmann felt he ‘was not only brilliant, but very affectionate and warm-hearted … I was very fond of him.’18
Yet from Stanley Christopherson at Lockers Park – ‘He wasn’t the kind of boy I wanted as a friend. He wasn’t quite right’ – to over thirty years later, there were those who were repelled by him. Margaret Anstee, a young female colleague in the Foreign Office, thought him ‘extremely repulsive. He was rather greasy and dirty. He was always telling awful dirty jokes.’19
Brian Sewell, who was eighteen when he met Burgess, remembered ‘he had egg on his tie, tobacco of his breath, and wandering hands; I might have been glad of such hands of a boy of my own age, but not his and the accompanying odours – not even the strawberry milk shakes that he was inclined to buy me could compensate for those.’20 John Waterlow put it simply, ‘I don’t think Burgess had any real warmth of character.’21
Harold Nicolson could see both sides of Burgess’s character and his conflicted personality. ‘He publicly announced his sympathies with communism and yet he heartily disliked the Russians … When Burgess was sober he was charming, jolly, and a magnificent talker. When he was drunk, he drooled foolish nonsense. He was a kind man, and despite his weaknesses, I don’t think he could do anything dishonourable or mean. But he was so terribly impetuous.’22
You don’t want to betray if you belong. It is all relative, but Burgess never felt he belonged. He was the outsider. At Lockers Park the fathers seemed more distinguished, at Eton he resented his failure to make Pop, at Cambridge the Etonians didn’t want anything to do with him, in the Foreign Office he wasn’t taken as seriously as he would have liked. Small slights grew into larger resentments and betrayal was an easy revenge. Espionage was simply another instrument in his social revolt, another gesture of self-assertion.
His homosexuality could have been a factor in feeling an outsider, but it strangely wasn’t, because on that score he felt no sense of shame. Robert Cecil, who knew him, noticed, ‘He had no particular wish to change the law on homosexuality; so long as he succeeded in defying it, the risk involved gave an added frisson to his exploits.’23 And frisson was part of the attraction of first communism and then his spying, which, as one newspaper put it, provided ‘a gesture of rebellion, an intellectual excitement; an outlet for his sense of adventure and love of mischief’.24
Spies have to be good liars and even fantasists, not least for self-protection, but for Burgess deceit was integral to his life, from his sexual activities to his political allegiances. As Andrew Boyle noted, ‘Truth for Guy would always be a moving target, but the ability to dazzle friends and casual acquaintances with the lurid glare of his fantasies consistently prevented them from finding him out.’25
Guy Burgess sought power and realising he was unable to achieve that overtly, he chose to do so covertly. He enjoyed intrigue and secrets for they were his currency in exerting power and controlling people. Goronwy Rees recalled, ‘He liked to know, or pretend to know, what no one else knew, he liked to surprise one with information about matters that were no concern of his, derived from sources which he could not, or would not, reveal; the trouble was that one could never be sure whether the ultimate source was not his own imagination.’26
There was, too, a moral vacuum. His BBC colleague John Green remembered, ‘He had literally no principles at all. None at all …’27 For Steven Runciman, ‘It was a wasted life. There was a solid core missing … épater le bourgeois. That’s what really started him off.’28
Burgess would, of course, not have seen his life as one of failure, hypocrisy and deceit. Just as his Huguenot ancestors had chosen to start a new life abroad, he too had put his political principles ahead of his personal wishes. He did not see himself as having betrayed his country, but as a Soviet agent who had nobly served his adopted country.
And yet, at the final reckoning, it was to his childhood home that Stalin’s Englishman wanted to be taken.