Preface
1. Spectator, 4 March 1972.
2. Goronwy Rees Inquiry Papers, GB 0210 GOREEES, UCW Aberystwyth, A Chapter of Accidents, original typescript, p. 76.
Prologue: Full Circle: Saturday, 5 October 1963
1. Daily Express, 10 October 1963.
2. Rev. John Hurst to the author, 17 September 1996.
1. Beginnings
1. Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956, p. 13.
2. Edward Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection, 1760-1960, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 345. They had the right to issue their own banknotes until the family bank was taken over in 1844.
3. He served with the expedition from Aden against the Foodlee Arab Tribe in 1866, took part in the destruction of Shugra in South Yemen in 1867-8, and as a lieutenant colonel led the Burmese Field Force in an expedition against the Dacoyts of Bubnesh in 1887. Retiring as a colonel in 1891, he died in Wales in 1908.
4. ADM 196/46/196. An account of contemporary life on Britannia can be found at http://www.pbenyon.plus.com/Commander_RN/Chap_01.html.
5. Malcolm’s naval record can be found at ADM 196/46/196 and ADM 196/126/73.
6. ADM/196/46.
7. Portsmouth Evening News, 15 March 1904.
8. Navy List, Oct. 1915, p. 394.
9. ADM/196/126.
10. Driberg, p. 83.
11. ADM 196/126/73. In April 1921, Malcolm transferred to HMS Emperor of India based in Malta, where he sailed to Constantinople during the Chanak Crisis in September 1921. Again his record was exemplary: ‘Capable, keen and zealous officer with good administrative ability.’
12. Nigel Burgess interview, 3 September 1996.
13. His contemporaries included: Lord Elcho, grandson of the Earl of Wemyss; Tom Mitford, brother of the Mitford sisters; Basil Ava, later the 4th Marquess of Dufferin & Ava; Hon. Martin Charteris, later private secretary to the Queen; the future philosopher, Stewart Hampshire; Bob Laycock, later Chief of Combined Operations during the Second World War; the writer, James Lees-Milne; and the future patrons of the arts and letters, Edward James and Peter Watson.
14. Peter Coats, Of Generals and Gardens, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976, p. 14.
15. Cherry Hughes Papers, Interview with Nigel Burgess, 21 January 1986.
16. David Leitch, Guy Burgess, unpublished manuscript p. 56.
2. Schooldays
1. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, Chapter 20. Connolly’s Eton contemporaries included Eric Blair (George Orwell), Steven Runciman, and Dadie Rylands.
2. William O’Brien to the author, 12 March 1999.
3. A contemporary account by another member of the St Vincent term can be found in Ambrose Lampen’s The Gilded Image, privately published, 1978, and slightly later in C.C. Anderson, Seagulls in my Belfry, Pentland Press, 1997.
4. Charles Owen, Plain Yarns from the Fleet, Sutton, 1997, p. 34.
5. William O’Brien to the author, 9 March 1999.
6. Owen, p. 34.
7. Ambrose Lampen, The Gilded Image, privately published, 1978, p. 49.
8. Arthur Hazlett to the author, undated letter, 1999.
9. Driberg, p. 13.
10. Creagh-Osborne to the author, 24 March 1999.
11. Lampen, p. 52.
12. A picture of Dartmouth at the time – he joined in January 1927 – can be found in John Hayes, Face the Music, Pentland Press, 1991, pp. 27-39.
13. Leitch, p. 69.
14. Interview with Bernard Ward, 21 March 1999.
15 Nigel Tangye, Facing the Sea, William Kimber, 1974, p. 101
16 ibid pp101-102
17. Robin Tonks to Andrew Boyle, 10 October 1978, Boyle Papers.
18. Captain John Gower, letter to the author, 12 March 1999.
19. Captain M.C. Creagh-Osborne, letter to the author, 24 March 1999.
20. Sir David Tibbits phone call, 12 March 1999, and Tibbitts letter to the author, 10 March 1999.
21. Captain St John phone call, 16 March 1999.
22. John Carmalt-Jones phone call, 16 March 1999.
23. Sir David Tibbitts letter to the author, 10 March 1999. David Buchanan-Dunlop, who had the next bed to Burgess, ‘did not like him, he had beautiful blue eyes and used to hypnotise younger naval cadets!’, Sir John Leslie to Celia Lee, 21 December 2005. A contemporary in the St Vincent term, a doctor at a famous London hospital, later claimed Burgess was expelled: ‘I remember him as a clever chap and very artistic. He was also very good at sport. But it sticks in my memory that he was very shifty-eyed. We were in our fifth term, late in 1925, when the theft came. I had missed drawing instruments. One day I was passing Burgess’s locker. It was half open and inside I saw my belongings. I reported the matter to a petty officer and I was interviewed by a Lt. Cavendish who was in charge. He told me to keep quiet about it. Burgess’s locker was emptied. He was sacked, and within a few hours he had left the college … We never saw Burgess again at Dartmouth, but the story went around that he had left because of poor eyesight. I said nothing, though I knew differently.’ Daily Mail, 25 October 1955. Burgess left in July 1927, which makes one question the authority of this account.
24. Burgess’s medical exam in December 1940 graded him ‘One’, subject ‘to further eyesight test which was not first class’.
25. Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, Headline, 1994, p. 65.
3. Eton Again
1. Driberg, p. 10.
2. Arthur Hearnden, Red Robert, Hamish Hamilton, 1984, p. 64.
3. Burgess would later claim he went rock climbing with Powell in Wales and was invited in the summer of 1933 to go climbing in the Alps, but he had already accepted another invitation to go with Cambridge friends to the South of France. Powell was killed with three other Eton masters on that trip. Driberg, p. 14.
4. Astor and Berry interviews with Andrew Boyle, both 26 April 1977, Boyle Papers 9429/1G/143, Cambridge University Library; A Mixed Grill, 4 June 1930; Motley, 10 July 1931; and The Phoenix, 30 November 1931.
5. Pym to the author, 5 February 2003, and interview, 9 February 2003.
6. The future writer and diplomat Fitrzoy Maclean was first, A.J. Ayer was second and David Hedley fourth. Hedley was best man at Ayer’s 1932 wedding.
7. One excitement that summer was the American actress Tallulah Bankhead’s seduction of several Eton schoolboys, including Peter Wilson, a future head of Sotheby’s.
8. He was ill the following year and it was won by Con O’Neil, later a distinguished diplomat, with the future Liberal leader Jo Grimond fifth.
9. Robert Birley to Frank Dobbs, 14 December 1928, quoted Driberg, p. 11. Dobbs stayed in touch with his former pupil. They went on holiday together to France and Burgess stayed with his former housemaster at Virginia Water in December 1949 when Burgess visited the Cecil family hoping to be allowed to add a final volume to Lady Gwendoline’s life of her father Lord Salisbury. TNA, FCO 158/9
10. Passenger lists, Ancestry.
11. Leitch, p. 65.
12. Michael Berry to Boyle, 26 April 1977, Boyle Papers 9429/1G/143.
13. Evan James to Boyle, 4 July 1977, Boyle Papers 9429/1G/143.
14. Lord Cawley to the author, 12 October 1998.
15. Lord Hastings to the author, 10 January 1999.
16. Lord Hastings to the author, 9 February 1999.
17. Michael Legge letter to the author, 17 August 2000.
18. David Philips telephone conversation with the author, 28 October 1998.
19. William Seymour to the author, 25 August 2000.
20. Mark Johnson to the author, 11 August 2000.
21. Tony Burgess to the author.
22. Eton College Chronicle, 10 October 1929.
23. Driberg, p. 12.
24. Gore-Booth later served with Burgess in Washington, but suspicions he may have been a Russian agent did not prevent him becoming Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1965-9.
25. Eton Archives, SCH/SOC/Pol/1.
26. Interview with Dick Beddington, 27 November 1998.
27. Driberg, p. 15.
28. Christopher Huntly interview, 24 August 2000.
29. Grant went on to Harvard and won the US amateur racquets championship in 1937; Baerlein became a Daily Express journalist and novelist and was killed in 1941 as a bomber pilot.
30. Peter Calvocoressi to the author, 4 December 1998.
31. Leitch, p. 80.
32. Eton College Chronicle, 6 June 1930.
33. Robert Birley interview with Andrew Boyle, 18 April 1977, CUP 3841.
34. Interview with Sir Steven Runciman, 2 August 1998.
35. Driberg, p. 14.
4. Cambridge Undergraduate
1. Driberg, p. 17.
2. Letter from Michael Vesey to the author, 25 August 2000.
3. Letter from Michael Grant to the author, 21 April 1999.
4. Runciman interview, 2 August 1998.
5. Driberg, p. 18.
6. Perhaps best defined as having characteristics of both sexes and concerned with or dedicated to enjoyment.
7. Letter from Gervase Markham to the author, 2 October 1998.
8. Hunter became a screenwriter after going down with a Third and is perhaps best known for his script for Carrington VC, 1954, starring David Niven. He briefly married dying in 1984. ‘Guy always said that he had been his greatest friend at Cambridge. A sweet man.’ Peter Pollock to author, 17 November 1998.
9. Michael Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye, Coronet edition, 1984, p. 90.
10. Jack Hewit claims Burgess first met Blunt when he sat the scholarship exam and the sketch of Anthony in his sketch book was done then, but this seems unlikely. Hewit interview, 5 March 1984.
11. British Library, Blunt Manuscript, ADD Ms 88902/1 handwritten addition, p. 14.
12. ADD MS 88902/1, p. 15.
13. Christopher Mayhew, A War of Words, Tauris, 1988, p. 6, and ‘Blunt “was Burgess’s lover”’, Observer, 13 January 1980.
14. Interview with Geoffrey Wright, 9 February 2003.
15. Guy was rumoured in Trinity to possess a collection of whips and use them in sado-masochistic orgies, Leitch, p. 93.
16. Early members included Richard Clarke, later a Whitehall mandarin and father of the politician Charles Clarke. According to Charles Clarke, his father used to go to football matches with Burgess and Maclean. Interview with Charles Clarke, 27 February 2015.
17. According to H.S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right, University of Toronto Press, 1983, p. 222, Pascal was asked by Soviet Intelligence to be a talent spotter but refused.
18. Driberg, p. 18.
19. Obituary, The Times, 2 November 2000.
20. Runciman engagement diaries, kindly supplied by Minoo Dinshaw.
21. Steven Runciman interview, 2 August 1998.
22. Desmond Seward email to author, 23 August 2013.
23. Steven Runciman interview, 2 August 1998.
24. Interview with Geoffrey Wright, 9 February 2003. A member of Footlights, Wright later wrote musical plays and took part in the musical Burgess, Maclean and Philby at the Kings Head.
25. The subject was ‘Should Blunt turn Reptile?’ The majority, including Burgess, decided not.
26. Keynes papers, King’s, undated, but from context January 1934. The first Marxian generation of Apostles are regarded as Dennis Proctor, Alister Watson, Hugh Sykes-Davie and Richard Llewellyn-Davies.
27. The picture was sold for £192,500 in 1983.
28. Some writers have suggested this scandal, which was covered up, made him vulnerable to blackmail.
29. Spectator, 3 March 1933.
30. Ibid., 5 May 1933.
31. Ferns quoted John Costello, Mask of Treachery, Collins, 1988, p. 249.
32. Driberg, pp. 15-16.
33. Carter, pp. 102-3.
34. Lord Thurlow interview, 21 January 1999, p. 87. Writing in 1942, Burgess would confess: ‘All the same I do understand examination terrors. Normally I used to have a nervous breakdown before them. Normally. Occasionally it was much worse. You shld ask A who used to nurse me through them.’ Guy Burgess to Peter Pollock, postmarked London, 20 June 1942, Pollock Letters.
35. Michael Burn, Turned Towards the Sun: An Autobiography, Michael Russell, 2003, p. 55.
36. Ibid., p. 59.
37. Ibid., p. 65.
38. Anne Barnes, unhappily married, was in love with Dadie Rylands, The Rylands and Barnes collection of letters at King’s College, Cambridge give vivid accounts of the South of France holidays and Anne Barnes’s friendship with Burgess with accounts of visits to seedy nightclubs and ‘alarming drives with Guy constantly getting excited about old houses and young men and taking both hands off the wheel to admire them’. Anne Barnes to Dadie Rylands 20 July 1933, King’s College Archives, GHWR 3/23/1.
39. Modin, pp. 70-1 for more on Burgess’s arguments to Blunt.
5. Cambridge Postgraduate
1. Driberg, p. 16.
2. Anthony Blunt, From Bloomsbury to Marxism, Studio International, November 1973, p. 167.
3. John Humphrey, quoted Penrose, p. 129.
4. Driberg, p. 22. The CUSS minute book 1928-1935 shows the most active members in the period were John Cornford Chairman in 1934, Donald Maclean first elected to the committee in autumn 1931, Kim Philby elected Junior Treasurer in June 1932, David Haden Guest, John Midgley, Fred Pateman, Julian Bell and the two Cumming Bruce brothers. TNA, KV3/442
5. Guy Liddell Diary, 14 November 1951
6. It peaked at six hundred in 1936. Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals, Gollancz, 1959, p. 52.
7. Interview with Lord Thurlow, 21 January 1999.
8. Cherry Hughes Papers, Nigel Burgess interview, 16 October 1985.
9. Granta, November 1933.
10. See account Cambridge Daily News, 14 November 1933.
11. Cherry Hughes papers, Michael Straight to John Costello, 24 November.
12. Carter, p. 110; For accounts see Cambridge Daily News, 14 November 1933; Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier, Constable, 1966, pp. 106-8; Penrose, pp. 94-7; Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason, Hutchinson, 1979, pp. 107-8; Costello, p. 225.
13. New Statesman, 9 December 1933.
14. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, unpublished memoirs, Very Little Luggage. Claud Phillimore was a good-looking Trinity architect with whom Blunt had an affair.
15. Penrose, p. 98.
16. Alan Hodgkin, Chance and Design, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 86. See also Margot Heinemann interview, Imperial War Museum, 9239/5/1–2, 1986. Hedley, who had been converted to communism by Burgess, took up graduate studies at Yale in 1934 and continued his communist activities in America supposedly dying of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1948 though both Christopher Harmer and A.J. Ayer have suggested he committed suicide. The FBI opened an extensive file on him in 1940.
17. Penrose, p. 108. According to Modin, Burgess was the best read of all the spies on Marxist theory. Roland Perry, The Fifth Man, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994, p. 436.
18. Victor Kiernan, LRB, Vol. 9, No. 12, 25 June 1987, pp. 3-5.
19. The review can be found in the Spectator, 23 March 1934.
20. Penrose, p. 133.
21. Runciman interview, 2 August 1998.
22. GBR/0272/PP/GHWR/3/73, Rylands Papers, Kings College, Cambridge Archives.
23. The date is incorrectly given as summer 1932 in Goronwy Rees, A Chapter of Accidents, Chatto & Windus, 1972, p. 110, while Costello, p. 222, says summer 1933. More details in Jenny Rees, Looking for Mr Nobody, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, pp. 69-71.
24. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 110–11.
25. Ibid., p. 112, but this is denied by Driberg, p. 24.
26. Driberg, p. 26.
27. Ibid., p. 28.
28. Ibid., p. 25.
29. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 112.
30. Driberg, p. 27.
31. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 112.
6. The Third Man
1. GHWR 3/73 Rylands Papers, King’s College, Cambridge Archives.
2. Interview with Nigel Burgess, 21 January 1986.
3. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, Very Little Luggage.
4. Interviews with Nigel Burgess, 21 January 1986 and 1 September 1996.
5. In March 1934 Guy had been one of two CUSS militants put in charge of managing a collection to help Austrian workers, after an appeal from Philby. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009, p. 172.
6. Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, p. 168, suggests a factor in the recruitment was the erroneous belief that his father St John Philby was in British intelligence.
7. From November 1935 Deutsch lived in Hampstead’s famous modernist Lawn Road Flats, whose occupants at various times included Agatha Christie. See David Burke, The Lawn Street Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists, The Boydell Press, 2014.
8. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, Penguin, 1999, p. 74. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusion, Century, 1993, p. 138, says seventeen. Deutsch’s recruits included the son of a ‘former minister’ and, through him, the son of an MI6 employee. The Mitrokhin Archive, MITN 1/7 quoted Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, OUP, 2015 p.297. We know the codenames but not the Identities of ‘Attila’ and his son ‘Otets’ (1936), ‘Ber’ (October 1934), ‘Helper’, ‘Saul’ (1936), ‘James’, ‘Socrates’, ‘Poet’, ‘Chauffeur’ (1936) ‘Molly’ (possibly Jenifer Hart) and ‘Om’. Oleg Tsarev, KGB v Anglii, TSentrpoligraf, 1999, p. 50 quoted Haslam p.297
9. Kim Philby, My Silent War, MacGibbon and Kee, 1968, introduction. Originally Philby’s cover name had been SYNOK in Russian, but the London ‘illegals’ preferred to use German rather than Russian as the language they shared and it helped disguise the Soviet link, so he was given the German diminutive, which translated in English means ‘Little Son’.
10. Rufina Philby, The Private Life of Kim Philby, Fromm International, 2000, p. 251. His Oxford contacts remain unknown.
11. Cryptogram to Centre No. 55/4037 from NKVD rezident in Copenhagen, 26 August 1934, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 187.
12. Deadly Illusions, p. 456.
13. Philby’s KGB memoir, p. 29, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 220.
14. Deadly Illusions, p. 462.
15. Rufina Philby The Private Life of Kim Philby, p. 230. Theo was another Soviet agent, Theodore Mally. See also Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, OUP, 2015, p. 89, and Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, p. 171.
16. Deutsch to Moscow Centre, undated Burgess file No. 83792, Vol. 1, p. 10, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 225.
17. Orlov to Centre, 12 July 1935, Orlov file No. 32476, Vol. 3, pp. 120–1, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 226. For a slightly different translation, see Voladarsky, pp. 106-7.
18. Psychological assessment of Burgess in the ‘History of The London Rezidentura’, File No. 89113, Vol. 1, pp. 350-1. Quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 226.
19. The list is in Burgess file 83792, pp. 28-31, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 227.
20. Rufina Philby with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov, The Private Life of Kim Philby, St Ermin’s Press, 1999, p. 235.
21. DEUTSCH File No. 89113, Vol. 1, pp. 250-1, quoted Deadly Illusions, pp. 228-9.
7. London
1. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 101. Goronwy Rees later wrote: ‘Some said that Guy’s sexual life had become so promiscuous especially with Party members, as to become a scandal to the Communist Party and that therefore he had to be expelled.’ National Library of Wales, A Chapter of Accidents, original manuscript, p. 5.
2. ‘William Anthony Camps (afterwards Master) was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship on 23 November 1933. ‘This is the only JRF election from this period, and I am afraid there are no papers surviving relating to this appointment, or any other competitions of any kind relating to Fellowships.’ Miss J.S. Ringrose, Honorary Archivist, Pembroke College to the author, 26 January 2015.
3. Eton have no record of the approach, but it is mentioned in Tim Card, Eton Renewed, John Murray, 1994, p. 187 and Boyle, p. 116, based on private information from Nicholas Elliot, son of the headmaster; Nicholas Elliot, Never Judge a Man by his Umbrella, Michael Russell, 1991, p. 46.
4. Deadly Illusions, p. 153.
5. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 127, Hewit quoted Leitch, p. 154.
6. Frith Banbury to the author, 3 February 2003.
7. Tim Milne, Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB Master Spy, Biteback, 2014, p. 44.
8. Kings Mis 37/1/7 47, 7 May 1936. The two would continue to meet, sharing a Chinese meal in London in July and Burgess is one of the beneficiaries of MacNeice and Auden’s poem ‘Last Will and Testament’, ‘I leave a keg of whiskey, the sweet deceiver.’
9. Rees, Mr Nobody, p. 86.
10. Volodarsky, p. 107.
11. Driberg, p. 31. Burgess later pretended to Claud Cockburn that he was Ruzsika’s illegitimate son.
12. Miriam Rothschild to the author, 4 February 1999. Miriam Rothschild to Andrew Boyle, 15 September 1977, CUL 3841. See also her comments, Boyle, p. 118.
13. Michael Straight to John Costello, 25 Oct 1988. The book was Spycatcher by Peter Wright. MI5 files reveal Rothschild set up a meeting with Chaim Weizmann and Burgess at Claridges about this time, a passage removed from Driberg’s biography. Blunt later wrote to Mrs Bassett ‘do you remember the occasion … when WEITZMAN (sic) was trying to turn VICTOR into a Zionist … and Guy argued with VICTOR very strongly against It … so to speak WEITZMAN and GUY wrestling for VICTOR’S soul?’ TNA, KV2/4117. According to Miriam Rothschild, ‘Neither my mother nor I ever, ever mentioned Germany or the Nazi regime to Guy. At my age (90) one’s memory is not as good as it was, but of that I am absolutely certain’, Miriam Rothschild to the author, 6 January 1999.
14. Norman Rose, Harold Nicolson, Jonathan Cape, 2005, p. 223, says they were not lovers, as Nicolson would have recognised Burgess as an ‘unpredictable, potentially ruinous partner’, whilst Miranda Carter thinks on probability they were, p. 234. Burgess’s boyfriend Jack Hewit described Nicolson as ‘a pink and white candy floss of a man who, when he did speak to me, always brought the subject round to masturbation. He wanted breathlessly to know how many times a week I did it and how I did it. A patronizing bore.’ Hewit, unpublished memoir.
15. Ben Nicolson diary, 25 March 1936.
16. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 122.
17. A copy of the January 1936 Anglo-German Fellowship membership list can be found in the London Metropolitan Archives ACC/3121/C/15/003/001 and TNA KV5/3. It doesn’t list Macnamara, Burgess or Philby.
18. Burgess supposedly also wrote a pamphlet for the Fellowship. William Duff, A Time for Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Mally and the Era of the Great Illegals, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, p. 117.
19. Cyril Connolly, The Missing Diplomats, Queen Anne Press, 1952, p. 23.
20. Pfeiffer was also supposedly an agent of the French Deuxieme Bureau and MI6. Modin, pp. 77-8.
21. Katz’s MI5 files TNA, KV2/2178. Interviewed in July 1951 Katz claimed he had met Burgess in 1936 through Victor Rothschild and stated ‘that Burgess told him he was helping a group of individuals who were acting as consultants to Winston Churchill and that Burgess’s field was Russia and India.’ TNA, KV2/4105.
22. National Library of Wales, A Chapter of Accidents, original manuscript, p. 12. The manuscript is also available at TNA, FCO 158/184.
23. See, for example, TNA, KV2/1382.
24. TNA, KV2/2587.
25. ‘Guy Burgess As I Knew Him’ by Gerald Hamilton, Spectator, 4 September 1955, p. 578. He gives a similar account in Gerald Hamilton, The Way It Was With Me, Leslie Frewin, 1969, pp. 40-4.
26. Missing Diplomats, p. 20.
27. Playfair papers, Kings’s College, Cambridge, Misc 82/5 & EWP/1935/17-18. See also 26 November 1935, Eddie Playfair to Julian Bell, King’s, EWP/1935/17-18. The Comite des Forges were an influential group in France involved in the steel industry and especially armaments, ship-building and heavy industry.
28. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 119-21. Burgess had been a member of the London Library since 24 December 1932. Charles Spencer who is writing a study of the Anglo-German Fellowship believes they were not members but somehow involved.
29. Blunt, MS 88902/1, pp. 24-5.
30. Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, Andre Deutsch, 1968, p. 72.
31. Isaiah Berlin recalled that Burgess in 1937 had joined an organisation called Britannia Youth, which took English schoolboys to the Nuremberg rallies and brought members of Hitler Youth on holidays with British scouts. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 95. He also claims there were several trips to Germany, including one to the Olympics, p. 93, a claim also made by Page, p. 92.
32. Deadly Illusions, p. 229.
8. The BBC
1. BBC Written Archives Centre, L1/68/1, O.V. Guy to B.E. Nicolls, Controller Administration, 15 November 1935.
2. Harding, later a famous BBC journalist best-known for his appearance on What’s My Line, was dismissed as ‘an odd sort of person … am very doubtful about its being worth seeing him …’ whilst Milner-Barry, who had won the British Boys chess championship in 1923, taken Firsts in Classics and Moral Sciences at Trinity, and would later have a distinguished career at Bletchley and in the Treasury, was passed over as ‘He does not really sound as if he had much imagination, and I hardly think it worthwhile putting him on our list.’ BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, 19 November 1935.
3. Ibid., Cecil Graves to B.E. Nicolls, 5 December 1935.
4. Ibid., ‘Report on Interview with Mr Burgess’, 18 January 1936. Interestingly Burgess, quite independently, had already been asked to take part in a programme on Russia with Gearmen Sverdloff, a press attaché at the Soviet Embassy, to be broadcast on 28th December 1935. The programme was cancelled because of disagreements over the script but was announced in the Radio Times where it was seen by Derek Blaikie who wrote a furious letter to the Daily Worker denouncing Burgess as ‘a renegade from the CP of which he was a member at Cambridge’. TNA, KV2/4106. It was an association MI5 missed until the 1951 Investigations.
5. Ibid., 30 July 1936. Burgess admitted in his application to ‘having gone through rather a communist stage’.
6. Ibid., 10 August 1936.
7. Ibid., P.D. Proctor to B.E. Nicolls, 18 August 1936.
8. Paul Bloomfield, BBC, Eyre & Spottiswode, 1941, p. 45; Spectator, 19 September 1963.
9. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, Staff Training Course, 1 October to 31 December 1936.
10. W.J. West, Truth Betrayed: Radio and Politics Between the Wars, Duckworth, 1987, claims Burgess lived with Barnes, Truth Betrayed, p. 47, but I’ve found no evidence to support this, though Burgess knew George’s wife Anne through Dadie Rylands and Steven Runciman.
11. Gorley Putt, Wings of a Man’s Life, Claridge Press, 1990, p. 115.
12. Penrose, p. 194.
13. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, 24 March 1937.
14. Ibid., 22 June 1937.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 25 June 1937.
17. Ibid., ‘Staff Photographs’, D.H. Clarke to G. Burgess, 12 July 1937.
18. BBC Written Archives, RCont1, Roger Fulford, Talks 1937-62.
19. Undated letter from 38 Chester Square, TNA, KV2/2587.
20. Katz’s MI5 file is TNA, KV2/2587.
9. Russian Recruiter
1. Volodarsky, p. 113, claims that according to KGB files 103 agents were recruited between Burgess and Blunt, but this has been disputed by Nigel West, amongst others.
2. E.M. Forster, ‘What I Believe’, The Nation, 16 July 1938.
3. George Steiner, ‘The Cleric of Treason’, New Yorker, 8 December 1980. Jonathan Haslam drawing on an authorised Russian biography of Blunt by a former ambassador to London, Viktor Popov, claims Rothschild ‘effectively provided cover for the Cambridge Five’. Haslam. p.82.
4. Carter, p. 165. Hampshire, who was later, almost certainly unfairly, denounced as a spy by Goronwy Rees, remembered Burgess had tried to recruit him just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Observer, 29 July 1984.
5. Anthony Blunt interview, The Times, 2 November 1979.
6. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 272.
7. Burgess file in Moscow, quoted Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, Random House, 1999, p. 73.
8. Michael Straight, After Long Silence, Collins, 1983, p. 71.
9. Madchen’s report to Moscow Centre, 16 February 1937, quoted John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Yale, 2009, p. 246.
10. A fuller account of Straight’s recruitment can be found in Roland Perry, The Last of the Cold War Spies, Da Capo, 2005, pp. 64-73. Perry now believes ‘Burgess had sex with Straight and this allowed GB to blackmail MS’. Straight had originally told Perry he had been raped by Burgess, but Perry never published it. ‘Now a close friend of MS’s has written to me backing up the sexual blackmail angle and supporting MS’s “confession” to me.’ Roland Perry to the author, 9 February 2006.
11. John Carncross, The Enigma Spy, Century, 1997, p. 58. Burgess met Putlitz in 1932 and the two men remained friendly until Burgess’s death. Putlitz was recruited by MI5 in the 1930s to inform on his colleagues and later worked during the Second World War on propaganda against Germany. He may have also worked for Soviet Intelligence after 1943 but this remains unproven.
12. LIST file No. 83896, Vol. 1, pp. 1a-4, quoted Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 206.
13. Enigma Spy, p. 59.
14. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 135.
15. Ibid., pp. 135-6. More details, Rees, Mr Nobody, pp. 88-9.
16. Ibid., pp. 136-7. According to the original typescript of A Chapter of Accidents, p. 22, Rees did once raise it with Blunt whilst walking in St James’s Park. ‘“I gather you know what Guy is really up to?” Blunt replied curtly, “Yes”, but it was clear he did not wish to discuss the matter any further.’
17. Ibid., p. 138.
18. Ibid. Burgess often came to stay with Rosamond for weekends in the country and they would discuss Victorian novels or swim. ‘One time, however, he overstepped the mark, and expressed his hopes of seducing the gardener’s handsome son. I forbade it. “Oh, Rosie, Rosie,” he cried, “can’t I?” “No,” I said.’ Selina Hastings, Rosamond Lehmann, Chatto, 2002, p. 190.
19. Jenny Rees, Mr Nobody, p. 274.
20. Deadly Illusions, p. 245.
21. Background information on Flit, Modrinskaya. The redacted name is Sheila Grant Duff.
22. Mr Nobody, p. 275.
23. Interview with Oleg Tsarev, 3 November 1993, 2/2, Goronwy Rees Papers, National Library of Wales.
10. Jack and Peter
1. Hewit, unpublished manuscript. Holzman has suggested the lover was the actor Douglas Seale (1913-99).
2. Penrose, p. 202; see also Penrose, pp. 202-3, where Hewit gives a slightly different account, and Leitch, pp. 153-4.
3. Hewit manuscript. A similar account is given in Penrose, p. 202.
4. Hewit interview, quoted Leitch, pp. 154-5.
5. Leitch, pp. 154-5. Rees describes a similar diet, Chapter of Accidents, p. 127.
6. Leitch, p. 155.
7. Penrose, p. 203.
8. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 113-14. One of his lovers was Donald Maclean. A Chapter of Accidents, original typescript, p. 2. Stephen Runciman interviewed in January 1958 told MI5 the two had ‘a roaring affair’ in Burgess’s fourth year. TNA, KV2/4123.
9. James Lees-Milne diary, 7 Feb 1980. James Lees-Milne, Deep Romantic Chasm: Diaries 1979-81, John Murray, 2000, p. 73. Stuart Preston (1915-2005), known as ‘the Sergeant’, was the original of ‘The Loot’ in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and friends with amongst others Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, James Lees-Milne and Osbert Sitwell. He had first met Burgess through Harold Nicolson in 1943 and was ‘impressed by his self-confidence and brashness. It would be hard not to have been.’ Interview with Stuart Preston, 1 March 1998.
10. Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, Methuen, 1970, p. 87.
11. Modin, p. 68.
12. Peter Pollock to author, letter postmarked 17 November 1998.
13. Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, Anthony Blond, 1968 and Timewell, 2005, p. 23, Timewell edition.
14. Deadly Illusion, p. 213. Burgess’s BBC file shows he was sick 14-18 January 1937.
15. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, 15 March 1938.
16. Leitch, p. 151.
17. On 25 April 1938 Maclean wrote to Moscow Centre, ‘I heard yesterday that the 3rd Musketeer [Burgess] has had a breakdown of some kind and has had to go away for two months. I have not seen him myself for many months, so do not know if this is likely to be true, but I shall be sorry if it is …’ Deadly Illusion, p. 212.
18. Penrose, p. 204.
19. Pollock interview, quoted Carter, p. 229, Leitch, p. 152; interview with Gale Pollock, 8 August 1996.
20. Carter, p. 230.
21. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, Lansel to Maconachie, 8 April 1938.
22. King’s, Cambridge, RNL/2/85, Guy Burgess to Rosamond Lehmann, 9 April 1938.
11. British Agent
1. BBC Written Archives. Contributors: David Footman, Talks 1937-49.
2. Undated BURGESS file, No. 83792, Vol. 1, pp. 100-3, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 233.
3. Igor Damaskin and Geoffrey Elliott, Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names, St Ermin’s Press, 2001, p. 151, pb edition. MI5 files which are not always accurate, however, suggest Burgess’s career in British Intelligence may have begun earlier – ‘from about 1936 onwards (i.e. before the time of the GRAND organisation) Footman and Burgess were collaborating in the running of an Agent network for MI6’. TNA, KV2/4103.
4. Driberg, p. 40.
5. Jack Hewit memoir. Hewit gave an identical account to Penrose, p. 209. Rather than coincidence, it seems more likely that Hewit was tasked with obtaining a job at the Goring.
6. Rose, p. 215, for full account of his attempt to dupe the British.
7. Deadly Illusions, p. 235, details in Burgess file 83792, Vol. 1, pp. 114-34. It has been suggested that Burgess was also used as a courier delivering Chamberlain’s letters, without the Foreign Office’s knowledge, to Count Ciano. Boris Piadyshev, ‘Burgess: In the Service of a Foreign Power’, International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations, 30 April 2005, No. 2, Vol. 51, p. 188. Though Ball’s liaison with the Italians was a Gray’s Inn lawyer called Adrian Dingli, this mission suggests Burgess did have contact with Grandi. Certainly when Ball tried to sue Hugh Trevor-Roper for revealing in a letter to the New Statesman Ball’s links with Grandi – details of which were in the original version of Count Ciano’s diaries published in 1948 until Ball forced their removal – Burgess ‘offered to give evidence for him if the matter came to court, saying that he had actually carried the messages for Ball’, p. 99. See also Ball’s papers, Bodleian Library, MS, c.6656, folios 40-9.
8. Burgess file 83792, Vol. 1, pp. 114-34 in Deadly Illusions, p. 236.
9. Ibid., p. 237. Also Volodarsky, p. 56.
10. Ibid., p. 237.
11. Ibid., p. 238.
12. Burgess file 83792, Vol. 1, pp. 138-9 in Deadly Illusions, p. 238.
13. The American friend may have been David Hedley, now living in the United States. Burgess profile in ‘History of London Rezidentura’ file 89113, Vol. 1, pp. 350-1, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 239.
12. Meeting Churchill
1. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, 12 January 1938.
2. CUL, Boyle Papers 9429/1G/278(i), David Graham to Boyle, 6 January 1979.
3. A fuller account is given in W.J. West, pp. 138-9.
4. Nigel Nicolson letters and diaries 1930-9, Collins, 1966, pp. 354-5.
5. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 209.
6. W.J. West, p. 54.
7. According to Burgess, ‘Pfeiffer telephoned to him at the BBC in great agitation, asking him to give an immediate message to his contact. The message was to the effect that he should be told that such a show of force might be fatal to certain plans which Daladier and Chamberlain had in mind, and that he should at once see Chamberlain and urge him to secure the cancellation of the order mobilising the Fleet. Pfeiffer further asked Guy to come to Paris at once to collect a letter amplifying this message. He went to Paris and collected the letter. For once, however he did not deliver it.’ Driberg, p. 41.
8. Ibid., p. 43.
9. According to a BBC colleague, ‘Burgess rang up the Soviet Ambassador Maisky and asked what he could do to help. Maisky answered: “Go and see Churchill and call on him, in the name of the youth of Great Britain, to intervene.” Burgess did not record this in any memo to the BBC but (presumably first) mentioned it at a dinner in honour of the retired Head of BBC Talks, Sir Richard Maconachie, attended by all the Talks Assistants who had worked in his department. The place was in the Langham … autumn 1945.’ CUL, 9429/ 1G/278(i), Graham to Boyle, 6 January 1979.
10. Burgess’s recording recreating the visit can be heard at http://www.city.ac.uk/cambridge-spies-the-guy-burgess-tape.
11. Driberg, p. 46.
12. The book was one of Burgess’s most prized possessions and was sent to him in Moscow. On Burgess’s death it was left to Philby, but eventually found itself as part of a £55 job lot at a suburban auction house. It was subsequently bought by the billionaire Malcolm Forbes for £2,000 at Christie’s. Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1997 who sold it for £12,000 thirteen years later. The Western Morning News 4th June 2010.
13. Churchill Archives, Char 2/350. John Green told Andrew Boyle the Churchill meeting was ‘during the war and not the Munich period. I am confident about this because Sir Richard Maconachie first asked me to go to Chartwell (on a Saturday or Sunday morning I believe) and I remember the prior appointment that prevented me. Burgess went to get some amendments in a script, stayed to lunch, played tennis with the young Mary Soames (in a pair of Winston’s flannel trousers!), had drinks (and I believe stayed to supper, the BBC chauffeur waiting the while)’, but admits that may have been a second meeting. CUL 9429/1G/283, Green to Boyle, 31 July 1980.
14. BBC Written Archives, Talks: RCont 1, Winston Churchill 1926-39. ‘Part of Conversation with Mr Churchill on Saturday 1 October’, 4 October.
15. Nicolson Diaries, Vol. 1, UK ed., pp. 354-5
16. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, Maconachie to DSA, 13 December 1938.
17. Ibid., 1 January 1939.
13. Section D
1. Internal history, Section D, p. 6, TNA, HS 7/3.
2. TNA, HS7/5.
3. Driberg, p. 56. MI5 files suggest Burgess may have served in the Spanish section alongside Philby whom he had brought in. TNA, KV2/4106, Interview with Isa Benzie, 6th November 1951.
4. See Paper 82, Joint Broadcasting Committee, TNA, T 162/858.
5. See Wellesley’s 3 October 1938 memo ‘Special Broadcasting Arrangements, 27-30 September 1938’, Chamberlain papers, Add. 14, Birmingham University Library.
6. Driberg, p. 56. In July 1939 JBC moved to offices at 71 Chester Square, TNA, FO395/666.
7. Benes is now revealed to have been a Soviet agent.
8. Christine Nichols, Elspeth Huxley, Collins, 2002, p. 150. Another colleague was Blythe Portillo, mother of the British politician and television presenter Michael Portillo.
9. For more details see Budberg’s MI5 files, TNA, KV 2/979-981 and Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield, A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy, Oneworld, 2015.
10. Nicolson, Diary, Balliol. A former MI6 officer, Peter Hofmann, told MI5 ‘I was with our friends in 1938 and was directed to meet Burgess in a hotel in Geneva. To my surprise he received me, a stranger, in his bedroom in his underclothes (tho the day was hot!) and we got thro’ our business’ which is either a misrembered date or confirms that Burgess was working for MI6 and maybe JBC earlier than officially claimed. TNA, FCO 158/8.
11. See Burgess report to K3 in KV6/127, TNA.
12. 24 August 1939, TNA, T162/858.
13. Enigma Spy, p. 75.
14. Deadly Illusions, p. 240.
15. Driberg, p. 52. Burgess reported to Gorski a conversation with Grand’s deputy Monty Chidson that ‘our aim is not to resist German expansion to the east’. Quoted Haslam p. 103.
16. Burgess letter, 28 August, Burgess file 83792, Vol. 1, p. 302, quoted Deadly Illusions, p. 240. See also Piadyshev, p. 189.
17. Blunt, ADD, Ms 88902/1, pp. 37-40.
18. Ibid.
19. Modin, p. 82.
20. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 149.
21. Ibid., p. 150.
14. ‘Rather Confidential Work’
1. Memo, Burgess & Smollett to Carr, TNA, INF1/27 ff8014/38.
2. West, Crown Jewels, p. 157. Smollett was a regular BBC broadcaster on Russian subjects from April 1936, but not produced by Burgess.
3. Eckesley, p. 422. Wellesley had left her husband Gerald Wellesley in 1922 for Vita Sackville-West, before becoming Matheson’s partner.
4. Guy Burgess file, SOE files.
5. Report, Sir Campbell Stuart, 18 February 1940, TNA, FO1093/149.
6. Deadly Illusions, p. 241.
7. TNA, INF1/4.
8. Selina Hastings, Rosamond Lehmann, Chatto, 2002, p. 207 and Costello, p. 376.
9. Leigh Ashton, SOE files, 10 & 14 May, 7 June. TNA, INF1/27, dates his transfer to War Office ‘D’ as 12 June 1940.
10. Deadly Illusions, p. 241.
11. Genrikh Borovik and Phillip Knightley (eds.), The Philby Files, Little Brown, 1994, pp. 157-64, claim Philby joined Section D at the suggestion of a Daily Express journalist Esther Marsden-Smedley with links to Section D and that may be true as well.
12. See Krivitsky files, TNA, KV2/804 and KV2/805. In January 1941 Blunt gave the Russians the full MI5 debriefing of Krivitsky.
13. Modin, pp. 83-4. According to MI5 files Burgess was sent to Moscow by Grand ‘to get in touch with the Comintern and influence them against the Germans’ TNA, KV2/4105, Memo 19th July 1951.
14. Holzman, p. 135.
15. Straight, pp. 142-3 and Perry, The Last of the Cold War Spies, p. 121. TNA, KV2/4139 FBI interview Michael Straight 1963.
16. Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, edited Henry Hardy, Chatto & Windus, 2004, pp. 318-19.
17. Miriam Rothschild to the author, 4 February 1999. See TNA, FO371/24847 for the exchange of telegrams showing that the Foreign Office had no idea of the purpose of the trip and were opposed to it.
18. Nicolson, Diary, 18 August 1940. Burgess’s scheme had proved premature, but just after the German invasion in June 1941, a British combined services military mission was sent to Moscow.
19. TNA, KV2/774.
20. A list of propaganda results for Section D which may have involved Burgess can be found in Appendix 2, TNA, HS 7/5.
21. Philby, My Secret War, p. 14.
22. Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, Methuen, 1965, p. 36.
23. History of the Training Section of SOE, 1940-45, TNA, HS7/51.
24. Philby, My Silent War, p. 15. Peters won the VC two years later during Operation Torch, but was killed in an air crash shortly afterwards.
25. For more on Paterson, see Cyril Cuningham, Beaulieu: The Finishing School for Secret Agents, Leo Cooper, 1998, p. 53.
26. Costello, pp. 383-5, argues that Harris was also a Soviet penetration agent. Enriqueta Frankfort wrote to the author about Burgess, 29 December 1998, ‘I trust you will understand when I say I have no wish to remember him.’
27. Driberg, p. 58.
28. Philby, My Secret War, p. 17.
29. Cowan, unpublished memoir, p. 13, Imperial War Museum, 07/25/1, catalogue number 15684.
30. Philby, My Secret War, p. 13. D/U was the training sub-section of Section D. Peters was D/US, Barcroft D/US.1 and Philby in fact D/UD. Information kindly supplied by Mark Seaman from a note dated 28 July 1940. The Dud appears to have been Burgess. Philby later wrote ‘there was a sad discrepancy between the size of his ideas and his efforts towards implementing them.’ TNA, KV2/4102, Philby unpublished memoir.
31. Driberg, p. 58.
32. George Hill, Reminiscences of Four Years with the NKVD, private publication, 1968, Hoover Institution Archives, p. 2.
33. TNA, HS7/3, pp. 21-2.
34. Philby, My Secret War, pp. 18-19.
35. IWM 14093, unpublished memoir, No Pipes or Drums, p. 53.
36. John Mather and Donald Seaman, ‘The Great Spy Scandal’, Daily Express, 1955, pp. 27-8.
37. Nottingham Evening Post, 10 September 1940.
38. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 154.
39 TNA, FCO 158/9 Note from Selborne 12th April 1956.
15. Bentinck Street
1. ‘Flat – I’m still between Chester & Bentinck & unsettled’. 29 April 1941, Pollock letters. There’s no evidence he had been living in the interim in Eaton Square, as claimed by Leitch, p. 174.
2. Penrose, p. 255.
3. Gale Pollock interview, 8 August 1998; Peter Pollock to the author, 3 July 1998.
4. Guy Burgess to Peter Pollock, postmarked London, 1 September 1941, Pollock letters.
5. Clarissa Churchill’s presence according to Peter Pollock tape, by kind permission of Miranda Carter. Muggeridge gives a vivid description of Burgess and Bentinck Street in his memoirs, written in the 1970s, but judging from his own diary entry for 7 February 1948, he only met Burgess after the war. ‘Present: character called Burgess (Foreign Office). Burgess lamentable character, very left-wing, obviously seeking to climb on the Socialist bandwagon. Long, tedious, rather acrimonious argument.’ Malcolm Muggeridge, Like it Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, Collins, 1981.
6. Hugh Thomas, John Strachey, Eyre Methuen, 1973, p. 202.
7. Holzman, p. 142.
8. Penrose, p. 256.
9. Ibid., p. 258.
10. Ibid., p. 257.
11. In his 5 March 1984 interview Hewit claimed it was Blunt who had slept with both Pat and her future husband Llewellyn Davies. Hewit manuscript.
12. Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, undated.
13. Ibid., Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 23 December 1940.
14. Ibid., undated. Aileen Furse would give birth to Philby’s first child Josephine in 1941. Burgess was one of the godfathers.
15. Ibid., Burgess to Pollock, undated.
16. Hewit interviews, quoted Costello, p. 391.
17. Pollock Letters, Burgess to Pollock, undated.
18. Clarissa Churchill interview, 28 January 2015.
19. Robin Bryans, Let the Petals Fall, Honeyford Press, 1993, p. 22.
20. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 155.
21. Mary Hardy, email to author, 25 May 2015.
22. Interviews with Mary Hardy, 13 May and 23 May 2015. Elaine may have been Elaine Finlay, previously a saleswoman for a clothing firm but in 1951 working for the Board of Trade, whom Burgess had met through David Footman and the subject of an MI5 investigation. She later married a barrister Cecil Binney.
23. Pollock letters. Burgess to Pollock, 17 April 1941. The following week he confessed to Pollock, writing on the notepaper of the Union Club in Carlton House Terrace but from 5 Bentinck Street, to having stolen ‘a Rolls-Royce out of a shop during the last blitz. There’s looting.’ Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 24 April 1941.
24. Ibid., undated 1941.
25. Ibid., postmarked 29 April 1941.
26. Ibid., postmarked London, 4 June 1941.
27. Pollock to the author, undated 1998.
28. Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, postmarked London, 19 July 1941.
29. Ibid., postmarked London, 1 September 1941. Burgess’s wide circle of acquaintances can also be glimpsed through Nicolson’s diaries, such as an evening with Augustus John in July 1942 and dinner at the Reform Club with William Beveridge, whose report on post-war welfare was published the following month.
30. Ibid., postmarked 1 December 1941. Pollock’s useful work for MI5 is outlined in a future chapter.
31. Harold Nicolson, Diary, Balliol, 21 July 1941.
32. Harold Nicolson, Vita & Harold, Weidenfeld, 1992, p. 340.
33. Pollock letters, Tom Wylie to Pollock, 8 July, 1941; ibid., Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 20 September 1942.
34. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, Very Little Luggage.
35. Private collection. Philip Jacobson to Phillip Knightley, 16 November 1968.
36. Interview with Virginia Bath, 22 August 1998.
37. Private information and Michael Luke, David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, p. 177. The building is now the Comedy Club.
1. BBC Written Archives, L1/8/1, Barnes memo, 20 January 1941.
2. Ibid., Baker to Charles, 15 January 1941.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., General Establishment Officer to Burgess, 20 January 1941.
5. Aileen Furse had first broadcast in August 1938 on ‘Welfare Work in a London Store’.
6. BBC Written Archives, R51/63/3, Talks: Can I Help You? File 1C 1941. According to Modin, p. 86 he requested an interview with Churchill, the Prime Minister called him in and they discussed it at length, but it never happened for technical reasons. This however may be the wartime meeting to which Green refers.
7. CUL, Add 9429/1G/283. John Green to Andrew Boyle, 31 July 1980.
8. Philip Hunt, who interviewed Eric Fenn in 1994, to author, 23 July 1998. The story also appears in Kenneth Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation 1922-1956, SCM Press, 1984, p. 585.
9. Eric Fenn, unpublished memoir, chapter VIII, ‘The BBC in Wartime’, p. 123, by kind permission of Sir Nicholas Fenn.
10. Philip Hunt to the author, 23 July 1998.
11. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, 30 May 1941.
12. Ibid., H.A. Pattinson to R.S. Stafford, 29 May 1941.
13. Ibid., 31 May 1941.
14. Ibid., 4 June 1941.
15. Ibid., 9 June 1941.
16. Ibid., Projection of Europe to the Home Country, 7 June 1941.
17. BBC Written Archives Centre, R51/520/1, Draft Suggestions for Talks on Russia, 15 July 1941.
18. Ibid. He later confessed to the writer Anthony Glees that he had been a Soviet agent.
19. See TNA, KV2/2156.
17. MI5 Agent Handler
1. Proctor invited Blunt and Burgess to dinner shortly after Blunt joined Military Intelligence. The writer Anthony Powell was another guest, but was distinctly unimpressed by Burgess, who arrived late, confiding to his diary on 4 October 1939, ‘A BBC fairy of the fat go-getting sort. Absolutely nauseating .’Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling, Penguin edition, 1983, p. 168.
2. Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 272.
3. Burgess was an MI5 agent until 1946 but failed to secure a job with the organisation at the end of the war. TNA, KV2/4103. Donald Maclean’s sister Nancy also worked for MI5. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, now in Churchill College, Cambridge, Burgess tried to recruit a counter-intelligence officer, who refused but through friendship did not report the approach.
4. Andrew, Defence of Realm, p. 270. Nigel, later the regional security liaison officer for East Anglia, remained in MI5 until 1947, until forced out by cuts, but maintained his links with MI5.
5. Interview with Kemball Johnston, 8 July 1984.
6. Hewit interview, August 1985.
7. Mitrokhin, p. 110.
8. Ibid. Revai after the war set up the Pallas Gallery, which specialised in reproductions by well-known artists.
9. Ibid., p. 120.
10. John Costello, Deadly Illusions, p. 242.
11. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 163.
12. TNA, HO334/138/6048.
13. Peter Pollock, letter to the author, 17 November 1998.
14. Modin, p. 87. Proctor’s wife Barbara has rebutted many of the accusations made against her husband in a letter to Phillip Knightley, 17 February 1983, National Library of Australia, Richard Hall Papers, series 32, folder 45.
15. Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984, p. 386.
16. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 160.
17. Ibid., p. 161.
18. Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 837.
19. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 163.
18. Propagandist
1. BBC Written Archives, R51/115/1, Week in Westminster, 14 September 1941. See W.J. West, The Truth About Hollis, Duckworth, 1989, p. 77.
2. Sunday Graphic, 17 June 1951.
3. Interview with Leonard Miall, 17 February 1999.
4. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, Barnes to Burgess, 13 December 1941.
5. Ibid., Barnes to Burgess, 2 September 1942. Blunt had been instrumental in keeping Burgess at the BBC partly because it saved him from being called up and partly because it suited MI5’s purposes. He told Guy Liddell ‘the reason for wanting to see Macconochie at this particular stage was that a re-arrangement of duties was contemplated in the BBC, which might have deprived Burgess of the direction of a particular series of talks which put him in a very useful position from our point of view.’ 30th April 1943, TNA, KV2/4101.
6. Ibid., Week in Westminster, 1 February 1942.
7. Nicolson Diaries, 3 June 1942. Burgess and Blair sometimes worked together. See W.J. West, Orwell: The War Broadcasts, BBC Books, 1985, p. 34.
8. Nicolson, Diary, 9 September 1942 and Holzman, p. 190.
9. TNA, INF1/147, Smollett to Atkins, 2 August 1942.
10. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 269.
11. There is, however, no reliable evidence Henri ‘helped to recruit Burgess in 1933’ and ‘had talent-spotted for the KGB at Cambridge in the 1930s, as Christopher Andrew claims, KGB, p. 154.
12. BBC Written Archives, R Cont, Harold Nicolson, Nicolson to Maconachie, 5 June 1942.
13. Donald Gillies, Radical Diplomat: The life of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, 1882-1951, I.B. Tauris, 1999, p. 140.
14. Jack Hewit interview, 1984.
15. Burgess’s use of the programme on behalf of his Soviet masters is covered in more detail in W.J. West, The Truth about Hollis, chapter 8.
16. BBC Written Archives, RCont 1, John Hilton, 20 August 1942.
17. BBC Written Archives, RS1/401, RCont, Talks Policy: John Hilton’s successor 1943-4, 31 August 1942. According to Micky Burn, Burgess pimped boys for Sparrow, a Fellow of All Souls. Burgess was still putting Pollock forward the following September.
18. Ibid.
19. CUL 3841, Maurice Webb interview. In 1955 Webb claimed that he had been responsible for Burgess’s removal from the BBC in 1944 but, if so, there is no evidence in the BBC archives and it seems unlikely Burgess would have then been taken on by the Foreign Office even as a temporary employee. However W.J. West, The Truth about Hollis, pp. 111-12, argues that there is truth in Webb’s claims.
20. BBC Written Archives, RS1/115/3, Talks: Current Affairs: Week in Westminster, File 2a, 1943-4.
21. Ibid., 4 November 1943.
22. Ibid., Week in Westminster, 6 November 1943.
23. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, George Barnes, 27 December 1942.
24. Ibid., O. Thompson, AA Talks to A(H), 2 January 1943. The distance from Bentinck Street to the BBC was half a mile.
25. Ibid., 11 January 1943. The man Burgess had been meeting was Collin Brooks, the editor of Truth, a paper that specialised in exposing political and social scandals and had been controlled by Joseph Ball since 1936. Brooks, who had worked for the press baron Lord Rothermere throughout the 1930s, was an important Burgess target – the Russians were interested in Rothermere and his links with the Germans – they often dined together throughout the war and Burgess had taken Brooks to see the occultist Aleister Crowley.
26. Ibid., Guy Burgess and the Week in Westminster, 20 April, 1943. Many of Burgess’s contacts came through membership of the Shanghai Club, an informal dining club, which met every Tuesday to discuss politics and was composed of young, left-wing journalists as well as David Astor, George Orwell, John Strachey and Peter Smollett. Along with David Footman, he was also a member of the Thursday Dining Club which included representatives of émigré governments in London and of the Allied governments including members of the Soviet Embassy. TNA, KV2/4105.
27. Ibid., Guy Burgess and the Week in Westminster, 20 April 1943.
28. Ibid., 4 November 1943.
29. Ibid., Mr Burgess First Class Travel, 4 November 1943.
30. Ibid., Burgess to Director of Talks, 3 December 1943.
31. Ibid., 3 December 1943.
32. W.J. West, The Truth About Hollis, p. 112.
33. BBC Written Archives, L1/68/1, Foot to Cadogan, 27 March 1944.
34. Ibid., 29 March 1944.
35. Ibid., Burgess to Barnes, 31 March 1944.
36. Ibid., Maconachie to Foot, 1 April 1944.
19. The News Department
1. Alan Maclean, No I Tell a Lie, It was the Tuesday … A Trudge Through His Life and Times, Kyle Cathie, 1998, pp. 68-9.
2. Ibid., p. 69.
3. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 160.
4. Interview with W.B. Hermondhalgh, 19 February 1998.
5. Richard Boston, Osbert: Portrait of Osbert Lancaster, HarperCollins, 1989, p. 119.
6. Guardian Archives, OHP/79/1. Interview with Richard Scott.
7. Quoted Holzman, pp. 198-9. It’s a good story, but Alan Maclean claimed the department saw confidential but not top secret telegrams.
8. Interview with Alan Maclean, 22 October 1998.
9. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 172.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Mitrokhin, p. 167.
13. 26 February 1945, Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Diaries and Letters 1939-1945, Collins, 1966, p. 434.
14. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, pp. 172-3.
15. Ibid., p. 173.
16. Mitrokhin, p. 167.
17. 11 August 1945, TNA, CAB120/691/109040 /002. Authentification of the document was confirmed by Oleg Tsarev in a lecture in Moscow on 26 May 2003, which the author attended.
18. TNA, FO366/1739. Interviewed by MI5 in December 1952, Ridsdale claimed ‘Burgess was not a particularly good member of his Department. He was slovenly and irresponsible, and it was never possible to assign to him any task of importance. He had to rebuke Burgess on more than one occasion for his appearance and manners and it was curious that Burgess’s reaction was to cringe and be most apologetic afterwards’. Meeting Ridsdale at the Reform in May 1951, Burgess had asked if he could come back to the News Department. Ridsdale told him not to be a fool. TNA, KV2/4149.
19. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, Random House, 1999, p. 210.
20. Christopher Andrew, Defence of Realm, p. 344, says Volkov claimed there were two Soviet agents in the British Foreign Office and seven ‘inside the British intelligence system’ including one ‘fulfilling the function of head of a section of British counter-espionage in London’. I am grateful to Nigel West for providing the original Volkov list which reads: ‘List of employees of military and civilian intelligence services of Great Britain known to NKGB. List includes about 250 official and secret employees of mentioned service of whom there are descriptions.’ As part of their damage control, the Soviets decided to concentrate on their two most important British agents Philby and Burgess. Burgess’s cover name in the VENONA traffic was Khiks. Herbert Romerstein and Eric Brandel, The Venona Secrets, Regnery, 2000, p. 14. More details of Volkov’s interrogations can be found in TNA, FCO 158/193.
20. Relationships
1. Interview with Gale Pollock, 8 August 1996. Burgess to Pollock in Stalag VII, postmarked 24 May 1944. Uncle Harry, with Redgrave playing alongside his wife Rachel Kempson, was at the Garrick Theatre.
2. Pollock obituary, The Independent, 12 September 2001.
3. Interview with Mrs Green, 11 May 2009.
4. Interview with Fanny Carby, 17 October 1998.
5. Pollock taped interview, by kind permission of Miranda Carter.
6. Leitch, p. 183.
7. Interview with Peter Pollock, April 1998.
8. Pollock Letters, Brian Howard to Pollock, c/o Kessler at Dorchester Hotel, postmarked 4 October 1945.
9. Ibid., 21 October 1945.
10. Ibid., Burgess to Pollock, postmarked London, 15 December 1945.
11. Interview with Noel Annan, 10 April 1987.
12. Hugh Trevor-Roper, New York Review of Books, 31 March 1983.
13. Modin, p. 68.
14. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 133-4.
15. Ibid., pp. 140–1.
16. Lancaster, p. 490.
17. Electoral Roll 1945. He was introduced to the landlord through David Footman. In December 1945 and after Medway Street, he briefly stayed with Blunt and Philby. Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 17 December 1945.
18. Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 11 July 1946. Hope Wallace was a gay, hard-drinking music and theatre critic who claimed, for which there is no evidence, to have been on holiday in Italy with Burgess just before he fled. Guardian archives, OHP/69/1.
19. Ibid., 30 August 1946. Sir John Philipps (1915-48) divided his time between Picton Castle in Wales and a flat in Albany – Burgess was a regular visitor at both. A friend of Brian Howard from Oxford, Philipps was known for his parties and collections of pornography. He accidentally drowned in his bath.
20. Ibid.
21. Back at the Centre of Power
1. Harold Nicolson, Diary, Balliol, 19 December 1946.
2. Interview with Norman Reddaway, 23 January 1999.
3. Interview with Lord Thurlow, 21 January 1999.
4. Russian archives, Burgess’s handwritten report.
5. Modin, pp. 130-1.
6. Boyle, p. 280.
7. Driberg, p. 62.
8. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 168-9.
9. Chapter of Accidents, original typescript, p. 40.
10. Boyle, p. 282.
11. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 177.
12. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 170.
13. Boyle, p. 282. See also Chapter of Accidents, pp. 170-1.
14. During previous occasions when the Russians had had to suspend operations with the Cambridge Ring, Blunt had acted as go-between for Burgess and Philby and he continued in such a role between June and October 1947 and February and March 1948, when contact was broken again. His role involved photocopying Foreign Office documents from Burgess, where he became adept with a second-hand Leica in his room at the Courtauld.
15. See ‘The Russia Committee of the British Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1946-7’, Ray Merrick, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, July 1985, pp. 453-68.
16. Playfair often met Burgess at the Reform Club. He later claimed, ‘I never sought his company because I rather disliked him for all the usual reasons and did not share his politics, but above all because I thought him a frightful bore … I am surprised that you find the material for a serious book centering on the life of anyone so evidently frivolous.’ Letter, Edward Playfair to the author, 22 September 1998. Playfair, later the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, was interviewed by MI5 in the 1970s but cleared.
17. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 175.
18. Leven, IWM 05/59/1.
19. Ibid.
20. Driberg, p. 71.
21. Fred Warner interview, quoted Boyle, p. 283.
22. Boyle, p. 283.
23. Patrick Reilly, Bodleian Library MS, England 6920.
24. Mitrokhin, p. 186.
25. Boyle, p. 284.
26. TNA, CSC 11/38 Z172650.
27. TNA, PREM 8/1524.
22. Russian Controls
1. Modin, pp. 150–1.
2. Ibid., p. 151.
3. Ibid., p. 152.
4. Ibid., pp. 152-3.
5. Ibid., p. 152.
6. Ibid., p. 153.
7. Ibid., p. 154.
8. Perry, Fifth Man, p. 62.
9. Ibid., p. 169.
10. Modin, p. 155.
11. Ibid., p. 156.
12. Driberg, p. 80.
13. Ibid., p. 71.
14. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 164.
15. Robin Maugham, Escape From the Shadows, Hodder & Stoughton, 1972, p. 173; Sunday People, 15 March 1970. Burgess introduced Maugham to one of his lovers, ‘Kurt’, actually Jorgen Klixbull, a former member of the Danish Underground who later served with the British army, and allowed them to use his New Bond Street flat for assignations, which gave him a hold over Maugham.
23. Settling Down
1. Burgess to Pollock, undated, Pollock Letters.
2. Peter Parker, Isherwood, Picador, 2004, p. 404.
3. Leitch, p. 166.
4. Interview with Richard Scott, Guardian Archives, OHP/79/1.
5. Hewit, unpublished memoir. The harmonium had been recovered from a bomb-damaged house and Burgess had carried it on his back. Boyle, p. 335.
6. Hewit, quoted Leitch, p. 160.
7. Empire News, 25 September 1955.
8. Interview with Micky Burn, 15 August 1998 and Burn, p. 202.
9. Interview with Micky Burn, 15 August 1998.
10. Interview with Dadie Rylands, 1999.
11. Interview with Tony Burgess, 31 July 2012.
12. Jenny Rees to author, 17 May 2015.
13. Chapter of Accidents, p. 174.
14. Hartwell to Boyle, 21 September 1977, Add 9429/1G/115. Berry’s Party Choice: The Real Issue Between Parties was published in 1948. See also ‘When I shared a taxi with Guy Burgess and his apprentice fiancée, dropping him at his flat, he did not ask me up.’ Hartwell to Boyle, 5 August 977, Boyle Papers, Add 9429/1G/112; cf. Boyle, p. 335.
15. Interview with Nigel Burgess, 16 October 1985.
16. Interviews with Nigel Burgess, 21 January 1986; Dadie Rylands, 1998; Fanny Carby, 17 October 1998. Jack Hewit in his unpublished memoir also writes that Clarissa Churchill was engaged to Guy.
17. Peter Wright, Spycatcher, Viking, 1987, pp. 242-3. Rees told MI5’s Ronnie Reed ‘that at one time Burgess was having an affair with Clarissa Churchill, now Lady Eden. I said I was well aware of this and that I agreed that it was a dangerous matter. I did not however know to what extent it was true and to what extent one could believe Burgess’s claims. Rees also professed himself to be unable to shed any light upon this.’ TNA, KV2/4113 15th March 1956. Burgess wrote to his mother on 9th March 1956 ‘Talking of girlfriends, I wonder what would happen if I sent my congratulations to Clarissa on her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden? The same of course applies to Esther – who I really should have married. Perhaps if she comes here with you we may change our minds – unless she’s found someone, not better, but else. I hope she has.’ TNA, KV2/4114.
18. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 175.
19. Michael Burn, The Debatable Land, p. 234.
20. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 176.
24. The Information Research Department
1. TNA, FO366/2759.
2. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive 12566, Reel 2, Christopher Mayhew interview, 1992, and Christopher Mayhew, Time to Explain, Hutchinson, 1987, p. 109. Email Gill Bennett to Andrew Lownie 17th December 2015.
3. Interview with Hugh Lunghi, 25 January 1999.
4. Mayhew, quoted Penrose, p. 323. See also Reel 2, Christopher Mayhew interview, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive 12566.
5. FO371/68068 A AN1614 TNA.
6. Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-1958: The Information Research Department, Frank Cass, 2003, p. 76.
7. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 177 and Driberg, p. 78.
8. Interview with Ronald Grierson, 27 July 2009. Cf. Ronald Grierson, A Truant Disposition, Weidenfeld, 1992, p. 20.
9. Rosemary Say and Noel Holland, Rosie’s War, Michael O’Mara, 2011, pp. 272-3.
10. Interview with Michael Alexander, 7 September 1998.
11. Henry Brandon, Special Relationships, Atheneum, 1988, p. 49.
12. Ibid.
13. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 178.
14. See TNA, FO371/70486, especially 16, 22 and 26 June 1948.
15. TNA, FO371/70486.
16. Driberg, pp. 72-3.
17. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 178.
18. Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace & War, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, p. 117.
19. Tim Milne, Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB Master Spy, Biteback, 2014, pp. 171-2.
20. Ibid., pp. 173-4.
21. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p. 192. Philby later remembered how Burgess showed considerable interest in Esther and ‘speculated freely about her feelings for him. At the time, I took this for another flight of fantasy on his part and paid little attention to it.’ TNA, KV2/4102 Philby unpublished memoir.
22. Milne, pp. 171-2. Burgess refers to the episode in an undated letter written to Harold Nicolson from Moscow, where he says he dove ‘from my bedroom window on the first floor … nearly breaking my neck by hitting a dolphin’.
23. Ibid., p. 173.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., pp. 173-4.
25. The Far East Department
1. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 178. Sir Esler Dening was the Under-Secretary responsible for the department.
2. Ibid., p. 179.
3. Margaret Anstee, Never Learn to Type, Wiley, 2003, p. 81.
4. Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess, pp. 80–1.
5. Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, The Missing Dimension, p. 189.
6. TNA, FO371/75747; cf. TNA, FO371/75749, 23 April 1949 minute on Chinese response.
7. Peter Hennessy and Kathleen Townsend, The Documentary Spoor of Burgess and Maclean, Intelligence and National Security, April 1987, p. 292.
8. TNA, FO371/75766, 26 May 1949.
9. Ibid.
10. Christopher Baxter, The Great Power Struggle in East Asia, 1944-50: Britain, America and Post-War Rivalry, Palgrave, 2009, p. 148.
11. Penrose, p. 324.
12. Liddell, Diary, 9 August 1949. Interview with Bill Freedman.
13. TNA, FO371/83315.
26. Disciplinary Action
1. Maugham Papers, Indiana University, Harold Nicolson to Robin Maugham, 14 February 1949. I am grateful to Selina Hastings for alerting me to this. In fact it was St Mary’s not the Middlesex. Warner gave a different account to Boyle claiming by chance he came across Burgess after the accident, while looking in at the club to make sure Guy was OK, Boyle, pp. 318-19, but Hewit confirms the Maugham version, Leitch, p. 164.
2. Irish Times, 31 October 1967.
3. Terence de Vere White, A Fretful Midge, Routledge, 1959, p. 163.
4. Dublin Evening Mail, 4 March 1949.
5. Dublin Evening Herald, 4 March 1949; cf. London Evening Standard, 5 March 1949. Michael Killanin reviewing Michael Straight’s autobiography gives a slightly garbled version with the wrong date. ‘The last time I saw him was in Stephen’s Green in 1951, when he was rolling down the street fairly late at night. He recognised me and I walked him back to the Shelbourne Hotel, where he was staying with his mother. She explained that he had had a nervous breakdown and was just recovering. Not knowing what to do with a drunk, I gave him another drink. Soon afterwards, in a Dublin evening paper, I read that a civil servant named Burgess had been in a car crash in O’Connell Street. He was whisked out of the country by the British embassy, and the next I heard was of his departure to the Soviet Union with Donald Maclean later that year.’ He continued that he thought of all the Cambridge Spies, Burgess was ‘the most important and dangerous. I never found him the Adonis he is frequently described as, but rather a grubby, chain-smoking alcoholic with black fingernails and a chip on his shoulder dating from the days at Eton when he was in the Sixth Form but was not elected to the Eton Society [Pop], the self-elected prefects of the school …’ ‘Voice of a Generation’, Irish Times, 5 March 1983. According to Modin, in August 1949, ‘while drunk and driving through a village in Ireland, he ran over and killed a pedestrian. His passenger, another Intelligence man, ended up badly injured and in hospital. Perry, Fifth Man, p. 169. There was a fatal collision in Dublin reported alongside Burgess’s accident in March 1949 and the two may have been confused. James Liddy, The Doctor’s House, Salmon Press, 2004, p. 37, describes Burgess being drunk on his trip to Arklow.
6. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 182.
7. How Do You Do, Dil Rohan, unpublished memoir, pp. 259-60. Greaves was a homosexual Australian journalist, a long-time Tangier-based stringer for Express newspapers with close links to British intelligence, and figures as the MI6 head of station in Tangier in Roger Croft’s novel The Wayward Spy.
8. Security Service archives, quoted Defence of Realm, p. 422. See also Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 180. It’s thought Greaves also complained.
9. See TNA, KV2/98.
10. Guy Liddell, Diary, 23 January 1950.
11. Ibid., 17 February 1950.
12. Macmillan in debate, 7 November 1955, Hansard.
13. Chapman Pincher later claimed Burgess ‘had been under deep suspicion before the Foreign Office made the blunder of posting him to the British Embassy in Washington. While I was shooting in North Yorkshire, one of the guns, whom I had never met before, described how, as a young Army officer, he had been transferred against his will, to a post specially created for the purpose so that he could keep Burgess under surveillance, which he did for several months.’ Chapman Pincher, Pastoral Symphony, Swan Hill Press, 1993, p. 46. The family of the army officer, Richard Birch-Reynardson, then in his mid-twenties, said they had no knowledge of this role, but he did serve in Washington at the right time.
14. Penrose, p. 326. Valentine Vivian wrote to Carey Foster on 19th January 1950 ‘We both agree that Burgess is not only an exceptional character but a very difficult problem. His knowledge both of MI5 and SIS, where he has numerous friends, is though perfectly legitimate, quite extensive. I do also understand that he has influential friends on high levels in the Foreign Office.’ TNA, KV2/4101.
15. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 181.
16. Ibid., p. 180.
17. Harold Nicolson, Diary, 24 January 1950.
18. Harold Nicolson, Diaries 1945-62, p. 184.
19. Nigel West, Crown Jewels, p. 184
20. Anthony Purdy and Douglas Sutherland, Burgess & Maclean, Secker & Warburg, 1963, p. 91.
21. Leven, IWM 05/59/1.
22. Fanny Carby interview, 17 October 1998.
23. TNA KV2/4101.
24. TNA, PREM 8/1524.
25. Hewit, unpublished memoir.
26. Bernard Burrows, Diplomat in a Changing World, The Memoir Club, 2001, p. 59. Burrows was a year ahead of Burgess at Eton. ‘I am not in favour of a biography of Guy Burgess being written and therefore regret that I am unable to help you.’ Letter from Burrows to author, 9 April 1999.
27. Robert Mackenzie interview, quoted Boyle, p. 352.
28. Fred was Anthony Blunt.
29. TNA, KV2/981, MI5 Papers Note from B Division section B2a to Mr B. A. Hill, 15 August 1950.
30. Hewit, unpublished memoir. Timing from Isaiah Berlin’s invitation card.
31. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 189.
32. Hewit, unpublished memoir. According to Douglas Sutherland, who knew Burgess and heard it from Rees, the man in the bottle incident was Peter Wilson, later chairman of Sotheby’s, and the writer was Harold Nicolson. Douglas Sutherland, Portrait of a Decade: London Life 1945-1955, Harrap, 1988, p. 186.
33. Hewit, unpublished memoir; cf. Boyle, pp. 352-3. Robeson was a black, homosexual communist actor.
27. Washington
1. Seale, p. 208.
2. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 195. Philby later wrote in an unpublished memoir ‘my wife found him a source of such constant irritation that I was forced, about Christmas or the New Year, to ask him to hurry in his search for alternative accommodation. He undertook to do so, and, after some delay, found a flat in Georgetown, for which he signed a contract with some effect from April 1st’ TNA, KV2/4102. In the end Burgess was recalled before he could move.
3. Undated Pollock letters.
4. ‘A Master Spy’s Son’, Daily Mail, 3 January 1998.
5. Nancy McDonald Hervey to the author, 25 February 2012.
6. Francis Thompson, Destination Washington, Robert Hale, 1960, p. 208.
7. Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends, Bloomsbury, 2014, says he was the Information Officer, p. 142, but provides no evidence and it is not supported by any official documentation. The Information Officer as second secretary was Howard Smith, later Director General of MI5, 1978-81. Burgess’s biographical entry in the Foreign Office List has him as a second secretary in the embassy, but he is not listed on the embassy roll call.
8. Denis Greenhill, More By Accident, privately published 1992, p. 73, and article draft TNA, FCO12/209.
9. According to Driberg, p. 83, ‘He was also required to concern himself with Middle Eastern affairs.’ The move to the Middle East section at the end of 1950 is supported by Burgess’s personnel file, which also says he was ‘reporting on United States internal politics’.
10. TNA, FO115/4483.
11. FBI interviews, 2/9, p. 77, Burfile 100-374183 sec 5/6.
12. FBI files, 100-374183, interview 14 July 1951.
13. Holzman, p. 318.
14. Greenhill, p. 73.
15. The Times, 7 September 1977. Copies of the original article and correspondence with the Foreign Office about publication can be found at TNA, FCO12/209.
16. Michael Marten, Tim Marten: Memories, Lulu Enterprises, 2010, p. 139.
17. Ibid., p. 129.
18 TNA, FCO 158/29 Philby unpublished memoir p.8.
19. Guy Burgess to Peter Pollock, undated, Pollock Letters.
20. FBI file, bufile 100-374183, p. 158.
21. Ibid., 2/42, pp. 88-9.
22. Driberg, p. 77.
23. One of the people the FBI interviewed said he had met Burgess there in early September 1950 and he claimed to be working with Jebb at the United Nations.
24. FBI interview with Valentine Lawford and interview with Costello, p. 538.
25. Newton, p. 281.
26. More details on Makayev can be found, Mitrokhin, p. 205.
27. Martin Young to the author, 4 September 2000. Members of the embassy took turns to take the fortnightly diplomatic bag to Cuba, as the King’s Messengers only worked on a monthly rotation.
28. Martin Young to the author, 4 September 2000.
29. Interview with Stanley Weiss, 17 June 2015.
30. Brandon, pp. 109-10.
31. Two years before, Welles had been found semi-conscious in a field near his baronial 500-acre estate, Oxon Hill Manor, 10 miles south of Washington, his fingers and toes frozen by seven hours’ exposure in 15° temperature, and his clothes, covered with mud and sand, were frozen to his body. It was assumed to have been some sort of homosexual encounter that had gone wrong.
32. Michael Berry, Lord Hartwell, to the author, 2 July 1998.
33. Newton, p. 312.
34. CUL, Boyle Papers, Michael Berry to Boyle, 27 April 1977.
35. David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, Collins, 1980, p. 53.
36. FBI files, interview with Jim Angleton.
28. Disgrace
1. Wilfred Mann, Was There a Fifth Man?, Pergamon Press, 1982, pp. 82-5. Accounts that he drew her with skirts hitched up and her naked pudenda showing are fanciful.
2. Ibid., p. 83. Newton, pp. 301-11.
3. Newton, p. 311.
4. Mann, p. 84. Holzman, p. 326, says Mann is the only witness to this scene and speculates that it is made up. Philby noted in his unpublished memoir ‘Guy’s misfortune was that however extravagant and noisy the company in which he found himself, there always lurked just below the skin an urge to commit that final outrage, the outrage that shocked and repulsed … on such occasions there was little to be done save try to limit the repercussions.’ TNA, FCO 158/29 p.4.
5. Boyle, pp. 308-9. Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, The CIA & the Craft of Counterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 167.
6. Ibid., p. 310.
7. Bodleian Library, MS England, c.6920, Maclean: Burgess: Philby, p. 230. Reilly described Mann as ‘an atomic spy’, MS, Eng c. 6932, folio 57. A colleague of Mann, Arnold Kramish, ‘nearly encountered’ Burgess ‘several times at Wilfrid Mann’s home’, suggesting the relationship was closer than Mann has claimed. Arnold Kramish, email to the author, 17 June 2003.
8. Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, Scarecow Press, 2014 pp 363-364; Jerry Dan, Ultimate Deception: How Stalin Stole the Bomb, Rare Books & Barry, 2003.
9. The CIA was not apprised of VENONA until 1952 although, according to CIA historian Hayden Peake, Harvey may have informed the CIA after he joined the agency in 1947.
10. Homer was identified because the cable revealed he was travelling to see his pregnant wife in New York. The identifying signal can be found at: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/venona/1944/28jun_kgb_mtg_donald_maclean.pdf.
11. In fact there had already been a warning, as Patrick Reilly noted in his memoirs. A Foreign Office employee Patience Maitland-Addison, who had served in MI5, ‘felt bound to report to Robin Hooper, who had also been in Paris and who had now succeeded Middleton in the Personnel Department, that at a party in the early hours of the morning Maclean, by then drunk, had declared inter alia “I am the English Alger Hiss”. Hooper had minuted this letter to Ashley Clarke, “It seems that Donald is up to his old tricks” and left it at that. This was alas typical of the way Maclean’s case was handled by the Foreign Office Administration.’ Bodleian, MS England, 6920, p. 239.
12. Seale, p. 211.
13. Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 16 January 1951.
14. Driberg Papers, Christ Church, Burgess interview with Tom Driberg.
15. FBI, bufile 100-374183, interview, 14 July 1951.
16. Ibid.
17. TNA, FCO 158/29 Philby unpublished memoir pp16-17.
18. Patsy Jellicoe interview, 1 November 2003. Amongst those he propositioned was Stewart Rockwell, the political adviser to the US Delegation to the UN General Assembly.
19. TNA, KV2/4102 Philby unpublished memoir. The proposal seems to have been made by 29th January 1951 when Eve Bassett wrote to her son ‘I have not said anything about your marriage, it so hard really to write anything and I feel inclined to shelve it till I see you. I had such a very nice letter from Esther, so I really can’t shelve it, as hers must be answered, though a very difficult letter to write. You say nothing more about the apartment you thought of taking.’ TNA, KV2/4103. From Moscow Burgess would write to his mother of Esther ‘I really should have married. Perhaps if she comes here with you we may change our minds – unless she’s found someone, not better, but else. I hope she has. She deserves it.’ TNA, FCO 158/10, Guy Burgess to Eve Bassett March 1956.
20. Interview with Alan Davidson, 7 April 1999.
29. Sent Home
1. In his FBI interviews on 13 and 19 June 1951, Turck claimed he had been picked up at 10 a.m. at Fredericksburg in Virginia, but in his affidavit of 28 February 1951, Turck admitted he had known Burgess for some time. ‘I didn’t have anything to do for a couple of days and agreed to go with him on this trip.’ Turck had only just been released from prison the previous September on a rape charge changed to aggravated assault. TNA, KV2/4104.
2. Newton, p. 314. See also Turck statements, 13 June and 22 June, FBI vault 2/42, p. 4. Burgess later claimed he was insulted to be charged with driving at 80mph, ‘as I was doing over a hundred’. Driberg, p. 85.
3. FBI files, interview with Turck, 19 June 1951.
4. The keynote speaker at the conference was the Deputy Director of the Office of West European Affairs at the State Department, Dr Francis Williamson, who spoke on ‘The Problems of Europe in American Foreign Policy’. Other speakers included a second secretary from the French Embassy on ‘Indo-China and Problems of Asia’ and professors from Duke and Princeton.
5. The News and Courier, Charleston, 1 March 1951, quoted Holzman, p. 330.
6. Telephone interview with Colonel Loma Allen 7th March 2016.
7. There are some suggestions the speech was only delivered, not written by Burgess. FBI vault 2/42, p. 41.
8. Emily Whaley, Mrs Whaley & her Charleston Garden, Algonquin Books, 1997, p. 174.
9. US National Archives, 601.4111/3-1451, 14 March 1951.
10. FBI files, quoted Holzman, pp. 331-2.
11. US Archives, 601.4111/4-1851, 18 April, C.E. Steel to John Symonds. TNA, PREM 8/1524.
12. Greenhill, p. 75. Hewit writes in his unpublished manuscript, though perhaps wise after the event, ‘I remember one particular night when we had been out drinking, he said, “I don’t think I shall be there very long.” “What do you mean,” I asked. “Oh,” he said. “I’ll get myself made persona non grata.” “How?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I’ll get myself arrested or something.” I thought he was joking and so we drunkenly enlarged on this and invented several ways he might get himself arrested. One way we enlarged upon was that he should have himself arrested for speeding while drunk in the company of a black homosexual, preferably somewhere in the South.’ Robert Mackenzie told Carey Foster that one of the options might have been ‘a direct transfer to one of the smaller and less pleasant posts in Latin America’ TNA, FCO 158/20 22nd June 1951.
13. Robert Cecil, ‘The Cambridge Comintern’ in Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds.), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, Macmillan, 1984, p. 193.
14. Straight, pp. 249-50.
15. Ibid., p. 251. In his account to the FBI in 1963, ‘Straight told Burgess that he should get out of his employment with the British government within a period of three months and if he did not do so he, Straight, would go to the United States government and report the fact that Burgess was working for the British government and that he was a communist.’ FBI Files.
16. For accounts see Carter, pp. 339-40. John Blamey in his taped interview with Miranda Carter surmises that Straight was a closet gay.
17. Perry, p. 239.
18. Greenhill, p. 73.
19. Thompson, p. 213.
20. Pollock letters, Burgess to Pollock, postmarked 28 April.
21. Philby, My Silent War, p. 171.
22. Luker, FBI files, Philby 6c, pp. 36ff, quoted Holzman, p. 334.
23. Daily Mirror, 1 November 1952.
24. FBI files, interview, 15 August 1951, probably with Norman Luker.
30. Back in Britain
1. There is no mention of a Bernard Miller in the passenger manifest, but a fellow passenger was a Donald Maclean.
2. Modin, p. 201.
3. Interview with Jenny Rees, 1999.
4. See Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 197-201, for a full account of the visit.
5. Ibid., p. 199.
6. Ibid., p. 201, Rees was to recreate the visit in a screenplay Influence, which he wrote in the 1970s.
7. LSE archives, Morrison 8/5, Hannock to Morrison, 2 Sept 1955, and TNA, PREM 8/1524. Burgess career note, D.F. Muirhead, 1 June 1962, released under Internal Review FOI 0023-15, 6 May 2015 confirms.
8. Hewit, unpublished memoir. Burgess had arranged for Murray Gladstone, an Old Etonian homosexual friend working in the ‘Duty Free’ department of Selfridges, to take his place in the flat whilst he was away. The two had become friendly again in 1935 when Gladstone had offered Burgess the use for holidays of a nine ton ketch which Gladstone kept on the Essex Coast. TNA, KV2/4110, Murray Gladstone interview 23rd November 1953.
9. Cyril Connolly, ‘The Case of the Missing Diplomats’ in The Reporter, 23 December 1952, p. 28 and The Missing Diplomats, p. 32.
10. Quentin Bell, Elders and Betters, John Murray, 1995, p. 205.
11. Leven, IWM 05/59/1.
12. Timothy Johnston to the author, 22 April 1988. There is no evidence, as suggested by some spy writers, that Kemball Johnston was anything but a loyal British subject.
13. Hewit unpublished memoir.
14. Philosophy at Cambridge newsletter, Issue 6, May 2009.
15. Rees, Mr Nobody, p. 186.
16. Burgess was elected to the RAC in 1946. Club records show he resigned in November 1951. Driberg, pp. 93-4.
17. Bodleian, MS England, 6920, p. 241.
18. Ibid., p. 257.
19. Perry, Fifth Man, p. 190. The meeting was near the park lavatories by Ealing Common underground.
20. Robert Cecil, A Divided Life: A Biography of Donald Maclean, Bodley Head, 1988, p. 136.
21. Yuri Modin interview, October 2003.
22. Modin, p. 206.
23. Deadly Illusions, p. 338.
24. Security Service Archive, quoted Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 425. Chapman Pincher has claimed that seven other Britons were under surveillance at the same time: Blunt, Rees, Anthony Rumbold, David Footman, Philby, an unnamed MI6 officer, plus one other. Chapman Pincher, Traitors, Sidgwick, 1987, p. 243.
25. Bodleian, MS England, c.6932, Carey-Foster to Reilly, 18 November 1984, and interview with Bill Freedman.
26. Guy Liddell, Diary, Friday 18 May.
27. Tom Bower, Dick White: The Perfect English Spy; Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935-90, Heinemann, 1995, p. 110.
28. Bodleian, MS England, 6920, Patrick Reilly, p. 242.
31. The Final Week
1. TNA KV2/4132, Pollock interview 12th June 1951.
2. TNA, KV2/4102 Esther Whitfield to Guy Burgess 18th May 1951.
3. Hewit, unpublished memoir.
4. Guy Liddell, Diary, 30 May 1951.
5. Hewit, unpublished memoir. Barley Allison claimed to have dined with him at the Gargoyle that night, one of several people who later claimed to have had that pleasure in the final week, telling her he wanted to start a new life in the Middle East or North Africa. Luke, p. 194.
6. CUL, Add 9429/1G/411(ii), Robert Birley interview with Andrew Boyle, 18 April 1977.
7. After Burgess fled, police came to the house and tore out the page from the visitor’s book. Interview with the owner at the time, John Guest, 2 February 1999.
8. Interview with Fanny Carby, 17 October 1998.
9. Hewit, unpublished memoir.
10. Ibid.
11. Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden, a Biography, Allen and Unwin, 1981, p. 369.
12. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 205.
13. TNA, CAB 134/1325.
14. FBI files and Costello, pp. 550–1.
15. Connolly says blue jeans and gaudy collection of ties, whilst Penrose says Hewit’s overcoat, which Hewit recognised Burgess wearing in Russia.
16. Nigel West, Molehunt, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, p. 137 and Costello, p. 556. Russell Lee, who was the Director General Sir Percy Sillitoe’s personal assistant and was doing night duty, was emphatic MI5 knew of their escape on Friday evening. It was confirmed to Nigel West quite separately by Arthur Martin. E mail Nigel West to the author 4th January 2016. Candida Tobin in her autobiography Lifting the Lid, Helicon Press, 2003, pp. 72-3, claims she was invited by Jack Hewit, with whom she acted in the Kings Cross Players, to give a joint party that night. ‘I was to provide the food and he would provide the wine.’ When she turned up at Bond Street there was no answer. Later she rang and ‘Guy (I knew his voice) whispered crossly down the phone, “Jack’s not here. Don’t phone again.” He immediately put the phone down. That was the weekend Guy Burgess went missing …’
17. According to one contemporary account, a sixty-five-year-old London produce importer, William Lyons, reported a tall, clean-shaven man in a homburg and raincoat, had met the two men as they boarded, and escorted them to St Malo, returning to Britain. Mather, p. 68; More details, Donald Seaman to Donald McCormick, 20 January 1980, McCormick Papers.
32. The Bird Has Flown
1. Interview with Lady Williams, 27 January 2015. Churchill was only leader of the opposition – he would become Prime Minister in October – so it’s strange he should be informed. Jane, now Lady Williams, continued to work for Churchill until 1955 and according to her, contrary to accounts, Churchill was to take a close interest in the case, advised by his private secretary, John Colville – Burgess’s fellow member of the Trinity History Society.
2. Anthony Cavendish, Inside Intelligence, Collins, 1990, p. 62.
3. W.A.P. Manser, ‘Do You Want Me to Kill Him?’, Spectator, 20 May 1995.
4. Penrose, p. 354.
5. Interview with Mary Hardy, 23 May 2015.
6. Rees, Mr Nobody, p. 162; Cecil, p. 146.
7. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 208.
8. Cecil, p. 145.
9. FBI interview with Melinda Maclean, 2 September 1981.
10. Genrikh Borovik and Phillip Knightley (eds.), The Philby Files, Little Brown, 1994, pp. 279-80; Damaskin, pp. 192-3; Modin, p. 203.
11. Modin, p. 207.
12. FBI 1955 Summary Report on Burgess and Maclean, Oetking interview 24th June 1954, quoted Costello, p. 556 and TNA, KV2/4151.
13. Bodleian, MS England, c.6920, p. 243.
14. Bodleian, MS England, c.6932, Maclean: Burgess: Philby, p. 82.
15. Ibid.
16. Hewit, unpublished memoir,
17. Bower, pp. 116-17 and TNA, KV2/2588.
18. Penrose, p. 358, based on an interview with Rosamond Lehmann, 1985, but this may just have been mischief making on Blunt’s part.
19. Nigel West, MI5 1945-1972, Coronet edition, 1983, pp. 50-1; Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984, p. 394; Chapman Pincher, Their Trade is Treachery, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981, p. 142.
20. As Peter Benenson (his mother’s maiden name) he founded Amnesty International in 1961.
21. Wright, Spycatcher, pp. 173, 260. Incensed by the anti-Israeli tone of Philby’s articles for the Observer in 1962, she told Lord Rothschild about Philby’s confession to her and subsequently was interviewed by MI5, also naming Tomas Harris and Dennis Proctor as fellow recruits. The concrete evidence for Philby’s treachery had finally come from one of his oldest friends.
22. Pollock interview tape, by permission of Miranda Carter.
23. Bodleian, MS, c.6932, George Carey-Foster, ‘Notes on Patrick’s Maclean: Burgess: Philby’, p. 83.
24. Philby, p. 172. Borovik, p. 286, places it as Wednesday or Thursday, but that is too late.
25. Borovik, p. 287.
26. Newton, p. 333.
27. Interview with Bill Freedman, 1995.
28. Alan Pryce Jones to Boyle, 2 December 1979, Add 9429/1G/369. The dinner is perhaps most memorable as the occasion when John Betjeman and Lady Elizabeth Cavendish first met, which led to a love affair that continued until his death over thirty years later.
29. LSE Archives, Morrison 8/5.
30. Guy Liddell, Diary, 30 May 1951.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. TNA KV2/4114. Playfair was cleared but speculation about Zaehner, who spent a year at Cambridge and served as an MI6 officer in Tehran during the Second World War, continues. See Costello p.506.
34. Penrose, p. 356.
33. The Story Breaks
1. See Arthur Christiansen, Headlines All My Life, Harper & Brothers, 1961, pp. 263-9, for a full account.
2. Mather and Seaman, p. 87.
3. Harold Nicolson, Diary, 7 June 1951.
4. Alan Maclean, p. 103.
5. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 214-15.
6. Georgetown University, Cave Brown Papers, Attached to letter to James Eastland, chairman Internal Security sub-committee, Committee of the Judiciary.
7. See Comments on ‘Effect of Disappearance on Anglo-US relations in US press comments’. TNA, FO371/90931.
8. Nigel West, email to the author, 17 January 2015.
9. TNA, PREM 8/1524, 13 June 1951, briefing to PM. Bland’s recommendations can be found, TNA, CAB 301/17 – CAB 301/23.
10. TNA, PREM 8/1524.
11. Harold Nicolson, Diary, 11 June 1951. Lord Simon, who had known Maclean’s father, thought the two men had been drugged, kidnapped and then killed by Soviet agents. Bodleian Library, MS Simon 99, folios 141-7, ‘The Mystery of Maclean and Burgess’.
12. TNA, PREM 11/4457.
13. Liddell, 12 June 1951.
14. TNA, KV2/4103.
15. Hewit, unpublished memoir.
16. TNA, KV2/1675, interview with Rosamond Lehmann, August 1985.
17. TNA, KV2/2588/51.
18. TNA, KV2/3215.
19. TNA, KV2/1675, 3 August 1951 and KV2/790,
20. Andrew Sinclair, War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties, Hamish Hamilton, 1989, p. 276. Lehmann had got to know Burgess during the late 1930s and later wrote of him, ‘He was an extremely intelligent, sanguine character, with a boisterous sense of fun and a malicious edge to his tongue. Not creative himself, he nevertheless had an immense interest in the writers who were my contemporaries, particularly Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender …’ John Lehmann, The Ample Proposition, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966, p. 127.
21. Guy Liddell, Diary, 26 June 1951. Amongst those Victor Rothschild named as possible spies were Alister Watson and Jenifer Hart - both of whom later partially confessed.
22. Ibid., 12 June 1951.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 18 June 1951.
25. FBI files. The car was eventually sold to a vintage car dealer five years later for $35 after being stored at taxpayer’s expense. Burgess’s pre-war open-top Ford V8 was sold to Goronwy Rees’s parents-in-law in 1948 when he was given another car by the Russians and eventually ended up as ‘a noble hen house’ on a Devon farm. Interview with Mary Hardy, 23 May 2015.
26. FBI interview with Bernard Miller, 14 June 1951.
27. TNA, FO115/4524, Tim Marten to Roger Makins, 20 June 1951.
28. Bill Freedman interview, 1995.
29. Jim Angleton also produced an assessment of Philby’s complexity but without coming to the same conclusions.
30. Interview with Nigel Clive, 20 November 1998. It seems to have been a favourite trick. Miriam Rothschild tells a similar story also about Pruniers.
31. Carter, p. 349, and Purdy, p. 148.
32. Time Magazine, 18 June 1951.
33. Carpenter, p. 369.
34. ‘Seventh Eighth Men Uncovered’, London Review of Books, Vol. 3, No. 8, 7 May 1981, p. 8. Grigson, who worked with Burgess at the BBC, later described him as ‘Bumptious, to use an old-fashioned word. Always using the Christian names of the great, the politically great or prominent, the Whitehall people who were talked about and who talked to him, and had done so only that morning or the previous evening … And then his appearance. He glanced at you with quick rather shifty eyes, to see if you were taking proper notice of the way he was analyzing this or that situation.’ Geoffrey Grigson, Recollections, Chatto and Windus, 1984, p. 170.
35. Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties, Random House, 1997, p. 52. A rough translation is, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but are the English diplomats Burgess and Maclean here by any chance?’
36. Irish Times, 11 June 1951. One member of the public wrote to report the missing diplomats were ‘dead and buried under my floor. This is a true statement and I claim the reward which still holds good. Now what about getting busy on this horrible murder at once. It will be four months next week, so you may guess what they are like by now.’ TNA, FCO 158/25.
37. Washington Star, 17 June 1951; Times Herald, 19 July 1951.
38. Washington Post, 14 January 1952; Irish Times, 15 January 1952.
39. Daily Graphic, 30 June 1952.
40. Washington Post, 2 July 1951.
34. Repercussions
1. Guy Liddell, Diary, 27 June 1951.
2. Ibid., 7 July 1951.
3. Ibid., 10 July 1951.
4. Ibid., 13 July 1951.
5. Ibid., 1 October 1951.
6. Ibid., 7 December 1951.
7. Ibid., 9 August 1951. In fact Bedell Smith did know about VENONA through Bill Harvey. USCIB is the acronym for the U.S. Communications Intelligence Board, the body created in 1946 that co-ordinated American SIGINT resources but did not necessarily see all the product.
8. Ibid., 20 August 1951.
9. Ibid., 14 November 1951.
10. Interview with Robert Cecil, 16 March 1984, Cherry Hughes papers.
11. TNA, CAB 134/1325.
12. Guy Liddell, Diary, 19 December 1951.
13. Ibid., 3 April 1952. The fact that Cairncross had been seen by watchers discarding a copy of a recent copy of the Communist Review in a bin in a London park didn’t help his protestations of innocence.
14. Ibid., 6 March 1952. TNA, KV2/4107, memo 29th January 1952.
15. Ibid., 21 April 1952.
16. Ibid., 5 September 1952. After allegations were made in Time Life and Kenneth de Courcy’s Intellignce Digest that Warner had had a homosexual relationship with both Burgess and Hewit, Warner was interviewed by Carey Foster on 29th May 1952. He denied the accusations but was sent to Rangoon to keep him out of the way. TNA, FCO 158/254. There, according to Harold Nicolsn’s diary, he had an affair with Peter Townsend who had almost married Princess Margaret.
17. Ibid., 7 July 1952.
18. Daily Express, 7 June 1951.
19. The American Weekly, 25 January 1953, pp. 8, 11.
20. Initially MI5 thought Connolly might have privileged information and tapped his phone, but they concluded he knew as much as they did.
21. TNA, FO800/432, 21 June 1953.
22. I am grateful to Tony Burgess for providing this letter.
23. Duncan Webb, Line-Up For Crime, Muller, 1956, pp. 15, 16.
24. Webb, pp. 59-66 and The People, 19 December 1954. Anthony Gibbs, In My Times, Peter Davies, 1969, pp. 188-221, has a similar story of how his colleague Charles Fry, a friend of Burgess at the publisher Allen Wingate, was approached by a Mr Farinetti offering to produce Burgess, in return for £11,000, if he went to a bar in Ravenna, where the owner would arrange a meeting with Burgess in Switzerland.
35. Petrov
1. KV2/3440. The files on the Petrov case are KV2/3439-KV2/3488. MI5 were worried that Philby might be exfiltrated at the same time and a watch was put on ports. It was hoped that Kislytsin would also defect. Vladimir Petrov, Empire of Fear, Andre Deutsch, 1956, pp. 271-2.
2. Eden, 24 September 1955, PREM 11/1578 and Sir Arthur De La Mare, Perverse and Foolish, La Haule Books, 1994, p. 104.
3. Nigel West, Molehunt, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, pp. 185-94, reproduces the paper with italics highlighting the parts known to be untrue.
4. The Times, 24 September 1955.
5. Spectator, 23 September 1955.
6. TNA, CAB 129/79, CP 55 (161).
7. Daily Express, 28 October 1955.
8. The Times, 5 November 1955.
9. TNA, CAB 134/1325, Arrangements for Security Conference of Privy Counsellers.
10. HC Deb, 7 November 1955, Vol. 545, cc. 1483-611 for the whole debate.
11. House of Lords Debate, 22 December 1955.
36. The Missing Diplomats Reappear
1. Room 101 figures as the torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984 and one wonders if the Russians were having some sort of private joke.
2. Richard Hughes, Foreign Devil, Deutsch, 1972, p. 130.
3. Foreign Devil, p. 130. Weilland’s account can be found in Nick Moore (ed.), Frontlines: Snapshots of History, Reuters, 2001, pp. 40-1.
4. Driberg, pp. 121-4, for whole text.
5. Foreign Devil, p. 130.
6. Interview with Sidney Weiland, 3 February 1999.
7. Pollock letters, Guy Burgess to Sheila Pollock, 20 May 1956.
8. Sunday Express, 19 February 1956. The Daily Mail subsequently offered £500 - the money to go to the Discharged Prisoners Aid Association - for Burgess to interview Boris Pasternak but Burgess said of Dr Zhivago, which had just been published, ‘he was bored by it and put the book down after the first ten pages’. TNA, FCO 158/12.
9. TNA, PREM 11/1578, Hayter, 14 February 1956.
10. Rees, Mr Nobody, pp. 183-7, for a full account.
11. Ibid., p. 187.
12. British Library, Harrod Papers, Add 71192 f.3, Roy Harrod to Goronwy Rees, undated, about A Chapter of Accidents, which is based on the articles.
13. Ruling Passions, p. 233.
14. Bodleian Library, Conservative Party Archives, Joseph Ball papers, MS England c.6656, Crocker to People, 27 March 1956.
15. Driberg, pp. 4-5 and Wheen, p. 310.
16. Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions, Chatto and Windus, 1990, p. 309.
17. Chapman Pincher, Treachery, Random House, 2009, pp. 411-12.
18. TNA, FO371/122850, 20 March 1956.
19. Daily Express, 25 July 1956. The Express seemed so anxious for any artefact connected with the story that they recovered Eve’s cigarette stubs from her flight back.
20. Driberg, Guy Burgess, pp. 7-8.
21. Driberg, Ruling Passions, Cape, 1977, p. 232.
22. Ibid., p. 230.
23. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 54.
24. Modin interview, October 1994.
25. Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 523-4.
26. Driberg papers, Eve to Driberg, 3 October 1956.
27. Driberg, Ruling Passions, p. 236.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 238.
30. The serial ran 22 October-1 November 1956. One consequence was the Daily Telegraph didn’t review any of Weidenfeld’s books for a year, so incensed was Michael Berry by the suggestion he had offered Burgess a job. George Weidenfeld, Remembering My Good Friends, HarperCollins, 1994, p. 406.
31. Pincher, Treachery, p. 415.
32. Bodleian Library, MS England, c.6656, folios 124 and 134-5. Reference to a ‘brilliant Oxford historian friend’ of Burgess also recruited by Ball, most likely Isaiah Berlin, was also removed.
33. Daily Mail, November 1956.
34. Tribune, 30 November 1956.
35. New Statesman, 1 December 1956.
36. Time & Tide, 15 December 1956.
37. Spectator, 30 November 1956. Noel Coward, after reading the book, noted in his diary, ‘Burgess emerges, admittedly more intelligent than I had imagined, but no less of a fool … He is obviously a tiresome, wrong-headed, self-indulgent man with faulty emotional balance and little integrity.’ Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (eds.), The Noel Coward Diaries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, p. 350.
38. Driberg, Guy Burgess, p. 96.
39. Ibid., pp. 98, 99.
40. Ibid., p. 99.
41. Ibid., p. 100.
42. Ibid., p. 101.
43. Ibid., p. 104.
44. Ibid., p. 105.
37. First Steps
1. Cecil, p. 144.
2. Defence of the Realm, p. 426; Jonathan Miles, The Nine Lives of Otto Katz, Bantam, 2010, p. 281, claims they remained in Prague in connection with the trial of Otto Katz.
3. Guy Liddell, Diary, 12 June 1951.
4. Nigel Burgess interview, Penrose, p. 351. Nigel gave a similar version to Robert Cecil, p. 164.
5. Interview with Yuri Modin, October 2003. Haslam, drawing on Russian sources, claims the two men remained in Moscow for debriefing until October 1951. Haslam, p.170.
6. Miller, All them Cornfields, p. 53. One of the KGB officers responsible for resettling them was Valentin Mikhaylov, who had previously been Maclean’s case officer in Washington and then was the Resident in Australia under the name Sadovnikov.
7. Interview with Sergei Humaryan, October 2003. Melinda Maclean, interviewed in 1981 by the FBI, said ‘they lived in an apartment which was directly across the hall from the apartment of Guy Burgess. She said that Burgess and Maclean did not get along and Burgess soon returned to Moscow.’ FBI report, Melinda Maclean, FBI files, 21 September 1981.
8. Humaryan interview, October 2003.
9. Lean, who knew Burgess at the Ministry of Information, in The Napoleonists, p. 348, suggests Burgess identified with the character’s admiration for Napoleon and worship of his father. The last words of War and Peace are Andreyevitch’s dedication of himself. ‘Oh, father, father! Yes, I will do something with which even he would be satisfied …’
10. TNA, KV2/3440; Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 54; Modin, interviewed in October 2003, said they were still there in 1956; Povolzhskaya State Social-Humanitarian Academy in Samara: http://cambridge5.pgsga.ru/guy/
11. John Goldsmith (ed.), Stephen Spender Journals: 1939-1983, Faber, 1985, p. 212.
12. Modin, pp. 243-4. The dacha was later pulled down and turned into a children’s garden.
13. Ibid., p. 245.
14. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 54.
15. Driberg Papers, Guy Burgess to Tom Driberg, undated letter 1956.
16. Other books he read during this period included: Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte; Alice Through the Loooking Glass; Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave; Gabriel Chevalier’s Clochmerle; the novels of C.S. Forrester, Upton Sinclair and E.M. Forster; his friend Christopher Sykes’s Four Studies in Loyalty; Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige; the plays of Oscar Wilde; Stephen Spender’s World with World; Nicholas Pevsner’s The Cities of London and Westminster; George Kennan’s American Diplomacy 1900-1950; Gogol’s Dead Souls; Anthony Powell’s Dance to Music of Time; Angus Wilson’s Anglo Saxon Attitudes; Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Officers & Gentlemen; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; C.P. Snow’s The New Men; Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage; Anthony Blunt’s Philbert de l’Orme and one of his favourite books – The Writings of Walter Sickert, edited by Osbert Sitwell; Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; Goya Etchings; two volumes of annotated Marx and Engels; Kenneth Clark’s The Nude; The Origins of Christianity; Lewis Sinclair’s Babbit and several volumes of John Morley’s works, inscribed and given by Blunt in 1946.
17. Piadyshev, In the Service of a Foreign Power, p. 181.
18. Ibid.
38. I’m Very Glad I Came
1. Driberg, Guy Burgess, p. 104.
2. Ibid., p. 117.
3. Modin, p. 255.
4. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 56.
5. Interview with Sergei Konsrashev, 24 November 2003.
6. Philby and Cairncross were also awarded the decoration which marked distinguished long service to the USSR. The order consisted of a white-enamelled badge, which had a golden Hammer and Sickle badge surrounded by two golden panicles of wheat on a Red Star backed by crossed hammer, lough, torch and a red flag bearing the motto Proletarians (Workers) of the World Unite!
7. British Library, Harrod Papers, Roy Harrod to Goronwy Rees, 1 March 1972.
8. Guy Burgess to Peter Pollock, undated, Pollock Letters. He also enclosed a list of recordings he wanted sent. Mozart’s operas Figaro, Don Juan, Magic Flute, Cosi ‘in English if tolerable versions exist’, and his Jupiter and Haffner Symphonies, Beethoven’s 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th (Toscanini) Symphonies, Emperor, Fidelio + piano sonatas, Bach D Minor Fugue, St Matthew Passion, Schubert Unfinished, Berlioz Fantastic Symphony, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, Patience, Trial by Jury, Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, Hugo Wolf’s song. Leonard Cassini was a visiting classical pianist.
9. The FBI subsequently interviewed Goodman on 27 August 1957. Cf. Memphis Press Scimitar, 17 August 1957, and Londoner’s Diary, Evening Standard, 27 July 1957.
10. Modin, p. 253.
11. Interview with Modin, 14 October 2003.
12. Golitsyn, unpublished memoir, p. 535.
13. Tennent Bagley, Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief, Skyhorse, 2013, pp. 181–2.
14. Bagley, pp. 181–2.
15. Interview with John Morrison, October 1994.
16. BBC History magazine, September 2005 and TNA, T 231/1145. In December 1959 Eve Bassett created a trust through the Royal Trust Company of Canada giving her elder son the £300 p.a. interest from the income. TNA, IR 40/12306.
17. See TNA, T326/1132 and TNA, T326/1133.
18. Lilly Library, Indiana, Robin Maugham’s papers, Guy Burgess to Harold Nicolson, undated, but from references elsewhere in the letter to Nigel Nicolson’s deselection at Bournemouth, just after February 1959.
19. Perry, Fifth Man, p. 236.
20. Modin, p. 255.
21. Interview with Terence Lancaster, 21 January 1999.
22. Ibid.
39. An Englishman Abroad
1. Though Peter Brook’s production of Hamlet starring Paul Scofield had taken place two years earlier
2. Michael Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye, Coronet, 1984, pp. 234-5.
3. Redgrave, MI5 debrief, TNA, KV2/3822.
4. Coral Browne, Daily Mail, 3 December 1983. She gives slightly different versions in the Sun, 20 October 1983, and Glasgow Herald, 28 November 1983. Buchanan and Browne had enjoyed a brief affair.
5. Undated letter, Guy Burgess to Coral Browne, quoted Rose Collis, Coral Browne: This Effing Lady, Oberon Books, 2007, p. 123.
6. Guy Burgess to Coral Browne, 16 April 1959, quoted Collis, p. 124.
7. Rachel Kempson, A Family and its Fortunes, Duckworth, 1986, p. 184.
8. Birmingham Post, 7 January 1959; undated letter, Guy Burgess to Coral Browne, quoted Collis, p. 121.
9. Redgrave, pp. 234-5; cf. the accounts Redgrave gave to MI5 on his return, TNA, KV2/3822 and his article in the Observer, 11 January 1959. Burgess wrote to Harold Nicolson after the visit, ‘I am sure his is the best Hamlet I’ve ever seen – better than Gielgud, better than Olivier, much better than Schofield.’
10. Stephen Spender Journals, p. 211.
11. TNA, PREM 11/4457. Hugh Trevor-Roper has suggested, ‘Once in Moscow, Burgess threatened to expose Blunt too. Wishing to return to England, he sought to negotiate a guarantee of immunity from prosecution there. Such a guarantee could only have been obtained against an undertaking to reveal all that he knew, which of course would have been fatal to Blunt. I suspect that it was this fear which prompted Blunt to make his confession – a confession which in fact may have been unnecessary, since Burgess then died in Moscow, having revealed nothing.’ Spectator, 24 November 1979, p. 11. This doesn’t make sense, as Blunt confessed only in April 1964, after Burgess’s death.
12. Evening Standard, 23 February 1959.
13. TNA, CAB 21/3878.
14. TNA, CAB 129/96.
15. TNA, PREM 11/4461.
16. Princeton, Harold Nicolson papers, Guy Burgess to Harold Nicolson, undated.
17. Ibid.
18. Bodleian, MS England, c.6920, p. 259.
19. Guy Burgess to Coral Browne, 16 April 1959, Collis, p. 123.
20. Interviews with Robert Elphick, 19 January 1999 and 17 December 1985. According to MI5 files, Elphick later admitted that Burgess did not say he had made a mistake but ‘anyone can be a failure’. TNA. KV2/4133.
21. TNA, FCO 158/12.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Erik Durschmied, Shooting Wars, Pharos, 1990, p. 225.
26. Shooting Wars, p. 227. It was broadcast on 11th March 1959. Further information emails Erik Durschmied to the author 1st and 3rd March 2016.
1. Interview with Colonel E. Perry, Fifth Man, p. 269.
2. Driberg Papers, B10, Jack Hewit to Driberg, 5 August 1959.
3. Stephen Spender Journals, p. 210.
4. Ibid., p. 213.
5. Ibid., p. 214.
6. Ibid., p. 215.
7. Ibid., p. 211.
8. Robert Cecil Papers, Graham Greene to Robert Cecil, 14 February 1989.
9. Princeton, Harold Nicolson Papers, Guy Burgess to Harold Nicolson, 15 April 1960.
10. Joan Littlewood, Undated letter to author, c.1998.
11. Jan Morris, Pleasures of a Tangled Life, Random House, 1989, pp. 133-4. Morris began the transition from man to woman in 1964.
12. James Morris, ‘Caviare with Burgess’, Guardian, 2 September 1963.
13. Ibid. Morris gives a slightly different version of the Bolshoi episode in Pleasures, pp. 133-4.
14. On the trip to Ascona, Hill had drawn a picture of Burgess and Pollock which ‘in a fit of feminine rage’ Pollock had torn up. Public Record Office, Northern Ireland, D4400/C/2/52, Guy Burgess to Derek Hill, undated letter.
15. Jose Manser, Mary Fedden and Julian Trevelyan, Unicorn Press, 2012, pp. 10-104.
16. Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses: Life of Frederick Ashton, Faber, 1996, p. 457.
17. Interview with ‘Brian’, 15 March 2012.
18. Modin interview, 2003.
19. Driberg Papers, B10, undated, letter postmarked London, 4 January 1961.
20. Interview with May Harper, 22 December 1998.
21. Stephen Harper to the author, 15 December 1998; cf. Harper, ‘The Burgess I Knew in Moscow’, unpublished memoir, p. 9.
22. Sebastian Faulks, Three Fatal Englishmen, Hutchinson, 1996, pp. 254-5.
23. Ian McDougall, Foreign Correspondent, Muller, 1980, pp. 110–11, and interview with Ian McDougall, 23 April 1999. The argument had been over McDougall’s Catholicism – Burgess ‘could not understand how an adult man could allow the Pope to decide what he should read’. Nora Beloff, Transit of Britain: A Report on Britain's Changing Role in the Post-War World, Collins, 1973, p. 109. Debriefed by the Foreign Office on his return, McDougall reported he had ‘found it difficult to follow everything he said since all his teeth have fallen out and his false ones do not fit very well.’ TNA, FCO 158/12 PA Rhodes to PG Adams 4th August 1960.
24. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, the Russians unsuccessfully tried to blackmail Crankshaw after they photographed him in ‘sexual frolics’. Mitrokhin, p. 530; Beloff, pp. 133, 108.
25. Interview with Norman Dombey, 17 October 2003.
26. Harold Nicolson, Age of Reason, Constable, 1960, p. 312. Burgess wrote of Youssopoff, ‘When I knew him in the 1930s he did not look quite the same. He was making scent, before he made £20,000 out of libel actions against Hollywood for its film of the assassination of which he gave me his account.’ Undated letter to Harold Nicolson from Moscow.
27. Undated letter, Guy Burgess to Harold Nicolson.
28. Daily Telegraph and The Times, 11 October 1961.
41. ‘I’m a communist, of course, but I’m a British communist, and I hate Russia!’
1. Harold Nicolson to Burgess, 17 May 1960, describes one such visit. ‘I remained there an hour and we talked about you and the past and the future. It was an agreeable conversation and I hope that she enjoyed it as much as I did.’
2. King’s College, Cambridge, RNL/1/1/1/7, Rosamond Lehmann’s Commonplace notebook, 1 January 1958.
3. Ibid.
4. Peter Keen to the author, 17 September 1998.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. The photos duly appeared in the Daily Express, ‘The picture Burgess sent his mother’, on 3 September 1963.
7. TNA, PREM 11/4461.
8. Burgess claimed that the Dutch Secret Service had started the rumour to divert attention from a Soviet scientist who had returned to Russia from Holland, TNA, T326/1133.
9. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 49.
10. Daily Express, 21 April 1962.
11. Harper, ‘The Burgess I Knew in Moscow’, chapter in unpublished memoir.
12. ‘The Burgess I Knew in Moscow’, p. 5. Harper gives a slightly different version of events, Daily Telegraph, 23 April 1962.
13. Daily Mail, 19 April 1962.
14. Mossman unpublished memoir, pp. 108-9.
15. Mossman interview, 3 February 1999 and unpublished memoir, p. 110.
16. Mark Frankland, Child of My Time, Chatto &Windus, 1999, pp. 63-4.
17. Ibid., p. 64.
18. Harold Nicolson papers, Princeton, undated letter to Harold Nicolson.
19. Ibid., Burgess to Nicholson, 23 May 1962.
20. I’m grateful to Tony Burgess for showing me the letter. Burgess claimed he had presented this magnificent set of Imperial Russian china to the Hermitage Museum ‘in grateful thanks’ for being allowed to live in the USSR. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 56.
21. Letter from William Seymour to the author, 16 August 2000. Interview with William Seymour, 25 August 2000.
22. Interview with Francis Haskell, 3 June 1999.
23. H. Honour interview, quoted Carter, p. 441. Haskell confirmed this in his interview with the author.
24. Jim Riordan, Comrade Jim, Fourth Estate, 2008, p. 157.
25. Ibid., p. 166.
26. A full account is given in Riordan, pp. 155-60.
27. Erik de Mauny, Russian Prospect: Notes of a Moscow Correspondent, Macmillan, 1969, p. 196. See also the account by Mauny in Independent, 17 July 1994.
28. Miller, All Them Cornfields, p. 57.
29. Letter from John Golding to the author, 1 August 1998.
30. Modin, p. 256 and Perry, Fifth Man, p. 269.
31. Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, Hamish Hamilton, 1968, p. 74; Seale, p. 270; Kondrashev interview, 24 November 2003.
32. Jeremy Wolfenden, Daily Telegraph, 5 September 1963.
33. Seale, p. 273; Nigel Burgess interview, 21 January 1986; John Miller interview, 4 February 1999. For other accounts of the funeral see Irish Times, 5 September 1963, a rather inaccurate one in Riordan, pp. 168-70, and Hughes, Foreign Devil, p. 145.
34. In January 1960 International Literary Management had suggested Burgess write an autobiography. TNA, KV2/4131. Nigel Burgess interview, 21 January 1986. Anthony Purdy’s Burgess and Maclean with Burgess’s annotations was one of the items which went missing, probably removed by the KGB. Cf. Miller, All Them Cornfields, pp. 56-7. Purdy interviewed by MI5, shortly after visiting Burgess in June 1963, told them Burgess was writing a memoir which would name Blunt ‘as having been the man who warned him that the security net was closing around him’ and ‘that Wolfenden and Burgess were currently involved in a close homosexual liaison.’ TNA, KV2/4139.
35. Probate records and Express, 27 November 1963.
36. TNA, T326/1132.
37. Eleanor Philby, p. 76.
38. Eve survived her elder son by only a few months, dying on 7 January 1964 and she was buried, with all his letters to her, alongside him in West Meon. She left £143,998 in her will, mostly to Nigel, with a legacy to Esther Whitfield, though this was cancelled, and £300 to Anthony Blunt ‘in gratitude for all his kindness’.
42. Summing Up
1. Alan Bennett, Single Spies and Talking Heads, Samuel French, 1991, introduction.
2. NA, RG218, ‘National Security Implications Resulting from the Defection of British Diplomats, Donald Duart Maclean and Guy De Moncy Burgess’.
3. NA, RGA 46, Box 13, Memo 15 January 1957, ‘Records of the United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Internal Security, Names files (first series) Burgess-Maclean.
4. West, The Crown Jewels, p. 171.
5. A Chapter of Accidents, original typescript, p. 82.
6. Ibid., pp. 49, 52.
7. Modin, p. 254, and interview, November 2003.
8. Kondrashev interview, 24 November 2003.
9. Ibid.
10. Penrose, p. 216.
11. Quoted Inigo Thomas, London Review of Books, 11 March 2015.
12. Philby, Silent War, foreword.
13. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 121.
14. Weidenfeld, pp. 157-8.
15. Ibid. Michael Straight said much the same to Noel Annan when explaining his treachery, reminding him of ‘the response of the historian who was asked to assess the French Revolution and who answered “It’s too soon to tell”’. King’s College, Cambridge archives, NGA 5/1/950, Straight to Annan, 24 April 1989.
16. Connolly, pp. 15-16.
17. Miriam Rothschild, letter to the author, 6 January 1999.
18. Rosamond Lehmann interview, 1986, Costello, p. 30.
19. Margaret Anstee interview.
20. Brian Sewell letter to author, 25 October 1998. He gives a slightly different account dating the meeting two years later to May 1951. ‘A day or two later he waylaid me and invited me to dinner, after which he inflicted the traumatic experience of taking me to his “club”, which was not in Pall Mall, but in some cellar haunt where I was more or less compelled to dance with him – more food stains and foul breath and an overwhelming discomfort at the very idea of doing such a thing. I fled.’ Brian Sewell, Outsider: Always, Almost Never Quite, Quartet, 2011, p. 69.
21. John Waterlow, letter to author, 20 December 1998.
22. Mather, pp. 35-6.
23. Cecil, pp. 131-2.
24. Daily Herald, 7 November 1955.
25. Boyle, p. 118.
26. Rees, Chapter of Accidents, pp. 140-1.
27. Penrose, pp. 195-6.
28. Steven Runciman interview, 2 August 1998.
Appendix
1. Rodney Garland, The Troubled Midnight, W.H. Allen, 1954, pp. 37, 192. William Fairchild, who had been at Dartmouth, just after Burgess had plans to make a film The Traitors based on the Burgess and Maclean story in 1955.
2. Godfrey Smith, The Flaw in the Crystal, Gollancz, 1954; Richard Llewellyn, Mr Hamish Gleave, Michael Joseph, 1956; Nicholas Monsarrat, Smith and Jones, Morrow, 1963; Michael Dobbs, Winston’s War, Collins, 2002.
3. John Banville, The Untouchable, Picador, 1997; Rufus Gunn, A Friendship of Convenience, Gay Men’s Press, 1997.
4. Nancy Mitford, Don’t Tell Alfred, Hamish Hamilton, 1960, p. 192; Terrance Dicks, Endgame, BBC Books, 2000.
5. Influence, pp. 28, 113. Esther Whitfield was forty in 1951. Burgess told Robert Rushmore, a Voice of America journalist, in September 1950 that he considered marrying Esther. FBI Eric Kessler file p. 7. The FBI interviews also reveal a Burgess girlfriend in the Washington area. Phillips is Philby.
6. The role of Guy Burgess was first offered to Robert Stephens, who wasn’t available. From a subsequent short list, which included Michael Caine, Tom Baker, Edward Fox and Dirk Bogarde, Alan Bates was chosen.