The British and Americans were suspicious that there was a mole. They were right; in fact, there were five double agents.
In the final part of this three-part mini-series, we see what happened when the net started closing in, and why some people think that the Cambridge Five got away unpunished.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini series on the Cambridge Five: the spy ring that infiltrated the upper echelons of Britain’s political and intelligence worlds and leaked state secrets to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:37] In case you missed them, in part one we set the scene, learned about who these men really were, and how they were recruited.
[00:00:45] In part two, we learned about the true extent of their success, how they managed to get away with it for so long, and saw some clues about where things might start to go wrong, some chinks in their armour.
[00:00:59] And in today’s episode, part three, we’ll see how this story ends.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about the downfall and defection of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:14] It was May 1951.
[00:01:17] Kim Philby held a telegram in his hands, a look of horror on his face.
[00:01:24] The Americans, he realised, had discovered one of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:29] Several years beforehand, Philby, the first of the Cambridge Five to be recruited, had been sent to Washington D.C.
[00:01:38] Although publicly he was working at the British Embassy, in reality he was the most senior British intelligence officer in Washington, or rather, in even more reality, he was a double agent working for the Soviets.
[00:01:53] As you heard in episode two, by the late-1940s both the British and the Americans were becoming suspicious that there was a mole - that is, that someone was leaking information to the Soviets.
[00:02:08] As part of his role, Philby, himself a Soviet double agent, of course, was involved in this investigation.
[00:02:16] There was or had been, the Americans believed, a mole working in the British embassy in Washington some time in the mid-1940s.
[00:02:27] To Philby’s horror, by the spring of 1951 he realised that the Americans had cracked the Soviets' transmission codes.
[00:02:37] They knew who the mole had been: a double agent referred to by the Soviets as ‘Homer’.
[00:02:46] If you remember from part one, Homer was the cryptonym, the code name, of Philby’s friend, university colleague, and fellow double agent, Donald Maclean.
[00:02:58] In the mid to late-1940s, Maclean had indeed worked in Washington and leaked incredibly sensitive information about the West’s nuclear capabilities.
[00:03:09] He had since been sent back to London and put under surveillance, one of several suspects.
[00:03:15] Then, on the 16th of May, Philby received the telegram that set in motion the start of the end for the Cambridge Five.
[00:03:24] The intelligence services back in London, it seemed, were about to take Maclean in for questioning.
[00:03:31] Maclean, he knew, was in an increasingly weak mental state. Philby was terrified he would crack under pressure and give up the identities of the rest of the five.
[00:03:44] Time was running out, the net was tightening.
[00:03:48] What would Philby do?
[00:03:49] How would he get word back to Maclean in London without arousing suspicion in Washington, as he supposedly led the very investigation into the mole?
[00:04:00] The responsibility would fall, unfortunately, onto the shoulders of the unpredictable and erratic drunk, Guy Burgess.
[00:04:10] Now, as a quick reminder, Burgess was one of the five high-flying Cambridge graduates who had gone on to become a double agent for the Soviets. He had joined the Foreign Office, while his fellow spies had held other high-powered positions in the British establishment.
[00:04:26] They had passed literally thousands of documents full of classified material to the Soviets, everything from nuclear secrets to the identities of British spies working in Europe.
[00:04:39] Fast forward to the early 1950s, these men became careless; complacent and sloppy in their spycraft.
[00:04:48] And a not insignificant part of this complacency and sloppiness can be traced back to alcohol.
[00:04:55] Though Burgess was known as the biggest drinker of the lot, the heaviest drinker, in the spring of 1950 Maclean too had descended into a downward spiral of alcoholism after being transferred to Cairo.
[00:05:09] His drinking got so out of control that he was sent back to London in disgrace for desk duty.
[00:05:16] He was a shadow of his former self, and Philby was understandably petrified that he would crack under pressure, that he would reveal all if he was taken in for questioning.
[00:05:28] Time was running out.
[00:05:30] And warning Maclean directly would have been too obvious, of course, he was under surveillance.
[00:05:37] So, what did Philby do?
[00:05:39] He realised he would have to rely on the unpredictable Burgess. By then, Burgess was also working in Washington DC and living with Philby.
[00:05:50] As you might remember from episode two, Burgess was hardly the most reliable of the Five, and was well-known as a careless alcoholic with a big mouth, someone who talked a lot and didn’t seem particularly good at keeping secrets.
[00:06:05] But he was the only way to get a message back to Maclean in London.
[00:06:11] There was a spanner in the works, an immediate problem, when Burgess was caught speeding in his car by the American police, and found to be drunk. He claimed diplomatic immunity and was kicked out of the country.
[00:06:26] This caused something of a diplomatic scandal, but it has been suggested that this was all part of the plan, that Burgess did this on purpose in order to be able to warn Maclean without seeming overly-suspicious.
[00:06:41] Nonetheless, he eventually arrived back in London later on in May and contacted his Soviet handlers to warn them that the Americans were onto Maclean and that he would be questioned any day.
[00:06:55] Incredibly, after Burgess saw the mental state of Maclean and his uncontrollable drunken behaviour, he decided that if Maclean was going to escape, he wouldn’t be able to do it alone, Burgess would go with him.
[00:07:09] This really was, as the expression goes, the blind leading the blind.
[00:07:14] But where would they go?
[00:07:17] By late May, Philby’s fears were confirmed and British intelligence had indeed decided they were going to confront Maclean about their suspicions. Remember, Philby at this time was a top-ranking counterespionage officer, so he had a front-row seat to all of these investigations.
[00:07:37] Monday 28th was the day he would be brought in for questioning.
[00:07:42] When Philby got wind, or heard about this, he warned Burgess, sending him a telegram.
[00:07:48] With time running out, on the 25th of May, Burgess bought two ferry tickets, and he and Maclean took an overnight ferry from Southampton to Saint-Malo, in France.
[00:08:01] The two had breakfast, with beer, of course, and paid a taxi driver to drive them to Rennes, the capital of Brittany.
[00:08:10] From there they took a train to Paris, then continued onto Zurich where they received papers from the Soviet Embassy, took a flight to Prague, and disappeared.
[00:08:20] They had defected to the Soviet Union, disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, and would not be heard from again for five years.
[00:08:29] With the British and Americans wondering how Maclean had realised they were onto him, suspicion immediately fell on Philby, given his relationship with Burgess and knowledge of the investigation.
[00:08:42] Philby was recalled to London and interrogated by MI6.
[00:08:47] MI6 were sure that Philby was the man, the link between Burgess and Maclean, but with no hard evidence, Philby faced no charges but was instead asked to retire quietly from MI6.
[00:09:02] As you might imagine, the whole saga caused outrage in Washington and seriously damaged British and American relations at a key time in the Cold War.
[00:09:13] So, two of the Cambridge Five had been discovered, but they were safely behind the Iron Curtain.
[00:09:19] Now all eyes were on Philby, but neither MI5 nor MI6 had the concrete evidence to pin anything on him, to prove that he had done anything wrong.
[00:09:31] They knew he had access to top secret files, including the ones about the mole, and that he had been living with Burgess, the man who had just travelled to London and then disappeared with Maclean, the man they suspected was Homer.
[00:09:46] Clearly, all signs pointed to him, but he was still a free man.
[00:09:51] After leaving MI6, he went to Beirut to work as a journalist, while still maintaining the support of many of his MI6 colleagues.
[00:10:00] Like Burgess and Maclean, Philby was by now a full-blown alcoholic and spent much of his time in bars around the British embassy.
[00:10:10] Some believe he even did the occasional bit of spywork for MI6, despite their suspicions about him.
[00:10:17] Anyway, in December of 1961 a high-ranking KGB officer defected to the West and provided clues that confirmed the long-held suspicions about Philby being the ‘third man’ and his role in tipping off Maclean and Burgess.
[00:10:34] And when a trusted source told MI6 that Philby had tried to recruit her years before, MI6 made its move.
[00:10:43] Now MI6 thought it had enough evidence to try and get a full confession from Philby, so in 1963 a man called Nicholas Elliott, one of Philby’s old school friends, was sent to Beirut to confront him.
[00:10:59] It didn’t take long for Philby to confess in writing that he was a double agent, but a few days later, on the 23rd of January, he boarded a Soviet ship bound for Odessa and disappeared.
[00:11:11] The third of the Cambridge Five had defected.
[00:11:15] Now, some have suggested that Philby was allowed to defect to avoid even more embarrassment for the British intelligence community.
[00:11:24] Whatever the truth, the fact that it was Philby’s school friend that was sent and not a proper interrogator, goes to the heart of the ‘good old chap’ culture that allowed Philby to exist as a double agent for so long.
[00:11:37] He was a gentleman, so naturally having an old school friend go and talk to him was the appropriate action, instead of police officers or soldiers. Let’s remember, he was accused of committing treason, which is legally one of the worst crimes possible.
[00:11:54] And he was allowed to slip away quietly to the Soviet Union.
[00:12:00] But instead of receiving the hero's welcome that he expected, when he arrived in the Soviet Union Philby was put in a flat in Moscow and shunned, rejected by Soviet intelligence, who had always been suspicious of how Philby had risen so quickly in MI6 and even feared he was a triple agent working for the British.
[00:12:24] In 1988 he died of heart failure in Moscow.
[00:12:29] So, what came of the other two defectors - Burgess and Maclean, the other two men who had fled to the Soviet Union?
[00:12:37] Maclean integrated into Soviet society, he went by the name of Comrade Madzoevsky and he lived a life of luxury compared to the average Soviet.
[00:12:47] He died in Moscow in March of 1983, and he was described in his obituary by the Russian newspaper Izvestia as “a man of high moral qualities and a convinced communist".
[00:13:01] Burgess, on the other hand, did not receive such a hero’s welcome.
[00:13:06] He did not learn Russian, and as a result he became increasingly isolated after his defection.
[00:13:13] He spent most of his time alone, drinking and reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he died of liver failure on the 30th of August in 1963.
[00:13:25] So, what of the two other members, Blunt and Cairncross?
[00:13:29] Well, though both men had provided vital information to the Soviets during the Second World War, they both did significantly less spying after the Second World War than Philby, Burgess and Maclean.
[00:13:43] This seems to have been partly ideological, with Blunt in particular losing faith in socialism, and partly practical.
[00:13:52] Whereas the other three all continued rising through the ranks in the diplomatic and intelligence worlds, Blunt and Cairncross focused more on academia and had less access to top secret information.
[00:14:06] I should say that even after Philby defected, in 1963, it wasn’t yet publicly known, that there were five double agents.
[00:14:16] British intelligence did have its suspicions about Blunt in particular and knew he had been good friends with Burgess since Cambridge, even suspecting that he had helped him and Maclean defect. But no way of proving it.
[00:14:31] Even without proof, the net was closing on the two men.
[00:14:36] After a handwritten note from Burgess was found in Cairncross’ flat in 1951, and following Burgess and Maclean’s defection, Cairncross had been interrogated by MI5 but denied he was a Soviet spy.
[00:14:51] However, after Philby’s defection in 1964, Cairncross was questioned by MI5 again, and this time, he confessed that he was indeed a spy, but in exchange for providing information he was not prosecuted and his role in the spy ring was kept a secret.
[00:15:11] Instead he went to the United States and began a career as a literary scholar, and he wouldn’t be revealed as the so-called ‘fifth man’ for many years.
[00:15:22] Anthony Blunt confessed when questioned the same year, but was not publicly revealed as the ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge Five until 1979, when someone he had tried to recruit at Cambridge in the 1930s told their story.
[00:15:37] The Queen was told that her high-ranking employee had been a double agent but, incredibly, Blunt was allowed to keep his job as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.
[00:15:48] He even kept his knighthood, his royal honour, until his spying past was made public by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
[00:15:57] As a result, the Queen stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and he died in London in 1983 aged 75, without spending as much as a night in prison.
[00:16:09] You might be thinking, how did they manage to get away with it for so long, and even after they were caught, why were they not punished in any way?
[00:16:19] Much of the answer to this comes back to something we talked about at the very beginning of this mini-series: class and social status.
[00:16:28] Because these men were from Britain’s ruling elite with famous and influential fathers, they studied at Britain’s top university, worked in its elite institutions, they were given the benefit of the doubt, that is, they were believed despite evidence or suspicions against them.
[00:16:45] Blunt was embedded in the Royal Family; Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean the political corridors of power; and Philby was the very man entrusted to fight against Soviet espionage.
[00:16:58] Nobody expected that ‘one of their own’ - ‘good chaps’ as we might say in England - would betray their country, and suspicions about them were ignored for years because of their status.
[00:17:11] Because of who they were, where they went to school, and the elite part of society they came from.
[00:17:17] Another reason is that revealing the Five, and therefore the weaknesses in British intelligence, would have had damaging consequences on the international stage.
[00:17:28] The slow unmasking, or uncovering, of the Cambridge Five was incredibly embarrassing to the British establishment and to the British security forces.
[00:17:40] Not only did these men undermine and actively work against the UK during the Second World War and the Cold War, but they brought into question the entirety of British foreign policy.
[00:17:52] The Cambridge Five shook the United States’ confidence in the UK, and damaged the transatlantic ‘special relationship’ at a time when cooperation was vital.
[00:18:04] And as the Cold War moved on into the 1970s and 1980s, rumours and gossip about the Cambridge Five contributed to the paranoia consuming the country.
[00:18:15] If men like the Cambridge Five would betray their country, who wouldn’t?
[00:18:21] How many of them really were there? What if there weren’t just five, but six, seven, ten, twenty, or fifty?
[00:18:29] What if there were still double agents working in the heart of government?
[00:18:35] For years after, countless people were accused of being the sixth or seventh or eighth members of the Cambridge spy ring, and many of their university contemporaries were suspected.
[00:18:47] None were found, or at least, none have been publicly revealed.
[00:18:53] If there were more, well if the example of the original five is anything to go by, they were probably hiding in the most unexpected place, hiding in plain sight.
[00:19:06] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the Cambridge Five, one of the most successful spy rings of all time.
[00:19:14] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about them, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about the whole thing, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:19:24] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:27] Who do you think was the best, or most effective, of the Cambridge Five?
[00:19:32] Which of the men do you find most interesting?
[00:19:35] What do you think that their long careers as double agents says about British society?
[00:19:40] I'd love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:51] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:56] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini series on the Cambridge Five: the spy ring that infiltrated the upper echelons of Britain’s political and intelligence worlds and leaked state secrets to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:37] In case you missed them, in part one we set the scene, learned about who these men really were, and how they were recruited.
[00:00:45] In part two, we learned about the true extent of their success, how they managed to get away with it for so long, and saw some clues about where things might start to go wrong, some chinks in their armour.
[00:00:59] And in today’s episode, part three, we’ll see how this story ends.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about the downfall and defection of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:14] It was May 1951.
[00:01:17] Kim Philby held a telegram in his hands, a look of horror on his face.
[00:01:24] The Americans, he realised, had discovered one of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:29] Several years beforehand, Philby, the first of the Cambridge Five to be recruited, had been sent to Washington D.C.
[00:01:38] Although publicly he was working at the British Embassy, in reality he was the most senior British intelligence officer in Washington, or rather, in even more reality, he was a double agent working for the Soviets.
[00:01:53] As you heard in episode two, by the late-1940s both the British and the Americans were becoming suspicious that there was a mole - that is, that someone was leaking information to the Soviets.
[00:02:08] As part of his role, Philby, himself a Soviet double agent, of course, was involved in this investigation.
[00:02:16] There was or had been, the Americans believed, a mole working in the British embassy in Washington some time in the mid-1940s.
[00:02:27] To Philby’s horror, by the spring of 1951 he realised that the Americans had cracked the Soviets' transmission codes.
[00:02:37] They knew who the mole had been: a double agent referred to by the Soviets as ‘Homer’.
[00:02:46] If you remember from part one, Homer was the cryptonym, the code name, of Philby’s friend, university colleague, and fellow double agent, Donald Maclean.
[00:02:58] In the mid to late-1940s, Maclean had indeed worked in Washington and leaked incredibly sensitive information about the West’s nuclear capabilities.
[00:03:09] He had since been sent back to London and put under surveillance, one of several suspects.
[00:03:15] Then, on the 16th of May, Philby received the telegram that set in motion the start of the end for the Cambridge Five.
[00:03:24] The intelligence services back in London, it seemed, were about to take Maclean in for questioning.
[00:03:31] Maclean, he knew, was in an increasingly weak mental state. Philby was terrified he would crack under pressure and give up the identities of the rest of the five.
[00:03:44] Time was running out, the net was tightening.
[00:03:48] What would Philby do?
[00:03:49] How would he get word back to Maclean in London without arousing suspicion in Washington, as he supposedly led the very investigation into the mole?
[00:04:00] The responsibility would fall, unfortunately, onto the shoulders of the unpredictable and erratic drunk, Guy Burgess.
[00:04:10] Now, as a quick reminder, Burgess was one of the five high-flying Cambridge graduates who had gone on to become a double agent for the Soviets. He had joined the Foreign Office, while his fellow spies had held other high-powered positions in the British establishment.
[00:04:26] They had passed literally thousands of documents full of classified material to the Soviets, everything from nuclear secrets to the identities of British spies working in Europe.
[00:04:39] Fast forward to the early 1950s, these men became careless; complacent and sloppy in their spycraft.
[00:04:48] And a not insignificant part of this complacency and sloppiness can be traced back to alcohol.
[00:04:55] Though Burgess was known as the biggest drinker of the lot, the heaviest drinker, in the spring of 1950 Maclean too had descended into a downward spiral of alcoholism after being transferred to Cairo.
[00:05:09] His drinking got so out of control that he was sent back to London in disgrace for desk duty.
[00:05:16] He was a shadow of his former self, and Philby was understandably petrified that he would crack under pressure, that he would reveal all if he was taken in for questioning.
[00:05:28] Time was running out.
[00:05:30] And warning Maclean directly would have been too obvious, of course, he was under surveillance.
[00:05:37] So, what did Philby do?
[00:05:39] He realised he would have to rely on the unpredictable Burgess. By then, Burgess was also working in Washington DC and living with Philby.
[00:05:50] As you might remember from episode two, Burgess was hardly the most reliable of the Five, and was well-known as a careless alcoholic with a big mouth, someone who talked a lot and didn’t seem particularly good at keeping secrets.
[00:06:05] But he was the only way to get a message back to Maclean in London.
[00:06:11] There was a spanner in the works, an immediate problem, when Burgess was caught speeding in his car by the American police, and found to be drunk. He claimed diplomatic immunity and was kicked out of the country.
[00:06:26] This caused something of a diplomatic scandal, but it has been suggested that this was all part of the plan, that Burgess did this on purpose in order to be able to warn Maclean without seeming overly-suspicious.
[00:06:41] Nonetheless, he eventually arrived back in London later on in May and contacted his Soviet handlers to warn them that the Americans were onto Maclean and that he would be questioned any day.
[00:06:55] Incredibly, after Burgess saw the mental state of Maclean and his uncontrollable drunken behaviour, he decided that if Maclean was going to escape, he wouldn’t be able to do it alone, Burgess would go with him.
[00:07:09] This really was, as the expression goes, the blind leading the blind.
[00:07:14] But where would they go?
[00:07:17] By late May, Philby’s fears were confirmed and British intelligence had indeed decided they were going to confront Maclean about their suspicions. Remember, Philby at this time was a top-ranking counterespionage officer, so he had a front-row seat to all of these investigations.
[00:07:37] Monday 28th was the day he would be brought in for questioning.
[00:07:42] When Philby got wind, or heard about this, he warned Burgess, sending him a telegram.
[00:07:48] With time running out, on the 25th of May, Burgess bought two ferry tickets, and he and Maclean took an overnight ferry from Southampton to Saint-Malo, in France.
[00:08:01] The two had breakfast, with beer, of course, and paid a taxi driver to drive them to Rennes, the capital of Brittany.
[00:08:10] From there they took a train to Paris, then continued onto Zurich where they received papers from the Soviet Embassy, took a flight to Prague, and disappeared.
[00:08:20] They had defected to the Soviet Union, disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, and would not be heard from again for five years.
[00:08:29] With the British and Americans wondering how Maclean had realised they were onto him, suspicion immediately fell on Philby, given his relationship with Burgess and knowledge of the investigation.
[00:08:42] Philby was recalled to London and interrogated by MI6.
[00:08:47] MI6 were sure that Philby was the man, the link between Burgess and Maclean, but with no hard evidence, Philby faced no charges but was instead asked to retire quietly from MI6.
[00:09:02] As you might imagine, the whole saga caused outrage in Washington and seriously damaged British and American relations at a key time in the Cold War.
[00:09:13] So, two of the Cambridge Five had been discovered, but they were safely behind the Iron Curtain.
[00:09:19] Now all eyes were on Philby, but neither MI5 nor MI6 had the concrete evidence to pin anything on him, to prove that he had done anything wrong.
[00:09:31] They knew he had access to top secret files, including the ones about the mole, and that he had been living with Burgess, the man who had just travelled to London and then disappeared with Maclean, the man they suspected was Homer.
[00:09:46] Clearly, all signs pointed to him, but he was still a free man.
[00:09:51] After leaving MI6, he went to Beirut to work as a journalist, while still maintaining the support of many of his MI6 colleagues.
[00:10:00] Like Burgess and Maclean, Philby was by now a full-blown alcoholic and spent much of his time in bars around the British embassy.
[00:10:10] Some believe he even did the occasional bit of spywork for MI6, despite their suspicions about him.
[00:10:17] Anyway, in December of 1961 a high-ranking KGB officer defected to the West and provided clues that confirmed the long-held suspicions about Philby being the ‘third man’ and his role in tipping off Maclean and Burgess.
[00:10:34] And when a trusted source told MI6 that Philby had tried to recruit her years before, MI6 made its move.
[00:10:43] Now MI6 thought it had enough evidence to try and get a full confession from Philby, so in 1963 a man called Nicholas Elliott, one of Philby’s old school friends, was sent to Beirut to confront him.
[00:10:59] It didn’t take long for Philby to confess in writing that he was a double agent, but a few days later, on the 23rd of January, he boarded a Soviet ship bound for Odessa and disappeared.
[00:11:11] The third of the Cambridge Five had defected.
[00:11:15] Now, some have suggested that Philby was allowed to defect to avoid even more embarrassment for the British intelligence community.
[00:11:24] Whatever the truth, the fact that it was Philby’s school friend that was sent and not a proper interrogator, goes to the heart of the ‘good old chap’ culture that allowed Philby to exist as a double agent for so long.
[00:11:37] He was a gentleman, so naturally having an old school friend go and talk to him was the appropriate action, instead of police officers or soldiers. Let’s remember, he was accused of committing treason, which is legally one of the worst crimes possible.
[00:11:54] And he was allowed to slip away quietly to the Soviet Union.
[00:12:00] But instead of receiving the hero's welcome that he expected, when he arrived in the Soviet Union Philby was put in a flat in Moscow and shunned, rejected by Soviet intelligence, who had always been suspicious of how Philby had risen so quickly in MI6 and even feared he was a triple agent working for the British.
[00:12:24] In 1988 he died of heart failure in Moscow.
[00:12:29] So, what came of the other two defectors - Burgess and Maclean, the other two men who had fled to the Soviet Union?
[00:12:37] Maclean integrated into Soviet society, he went by the name of Comrade Madzoevsky and he lived a life of luxury compared to the average Soviet.
[00:12:47] He died in Moscow in March of 1983, and he was described in his obituary by the Russian newspaper Izvestia as “a man of high moral qualities and a convinced communist".
[00:13:01] Burgess, on the other hand, did not receive such a hero’s welcome.
[00:13:06] He did not learn Russian, and as a result he became increasingly isolated after his defection.
[00:13:13] He spent most of his time alone, drinking and reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he died of liver failure on the 30th of August in 1963.
[00:13:25] So, what of the two other members, Blunt and Cairncross?
[00:13:29] Well, though both men had provided vital information to the Soviets during the Second World War, they both did significantly less spying after the Second World War than Philby, Burgess and Maclean.
[00:13:43] This seems to have been partly ideological, with Blunt in particular losing faith in socialism, and partly practical.
[00:13:52] Whereas the other three all continued rising through the ranks in the diplomatic and intelligence worlds, Blunt and Cairncross focused more on academia and had less access to top secret information.
[00:14:06] I should say that even after Philby defected, in 1963, it wasn’t yet publicly known, that there were five double agents.
[00:14:16] British intelligence did have its suspicions about Blunt in particular and knew he had been good friends with Burgess since Cambridge, even suspecting that he had helped him and Maclean defect. But no way of proving it.
[00:14:31] Even without proof, the net was closing on the two men.
[00:14:36] After a handwritten note from Burgess was found in Cairncross’ flat in 1951, and following Burgess and Maclean’s defection, Cairncross had been interrogated by MI5 but denied he was a Soviet spy.
[00:14:51] However, after Philby’s defection in 1964, Cairncross was questioned by MI5 again, and this time, he confessed that he was indeed a spy, but in exchange for providing information he was not prosecuted and his role in the spy ring was kept a secret.
[00:15:11] Instead he went to the United States and began a career as a literary scholar, and he wouldn’t be revealed as the so-called ‘fifth man’ for many years.
[00:15:22] Anthony Blunt confessed when questioned the same year, but was not publicly revealed as the ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge Five until 1979, when someone he had tried to recruit at Cambridge in the 1930s told their story.
[00:15:37] The Queen was told that her high-ranking employee had been a double agent but, incredibly, Blunt was allowed to keep his job as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.
[00:15:48] He even kept his knighthood, his royal honour, until his spying past was made public by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
[00:15:57] As a result, the Queen stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and he died in London in 1983 aged 75, without spending as much as a night in prison.
[00:16:09] You might be thinking, how did they manage to get away with it for so long, and even after they were caught, why were they not punished in any way?
[00:16:19] Much of the answer to this comes back to something we talked about at the very beginning of this mini-series: class and social status.
[00:16:28] Because these men were from Britain’s ruling elite with famous and influential fathers, they studied at Britain’s top university, worked in its elite institutions, they were given the benefit of the doubt, that is, they were believed despite evidence or suspicions against them.
[00:16:45] Blunt was embedded in the Royal Family; Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean the political corridors of power; and Philby was the very man entrusted to fight against Soviet espionage.
[00:16:58] Nobody expected that ‘one of their own’ - ‘good chaps’ as we might say in England - would betray their country, and suspicions about them were ignored for years because of their status.
[00:17:11] Because of who they were, where they went to school, and the elite part of society they came from.
[00:17:17] Another reason is that revealing the Five, and therefore the weaknesses in British intelligence, would have had damaging consequences on the international stage.
[00:17:28] The slow unmasking, or uncovering, of the Cambridge Five was incredibly embarrassing to the British establishment and to the British security forces.
[00:17:40] Not only did these men undermine and actively work against the UK during the Second World War and the Cold War, but they brought into question the entirety of British foreign policy.
[00:17:52] The Cambridge Five shook the United States’ confidence in the UK, and damaged the transatlantic ‘special relationship’ at a time when cooperation was vital.
[00:18:04] And as the Cold War moved on into the 1970s and 1980s, rumours and gossip about the Cambridge Five contributed to the paranoia consuming the country.
[00:18:15] If men like the Cambridge Five would betray their country, who wouldn’t?
[00:18:21] How many of them really were there? What if there weren’t just five, but six, seven, ten, twenty, or fifty?
[00:18:29] What if there were still double agents working in the heart of government?
[00:18:35] For years after, countless people were accused of being the sixth or seventh or eighth members of the Cambridge spy ring, and many of their university contemporaries were suspected.
[00:18:47] None were found, or at least, none have been publicly revealed.
[00:18:53] If there were more, well if the example of the original five is anything to go by, they were probably hiding in the most unexpected place, hiding in plain sight.
[00:19:06] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the Cambridge Five, one of the most successful spy rings of all time.
[00:19:14] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about them, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about the whole thing, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:19:24] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:27] Who do you think was the best, or most effective, of the Cambridge Five?
[00:19:32] Which of the men do you find most interesting?
[00:19:35] What do you think that their long careers as double agents says about British society?
[00:19:40] I'd love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:51] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:56] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini series on the Cambridge Five: the spy ring that infiltrated the upper echelons of Britain’s political and intelligence worlds and leaked state secrets to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:37] In case you missed them, in part one we set the scene, learned about who these men really were, and how they were recruited.
[00:00:45] In part two, we learned about the true extent of their success, how they managed to get away with it for so long, and saw some clues about where things might start to go wrong, some chinks in their armour.
[00:00:59] And in today’s episode, part three, we’ll see how this story ends.
[00:01:05] OK then, let’s get into it and talk about the downfall and defection of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:14] It was May 1951.
[00:01:17] Kim Philby held a telegram in his hands, a look of horror on his face.
[00:01:24] The Americans, he realised, had discovered one of the Cambridge Five.
[00:01:29] Several years beforehand, Philby, the first of the Cambridge Five to be recruited, had been sent to Washington D.C.
[00:01:38] Although publicly he was working at the British Embassy, in reality he was the most senior British intelligence officer in Washington, or rather, in even more reality, he was a double agent working for the Soviets.
[00:01:53] As you heard in episode two, by the late-1940s both the British and the Americans were becoming suspicious that there was a mole - that is, that someone was leaking information to the Soviets.
[00:02:08] As part of his role, Philby, himself a Soviet double agent, of course, was involved in this investigation.
[00:02:16] There was or had been, the Americans believed, a mole working in the British embassy in Washington some time in the mid-1940s.
[00:02:27] To Philby’s horror, by the spring of 1951 he realised that the Americans had cracked the Soviets' transmission codes.
[00:02:37] They knew who the mole had been: a double agent referred to by the Soviets as ‘Homer’.
[00:02:46] If you remember from part one, Homer was the cryptonym, the code name, of Philby’s friend, university colleague, and fellow double agent, Donald Maclean.
[00:02:58] In the mid to late-1940s, Maclean had indeed worked in Washington and leaked incredibly sensitive information about the West’s nuclear capabilities.
[00:03:09] He had since been sent back to London and put under surveillance, one of several suspects.
[00:03:15] Then, on the 16th of May, Philby received the telegram that set in motion the start of the end for the Cambridge Five.
[00:03:24] The intelligence services back in London, it seemed, were about to take Maclean in for questioning.
[00:03:31] Maclean, he knew, was in an increasingly weak mental state. Philby was terrified he would crack under pressure and give up the identities of the rest of the five.
[00:03:44] Time was running out, the net was tightening.
[00:03:48] What would Philby do?
[00:03:49] How would he get word back to Maclean in London without arousing suspicion in Washington, as he supposedly led the very investigation into the mole?
[00:04:00] The responsibility would fall, unfortunately, onto the shoulders of the unpredictable and erratic drunk, Guy Burgess.
[00:04:10] Now, as a quick reminder, Burgess was one of the five high-flying Cambridge graduates who had gone on to become a double agent for the Soviets. He had joined the Foreign Office, while his fellow spies had held other high-powered positions in the British establishment.
[00:04:26] They had passed literally thousands of documents full of classified material to the Soviets, everything from nuclear secrets to the identities of British spies working in Europe.
[00:04:39] Fast forward to the early 1950s, these men became careless; complacent and sloppy in their spycraft.
[00:04:48] And a not insignificant part of this complacency and sloppiness can be traced back to alcohol.
[00:04:55] Though Burgess was known as the biggest drinker of the lot, the heaviest drinker, in the spring of 1950 Maclean too had descended into a downward spiral of alcoholism after being transferred to Cairo.
[00:05:09] His drinking got so out of control that he was sent back to London in disgrace for desk duty.
[00:05:16] He was a shadow of his former self, and Philby was understandably petrified that he would crack under pressure, that he would reveal all if he was taken in for questioning.
[00:05:28] Time was running out.
[00:05:30] And warning Maclean directly would have been too obvious, of course, he was under surveillance.
[00:05:37] So, what did Philby do?
[00:05:39] He realised he would have to rely on the unpredictable Burgess. By then, Burgess was also working in Washington DC and living with Philby.
[00:05:50] As you might remember from episode two, Burgess was hardly the most reliable of the Five, and was well-known as a careless alcoholic with a big mouth, someone who talked a lot and didn’t seem particularly good at keeping secrets.
[00:06:05] But he was the only way to get a message back to Maclean in London.
[00:06:11] There was a spanner in the works, an immediate problem, when Burgess was caught speeding in his car by the American police, and found to be drunk. He claimed diplomatic immunity and was kicked out of the country.
[00:06:26] This caused something of a diplomatic scandal, but it has been suggested that this was all part of the plan, that Burgess did this on purpose in order to be able to warn Maclean without seeming overly-suspicious.
[00:06:41] Nonetheless, he eventually arrived back in London later on in May and contacted his Soviet handlers to warn them that the Americans were onto Maclean and that he would be questioned any day.
[00:06:55] Incredibly, after Burgess saw the mental state of Maclean and his uncontrollable drunken behaviour, he decided that if Maclean was going to escape, he wouldn’t be able to do it alone, Burgess would go with him.
[00:07:09] This really was, as the expression goes, the blind leading the blind.
[00:07:14] But where would they go?
[00:07:17] By late May, Philby’s fears were confirmed and British intelligence had indeed decided they were going to confront Maclean about their suspicions. Remember, Philby at this time was a top-ranking counterespionage officer, so he had a front-row seat to all of these investigations.
[00:07:37] Monday 28th was the day he would be brought in for questioning.
[00:07:42] When Philby got wind, or heard about this, he warned Burgess, sending him a telegram.
[00:07:48] With time running out, on the 25th of May, Burgess bought two ferry tickets, and he and Maclean took an overnight ferry from Southampton to Saint-Malo, in France.
[00:08:01] The two had breakfast, with beer, of course, and paid a taxi driver to drive them to Rennes, the capital of Brittany.
[00:08:10] From there they took a train to Paris, then continued onto Zurich where they received papers from the Soviet Embassy, took a flight to Prague, and disappeared.
[00:08:20] They had defected to the Soviet Union, disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, and would not be heard from again for five years.
[00:08:29] With the British and Americans wondering how Maclean had realised they were onto him, suspicion immediately fell on Philby, given his relationship with Burgess and knowledge of the investigation.
[00:08:42] Philby was recalled to London and interrogated by MI6.
[00:08:47] MI6 were sure that Philby was the man, the link between Burgess and Maclean, but with no hard evidence, Philby faced no charges but was instead asked to retire quietly from MI6.
[00:09:02] As you might imagine, the whole saga caused outrage in Washington and seriously damaged British and American relations at a key time in the Cold War.
[00:09:13] So, two of the Cambridge Five had been discovered, but they were safely behind the Iron Curtain.
[00:09:19] Now all eyes were on Philby, but neither MI5 nor MI6 had the concrete evidence to pin anything on him, to prove that he had done anything wrong.
[00:09:31] They knew he had access to top secret files, including the ones about the mole, and that he had been living with Burgess, the man who had just travelled to London and then disappeared with Maclean, the man they suspected was Homer.
[00:09:46] Clearly, all signs pointed to him, but he was still a free man.
[00:09:51] After leaving MI6, he went to Beirut to work as a journalist, while still maintaining the support of many of his MI6 colleagues.
[00:10:00] Like Burgess and Maclean, Philby was by now a full-blown alcoholic and spent much of his time in bars around the British embassy.
[00:10:10] Some believe he even did the occasional bit of spywork for MI6, despite their suspicions about him.
[00:10:17] Anyway, in December of 1961 a high-ranking KGB officer defected to the West and provided clues that confirmed the long-held suspicions about Philby being the ‘third man’ and his role in tipping off Maclean and Burgess.
[00:10:34] And when a trusted source told MI6 that Philby had tried to recruit her years before, MI6 made its move.
[00:10:43] Now MI6 thought it had enough evidence to try and get a full confession from Philby, so in 1963 a man called Nicholas Elliott, one of Philby’s old school friends, was sent to Beirut to confront him.
[00:10:59] It didn’t take long for Philby to confess in writing that he was a double agent, but a few days later, on the 23rd of January, he boarded a Soviet ship bound for Odessa and disappeared.
[00:11:11] The third of the Cambridge Five had defected.
[00:11:15] Now, some have suggested that Philby was allowed to defect to avoid even more embarrassment for the British intelligence community.
[00:11:24] Whatever the truth, the fact that it was Philby’s school friend that was sent and not a proper interrogator, goes to the heart of the ‘good old chap’ culture that allowed Philby to exist as a double agent for so long.
[00:11:37] He was a gentleman, so naturally having an old school friend go and talk to him was the appropriate action, instead of police officers or soldiers. Let’s remember, he was accused of committing treason, which is legally one of the worst crimes possible.
[00:11:54] And he was allowed to slip away quietly to the Soviet Union.
[00:12:00] But instead of receiving the hero's welcome that he expected, when he arrived in the Soviet Union Philby was put in a flat in Moscow and shunned, rejected by Soviet intelligence, who had always been suspicious of how Philby had risen so quickly in MI6 and even feared he was a triple agent working for the British.
[00:12:24] In 1988 he died of heart failure in Moscow.
[00:12:29] So, what came of the other two defectors - Burgess and Maclean, the other two men who had fled to the Soviet Union?
[00:12:37] Maclean integrated into Soviet society, he went by the name of Comrade Madzoevsky and he lived a life of luxury compared to the average Soviet.
[00:12:47] He died in Moscow in March of 1983, and he was described in his obituary by the Russian newspaper Izvestia as “a man of high moral qualities and a convinced communist".
[00:13:01] Burgess, on the other hand, did not receive such a hero’s welcome.
[00:13:06] He did not learn Russian, and as a result he became increasingly isolated after his defection.
[00:13:13] He spent most of his time alone, drinking and reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he died of liver failure on the 30th of August in 1963.
[00:13:25] So, what of the two other members, Blunt and Cairncross?
[00:13:29] Well, though both men had provided vital information to the Soviets during the Second World War, they both did significantly less spying after the Second World War than Philby, Burgess and Maclean.
[00:13:43] This seems to have been partly ideological, with Blunt in particular losing faith in socialism, and partly practical.
[00:13:52] Whereas the other three all continued rising through the ranks in the diplomatic and intelligence worlds, Blunt and Cairncross focused more on academia and had less access to top secret information.
[00:14:06] I should say that even after Philby defected, in 1963, it wasn’t yet publicly known, that there were five double agents.
[00:14:16] British intelligence did have its suspicions about Blunt in particular and knew he had been good friends with Burgess since Cambridge, even suspecting that he had helped him and Maclean defect. But no way of proving it.
[00:14:31] Even without proof, the net was closing on the two men.
[00:14:36] After a handwritten note from Burgess was found in Cairncross’ flat in 1951, and following Burgess and Maclean’s defection, Cairncross had been interrogated by MI5 but denied he was a Soviet spy.
[00:14:51] However, after Philby’s defection in 1964, Cairncross was questioned by MI5 again, and this time, he confessed that he was indeed a spy, but in exchange for providing information he was not prosecuted and his role in the spy ring was kept a secret.
[00:15:11] Instead he went to the United States and began a career as a literary scholar, and he wouldn’t be revealed as the so-called ‘fifth man’ for many years.
[00:15:22] Anthony Blunt confessed when questioned the same year, but was not publicly revealed as the ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge Five until 1979, when someone he had tried to recruit at Cambridge in the 1930s told their story.
[00:15:37] The Queen was told that her high-ranking employee had been a double agent but, incredibly, Blunt was allowed to keep his job as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.
[00:15:48] He even kept his knighthood, his royal honour, until his spying past was made public by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
[00:15:57] As a result, the Queen stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and he died in London in 1983 aged 75, without spending as much as a night in prison.
[00:16:09] You might be thinking, how did they manage to get away with it for so long, and even after they were caught, why were they not punished in any way?
[00:16:19] Much of the answer to this comes back to something we talked about at the very beginning of this mini-series: class and social status.
[00:16:28] Because these men were from Britain’s ruling elite with famous and influential fathers, they studied at Britain’s top university, worked in its elite institutions, they were given the benefit of the doubt, that is, they were believed despite evidence or suspicions against them.
[00:16:45] Blunt was embedded in the Royal Family; Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean the political corridors of power; and Philby was the very man entrusted to fight against Soviet espionage.
[00:16:58] Nobody expected that ‘one of their own’ - ‘good chaps’ as we might say in England - would betray their country, and suspicions about them were ignored for years because of their status.
[00:17:11] Because of who they were, where they went to school, and the elite part of society they came from.
[00:17:17] Another reason is that revealing the Five, and therefore the weaknesses in British intelligence, would have had damaging consequences on the international stage.
[00:17:28] The slow unmasking, or uncovering, of the Cambridge Five was incredibly embarrassing to the British establishment and to the British security forces.
[00:17:40] Not only did these men undermine and actively work against the UK during the Second World War and the Cold War, but they brought into question the entirety of British foreign policy.
[00:17:52] The Cambridge Five shook the United States’ confidence in the UK, and damaged the transatlantic ‘special relationship’ at a time when cooperation was vital.
[00:18:04] And as the Cold War moved on into the 1970s and 1980s, rumours and gossip about the Cambridge Five contributed to the paranoia consuming the country.
[00:18:15] If men like the Cambridge Five would betray their country, who wouldn’t?
[00:18:21] How many of them really were there? What if there weren’t just five, but six, seven, ten, twenty, or fifty?
[00:18:29] What if there were still double agents working in the heart of government?
[00:18:35] For years after, countless people were accused of being the sixth or seventh or eighth members of the Cambridge spy ring, and many of their university contemporaries were suspected.
[00:18:47] None were found, or at least, none have been publicly revealed.
[00:18:53] If there were more, well if the example of the original five is anything to go by, they were probably hiding in the most unexpected place, hiding in plain sight.
[00:19:06] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on the Cambridge Five, one of the most successful spy rings of all time.
[00:19:14] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about them, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about the whole thing, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:19:24] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:27] Who do you think was the best, or most effective, of the Cambridge Five?
[00:19:32] Which of the men do you find most interesting?
[00:19:35] What do you think that their long careers as double agents says about British society?
[00:19:40] I'd love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:51] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:56] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
