While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross were recruited by Moscow Centre as agents of the Soviet NKVD. They became known as ‘The Cambridge Five’.
Burgess would go on to work for the BBC and for the Foreign Office. Maclean, the son of a prominent Liberal MP, also joined the Foreign Office and was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington DC between 1944 and 1948. Philby became an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6). Blunt, a world authority on the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, worked for MI5 until 1945, at which point he was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (and, later, the Queen’s Pictures). During World War II, John Cairncross worked as an analyst at Bletchley Park. All five men passed vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers in the NKVD.
In May 1951, Burgess and Maclean boarded a ferry in Southampton, England, and defected to the Soviet Union. Their disappearance caused an international uproar. They had been tipped off by Blunt and Philby that MI5 were about to expose Maclean as a traitor. Four years later, Philby held a press conference at which he denied being the so-called ‘Third Man’. He was exonerated in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, and continued to provide information to SIS. Seven years later, while working as a journalist in Lebanon, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter in Beirut and was spirited back to Moscow. The trauma of his betrayal haunts British Intelligence to this day.
Cairncross was identified as a Soviet agent in 1952. However, his involvement in the Cambridge ring was covered up by the British government. In 1964, Blunt also signed a full confession, in return for immunity from prosecution. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher admitted to the House of Commons that Sir Anthony Blunt, one of the pillars of the British Establishment, had been a Soviet asset for more than thirty years. MI5 and SIS faced a further bout of bloodletting.
Guy Burgess died of alcoholism in Moscow in 1963. Maclean, who worked for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, died in 1983. In the same year, Blunt, who had been stripped of his knighthood, died at his home in London. Five years later, Kim Philby was granted a full state burial by the Soviet authorities. Cairncross, who had lived in Italy, Thailand and France, died in 1995, five years after the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed him as the ‘Fifth Man’.
The recruitment of the Cambridge Spies is regarded as the most successful ‘penetration’ by a foreign Intelligence service in the history of espionage. In Russia, the men from Trinity College were known simply as ‘The Magnificent Five’.
C.C. London 2010