travelled in Europe, and in Vienna met and married Litzi Friedmann, who was a Comintern agent, and attracted the attention of the OGPU for his work on behalf of the party. He was recruited by Teodor Maly, and according to Philby, at that stage ‘given the job of penetrating British intelligence… it did not matter how long it took to do the job’. He was sent back to England in May 1934 with a new controller, Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto.
Deutsch was instructed to work with both Philby and Burgess, but when Philby unsuccessfully tried to join the civil service (he was passed over because his referees had doubts about his ‘sense of political injustice’), Deutsch ordered him to be patient. Philby therefore publicly claimed to have changed his political orientation, and started to become a member of the establishment, working for the liberal monthly
Burgess had been busy, gathering his ring of five. They included mathematician Anthony Blunt, and language scholar Donald Maclean, both of whom were Burgess’ lovers at different times. He also recruited another modern languages student, John Cairncross, into his Comintern cell.
When Burgess was formally recruited by Deutsch, the controller suggested that the idea of a group was perhaps not the best way forward. Burgess, though, maintained the links of friendship between the five men throughout the next few years — which would almost prove catastrophic for Kim Philby when he was tarred by association with Maclean and Burgess when they were forced to defect to Russia in 1951.
On Deutsch’s instructions, Maclean and Cairncross both broke off their contact with the Communist party, and applied to join the civil service. Burgess became personal assistant to MP Jack Macnamara; Maclean was accepted into the Foreign Office in October 1935, with Cairncross joining him there a year later. While the personable Maclean made friends and started to gain access to useful material, Cairncross was less successful, and eventually Deutsch suggested that he apply to work at the Treasury. Burgess became a popular producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation, making contacts across the spectrum — including MI6 deputy department head David Footman, who would recommend Burgess for a job in the secret service in 1938, working for MI6’s new Section D, broadcasting propaganda to Nazi Germany. Blunt remained in Cambridge, sourcing new recruits for the NKVD, including Leo Long, who would be an important asset during the Second World War.
Philby, meanwhile, was becoming involved in the sort of assignment more usually to be found in the contemporary thrillers of Helen MacInnes or Leslie Charteris than the more mundane copying of secrets and passing of information carried out by the other Cambridge Spies. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and early the next year, Philby was sent under journalistic cover to penetrate General Franco’s entourage and help organize his assassination. That particular mission was abandoned that summer in favour of gaining information about the other intelligence services operating in Spain. The following spring, Philby became a local hero when the car he was travelling in was hit by a shell and he was the sole survivor; the medal he received was pinned on by Franco himself!
The Magnificent Five, though, were shortly to find themselves without a controller. Following the great purges of the NKVD in 1937, both Maly, who had been working with Philby, and Deutsch were recalled to Moscow. Maly faced execution, while Deutsch survived into the war years before being executed by the SS as part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna.
When war broke out, the Magnificent Five ensured that they were in prime positions to assist their Soviet paymasters. Cairncross became private secretary to Lord Hankey, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who chaired many secret committees and was even overseeing the intelligence services. This meant that Cairncross could pass across ‘literally tons of documents’, according to the NKVD, including warnings about Operation Barbarossa, and the findings of the Scientific Advisory and Maud Committees regarding the prospect of creating a weapon using Uranium-235 — making him one of the Soviet Union’s first atomic spies. When Hankey was sacked from the Government in 1942, Cairncross turned his attentions to Bletchley Park, home of the Engima codebreakers.
Burgess was already ensconced in MI6 at the outbreak of war, and he assisted Kim Philby’s smooth entry to the organization. Philby and Burgess would work together as instructors at a training school for the sabotage division Section IX (known as Section D, for ‘Destruction’) before that was folded into the new SOE. Burgess was let go while Philby remained with SOE until he moved across to Section V, the Counter-Intelligence section of MI6. (Moscow had other agents in SOE, including Donald Maclean’s schoolfriend James Klugmann.)
While at Section V, Philby was able to pass on information on pre-war MI6 agents operating against the Soviets from the Registry, and, by volunteering for night duty at service headquarters at 54 Broadway, near St James’ Park in central London, he could keep Moscow informed of all current developments. He liaised with MI5 when Section V moved into central London in 1943, and when a new Section IX was established in 1944, specifically to deal with the Soviet threat past and present, Moscow Centre insisted that he ‘must do everything, but everything, to ensure that [he] became head of Section IX’. Philby manoeuvred the main contender — a staunch anti-Communist — out of the running, and as his colleague Robert Cecil wrote, thereby ‘had ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter Communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage records few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.’
Although Philby undoubtedly made the greatest contribution overall to Soviet intelligence, during the war it was Cairncross and Blunt who attracted the most plaudits from Moscow Centre. Blunt would eventually work himself into a nervous breakdown, and effectively become little more than a courier after the war. He was recruited into MI5 in the summer of 1940, and was soon in charge of surveillance of neutral embassies, as well as gaining surreptitious access to the various diplomatic bags of their couriers — which he would photograph and pass over to the Five’s new London contact, Anatoly Gorsky. He also ran Leo Long as a sub-agent, gaining material courtesy of Long’s access to ULTRA material from Bletchley Park as a member of MI14.
Cairncross was also at Bletchley at this point early in the Second World War, passing on information about German troop movements, and contributing to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. In 1944, he then moved across to MI6, working on the German desk at Section V, before moving to the Political Intelligence section, where he didn’t prosper so well, lacking Burgess’ or Maclean’s innate talents for getting along with people easily.
Guy Burgess’ contributions to the Soviet war effort were in a different field, following his dismissal from SOE. He ended up working once more as a talks producer for the BBC, and even managed to get the author of his own inspiration, Ernst Henri, on the air, proclaiming how great the Soviet Union’s intelligence network was!
Maclean was the only one of the Five not to have a distinguished war career — at least at first. He didn’t handle the strain of his double life well, and although he was part of the General Department of the Foreign Office, he seemed to lack energy, not helped by problems with his domestic life. However in Spring 1944, he was posted to Washington DC, and seemed to regain his previous enthusiasm. He had access to information about the Allies’ plans after the war ended, and also became involved with liaison with the atomic-bomb project. His wife was in New York, and he travelled there from Washington regularly to see her — and pass on information to Gorsky, who had crossed to the United States to handle Centre agents there. Of course, this meant that there was signals traffic between the various Soviet missions on the East Coast regarding his movements — something that would come back to haunt Maclean a few years later, and eventually cause the downfall of the entire Cambridge Magnificent Five.
Compared with their British or Russian allies, the Americans were latecomers to the espionage field — partly, of course, because as of the start of the Second World War, the United States as an entity had only existed for just over 150 years.
During the First World War, which America only entered in 1917, the Army’s G-2 section along with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had operated against pro-German groups, and American cryptologist Herbert O. Yardley helped to organize the US Army’s Cipher Bureau, known as MI-8. This had some notable successes against German agents operating in the US, but its peacetime operations were brought to a close in 1928 when incoming president Herbert Hoover’s new secretary of state Henry L. Stimson shut it down, stating that ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’.
G-2 and the ONI continued to function between the wars, working in tandem with the newly created Federal Bureau of Intelligence (formerly the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation) to keep an eye on actual and potential subversive elements, including the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). It seems they didn’t realize the scale of Soviet infiltration: the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany was an early recruit, while Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a key member of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking to eradicate Nazism in the States, was on the NKVD books during the late thirties,
