Guy Burgess
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Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent who worked for the Soviet Union and was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed allied secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy. Like Anthony Blunt, Burgess was homosexual.
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[edit] Biography
Burgess was the son of a naval officer and although he attended Royal Naval College, Dartmouth he failed to follow in his father's footsteps.
Like most of the Cambridge five, he came from a privileged background, attending Eton College, and eventually attending Cambridge University, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite, debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby.
Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the Producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in that conflict. Burgess and the other members of the "Five" were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals.
He was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington DC, Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things : "the race thing", contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. "Oh," said the irrepressible Burgess, "you mean I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson?"
Assigned to the British embassy in the USA, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties. The FBI described him in a report as "a loud, foul-mouthed queer with a penchant for seducing hitchhikers."[citation needed]
After he was unmasked as a double agent, Burgess moved to Moscow on a moonlit flight with Donald Maclean arranged by Yuri Modin. However, unlike Donald Maclean who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until the 80s, Burgess seems not to have taken to life in the USSR so well. Homosexuality in particular, was much more frowned upon in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.
Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.
Harold Nicolson, diplomat and writer, describes Burgess a year before his defection in a letter to his wife:
- 'I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.'
- -Harold Nicolson to his wife Vita Sackville-West, 25 January 1950
[edit] Chronology
- 1911 Born in Devonport, England
- Studied at Eton College
- Studied at Dartmouth Royal Naval College
- Studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Meets the rest of the spy-ring and becomes a supporter of the Communist party. Inducted into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society that was strongly Marxist at that point
- 1934 To hide his sympathies, renounces communism and joins the Anglo-German Fellowship, a pro-Nazi group. Philby is also a member
- 1936 until 1944 worked for the BBC. Produced the programme The Week in Westminster
- (Note: 1939 to 1941 Seconded to MI5 to work on war propaganda)
- 1944 Joins the Foreign Office news department
- 1947 Sent to Washington, DC as a second secretary of the British Embassy
- 1951 March, met Michael Straight in D.C.; Kim Philby warns Burgess and Donald Maclean that Maclean is under suspicion and will most likely be unmasked. They both flee and go into hiding.
- 1956 They appear in Moscow
- 1963 Died in Moscow; in the same year, Kim Philby defects to Soviet Union.
- 1983 The grandson of Donald MacLean marries the great-grand-niece of Guy Burgess in Dayton, Ohio (USA).
[edit] Works based on his life
- Another Country, a play subsequently made into a movie.
- An Englishman Abroad, the first act of Single Spies, a 1983 play by Alan Bennett subsequently made into a TV movie.
- Cambridge Spies, a five-part BBC TV series.
[edit] Biographies, etc.
Deacon, Richard (1986), The Cambridge Apostles: a History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society.
Modin, Yuri (1994), My Five Cambridge Friends.
Newton, Verne W. (1991), The Cambridge Spies: the Untold Story of Maclean, Philby, and Burgess in America.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- [1] Guy Burgess (BBC)
