Guy Burgess

Life

Family background

The Burgess family's English roots can be traced to the arrival in Britain in 1592 of Abraham de Bourgeous de Chantilly, a refugee from the Huguenot religious persecutions in France. The family settled in Kent and became prosperous, mainly as bankers. Later generations created a military tradition; Burgess's grandfather, Henry Miles Burgess, was an officer in the Royal Artillery whose main service was in the Middle East. His youngest son, Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess, was born in Aden in 1881, the third forename being a nod to his Huguenot ancestry. Malcolm had a generally unremarkable career in the Royal Navy, eventually reaching the rank of Commander. In 1907 he married Evelyn Gillman, the daughter of a wealthy Portsmouth banker. The couple settled in the naval town of Devonport where, on 16 April 1911, their elder son was born, christened Guy Francis de Moncy. A second son, Nigel, was born two years later.

Childhood and schooling

The Gillman wealth ensured a comfortable home for the young family. Guy's earliest schooling was probably with a governess until, aged 9, he began as a boarder at Lockers Park, an exclusive preparatory school near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. He did well there; his grades were consistently good and he played for the school's association football team. Having completed the Lockers curriculum a year early, he was too young to proceed immediately, as intended, to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Instead, from January 1924 he spent a year at Eton College, a boys' public school in Eton, Berkshire.

Following Malcolm's retirement from the navy, the family moved to West Meon in Hampshire. Here, on 15 September 1924, Malcolm died suddenly of a heart attack. Despite this traumatic event, Guy's education proceeded as planned, and in January 1925 he began at Dartmouth. Here he encountered strict discipline and insistence on order and conformity, enforced by frequent use of corporal punishment even for minor infringements. In this environment, Guy thrived both academically and in sports. He was marked by the college authorities as "excellent officer material", but an eye test in 1927 exposed a deficiency that precluded a career in the navy's executive branch. Burgess had no interest in the available alternatives – the engineering or paymaster branches – and in July 1927 he left Dartmouth and returned to Eton.

Burgess's second period at Eton, between 1927 and 1930, was largely rewarding and successful, both academically and socially. Although he failed to be elected to the elite society known as "Pop", he began to develop a network of contacts that would prove useful in later life. At Eton, sexual relationships between boys were common, and although Burgess would claim to explore his homosexuality at Eton, his contemporaries could recall little evidence of this. Generally, Burgess was remembered as amusingly flamboyant, and something of an oddity with his professed left-wing social and political opinions. In January 1930 he sat for and won a history scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, concluding his school career with further prizes in history and drawing. Throughout his life he retained fond memories of Eton; according to his biographers Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, he "never showed any embarrassment that he had been educated in a citadel of educational privilege".

Cambridge

Burgess arrived in Cambridge in October 1930 and quickly involved himself in many aspects of student life. He was not universally liked; one contemporary described him as "a conceited unreliable shit", although others found him amusing and good company. After a term, he was elected to the Trinity Historical Society, whose membership was formed from the brightest of Trinity College undergraduates and postgraduates. Here he encountered Harold "Kim" Philby and Jim Lees, the latter a former miner studying under a trade union scholarship, whose working-class perspective Burgess found stimulating. In June 1931 Burgess designed the stage sets for a student production of Bernard Shaw's play Captain Brassbound's Conversion, with Michael Redgrave in the leading role. Redgrave considered Burgess "one of the bright stars of the university scene, with a reputation for being able to turn to anything".

Burgess by this time made no attempt to conceal his homosexuality. In 1931 he met Anthony Blunt, four years his senior and a Trinity postgraduate. The two shared artistic interests and became friends, possibly lovers. Blunt was a member of the intellectual society known as the "Apostles", to which in 1932 he secured Burgess's election. This gave Burgess a greatly extended range of networking opportunities; membership of the Apostles was ostensibly lifelong, so at the regular meetings he met many of the leading intellectuals of the day, such as G. M. Trevelyan, the university's Regius Professor of History; the writer E. M. Forster; and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

In the early 1930s, the general political climate was volatile and threatening. In Britain, the financial crisis of 1931 pointed to the failure of capitalism, while in Germany the rise of Nazism was a source of increasing disquiet. Such events radicalised opinion in Cambridge and elsewhere; according to Burgess's fellow Trinity student James Klugmann, "Life seemed to demonstrate the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and shouted aloud for some sort of quick, rational, simple alternative". Burgess's interest in Marxism, initiated by friends such as Lees, deepened after he heard the economist Maurice Dobb, a fellow of Pembroke College, address the Trinity Historical Society on the issue of "Communism: a Political and Historical Theory". Another influence was a fellow student, David Guest, a leading light in the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS), within which he formed the university's first active communist cell. Under Guest's influence, Burgess began studying the works of Marx and Lenin.

In 1932 Burgess obtained first-class honours in Part I of the history Tripos and was expected to graduate with similar honours in Part II the following year. However, political activity distracted him and by the time of his final examinations in 1933 he was quite unprepared. During his examinations he fell ill and was unable to complete his papers; this may have been the consequence of belated cramming, or of taking amphetamines. The examiners awarded him an aegrotat, an unclassified degree awarded to students considered worthy of graduation but prevented through illness from completing their examinations.

BBC and MI6

In July 1936, having twice previously applied unsuccessfully for posts at the BBC, Burgess was appointed as an assistant producer in the corporation's Talks Department. Responsible for selecting and interviewing potential speakers for current affairs and cultural programmes, he drew on his extensive range of personal contacts and rarely met refusal. His relationships at the BBC were volatile; he quarrelled with management about his pay, while colleagues were irritated by his opportunism, his capacity for intrigue, and his slovenliness. One colleague, Gorley Putt, remembered him as "a snob and a slob ... It amazed me, much later in life, to learn that he had been irresistibly attractive to most people he met".

Among those Burgess invited to broadcast were Blunt, several times; the well-connected writer-politician Harold Nicolson (a fruitful source of high-level gossip); the poet John Betjeman; and Philby's father, the Arabist and explorer St John Philby. Burgess also sought out Winston Churchill, then a powerful backbench opponent of the government's appeasement policy. On 1 October 1938, during the Munich crisis, Burgess, who had met Churchill socially, went to the latter's home at Chartwell to persuade him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from a projected talks series on Mediterranean countries. According to the account provided in Tom Driberg's biography, the conversation ranged over a series of issues, with Burgess urging Churchill to "offer his eloquence" to help resolve the current crisis. The meeting ended with the presentation to Burgess of a signed copy of Churchill's book Arms and the Covenant, but the broadcast did not take place.

Pursuing their main objective, the penetration of British intelligence, Burgess's controllers asked him to cultivate a friendship with the author David Footman, who they knew was an MI6 officer. Footman introduced Burgess to his superior, Valentine Vivian; as a result, over the following eighteen months, Burgess carried out several small assignments for MI6 on an unpaid freelance basis. He was trusted sufficiently to be used as a back channel of communication between Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Edouard Daladier, during the period leading to the 1938 Munich summit.

At the BBC, Burgess thought his choices of speaker were being undermined by the corporation's subservience to the government–he attributed Churchill's non-appearance to this–and in November 1938, after another of his speakers was withdrawn at the request of the prime minister's office, he resigned. MI6 was by now convinced of his future utility, and he accepted a job with its new propaganda division, known as Section D. In common with the other members of the Cambridge Five, his entry to British intelligence was achieved without vetting; his social position and personal recommendation were considered sufficient.

Foreign Office

As a press officer in the Foreign Office news department, Burgess's role involved explaining government policy to foreign editors and diplomatic correspondents. His access to secret material enabled him to send Moscow important details of Allied policy both before and during the March 1945 Yalta Conference. He passed information relating to the postwar futures of Germany and Poland, and also contingency plans for "Operation Unthinkable", which anticipated a future war with the Soviet Union. His Soviet masters rewarded his efforts with a £250 bonus.

Burgess's working methods were characteristically disorganised, and his tongue was loose; according to his colleague Osbert Lancaster, "[w]hen in his cups he made no bones about working for the Russians".

Burgess had maintained contact with McNeil who, following Labour's victory in the 1945 general election, became Minister of State at the Foreign Office, effectively serving as a deputy to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. McNeil, a staunch anti-communist unsuspecting of Burgess's true allegiance, admired the latter for his sophistication and intelligence, and in December 1946 secured his services as an additional private secretary. The appointment was in breach of regular Foreign Office procedures, and there were complaints, but McNeil prevailed. Burgess quickly made himself indispensable to McNeil, and in one six-month period transmitted to Moscow the contents of 693 files, a total of over 2,000 photographed pages, for which he received a further cash reward of £200.

Early in 1948, Burgess was seconded to the Foreign Office's newly created Information Research Department (IRD), set up to counteract Soviet propaganda. The move was not a success; he was indiscreet, and his new colleagues thought him "dirty, drunken and idle". Burgess was quickly sent back to McNeil's office, and in March 1948 accompanied McNeil and Bevin to Brussels for the signing of the Treaty of Brussels, which eventually led to the establishment of the Western European Union and NATO. He remained with McNeil until October 1948, when he was posted to the Far East. Burgess was assigned to the China desk at a point when the Chinese Civil War was nearing its climax, a communist victory imminent. There were important differences of view between Britain and the US on future diplomatic relations with the forthcoming communist state. Burgess was a forceful advocate for recognition and may have influenced Britain's decision to recognise Communist China in 1949.

Defection

Burgess returned to England on 7 May 1951. He and Blunt then contacted Yuri Modin, the Soviet spymaster in charge of the Cambridge ring, who began arrangements with Moscow to receive Maclean. Burgess showed little urgency in proceeding with the matter, finding time to pursue his personal affairs and attend an Apostles dinner in Cambridge. On 11 May he was summoned to the Foreign Office to answer for his misconduct in Washington and, according to Boyle, was dismissed. Other commentators say he was invited to resign or "retire", and was given time to consider his position.

Burgess's diplomatic career was over, although he was not at this stage under any suspicion of treachery. He met with Maclean several times; according to Burgess's 1956 account to Driberg, the question of defection to Moscow was not raised until their third meeting, when Maclean said he was going and requested Burgess's help. Burgess had previously promised Philby that he would not go with Maclean, since a double defection would put Philby's own position in serious jeopardy. Blunt's unpublished memoirs state that it was Moscow's decision to send Burgess with Maclean who, they thought, would be unable to handle the complicated escape arrangements alone. Burgess told Driberg that he had agreed to accompany Maclean because he was leaving the Foreign Office anyway, "and I probably couldn't stick the job at the Daily Telegraph".

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office had fixed Monday 28 May as the date for confronting Maclean with their suspicions. Philby notified Burgess who, on Friday 25 May, bought two tickets for a weekend channel cruise on the steamship Falaise. These short cruises docked at the French port of Saint-Malo, where passengers could disembark for a few hours without passport checks. Burgess also hired a saloon car, and that evening drove to Maclean's house at Tatsfield, Surrey, where he introduced himself to Maclean's wife Melinda as "Roger Styles". After the three had dined, Burgess and Maclean drove rapidly to Southampton, boarding Falaise just before its midnight departure–the hired car was left abandoned on the quayside.

The pair's subsequent movements were revealed later. On arrival in Saint-Malo, they took a taxi to Rennes, then travelled by rail to Paris and on to Bern in Switzerland. Here, by prior arrangement, they were issued with papers at the Soviet embassy before travelling to Zürich, where they caught a flight to Prague. Safely behind the Iron Curtain, they were able to proceed smoothly on the final stages of their journey to Moscow.

In the Soviet Union

After being held in Moscow for a short period, Burgess and Maclean were sent to Kuybyshev, an industrial city in the Russian SFSR which Burgess described as "permanently like Glasgow on a Saturday night". He and Maclean were granted Soviet citizenship in October 1951, and took fresh identities: Burgess became "Jim Andreyevitch". Unlike Maclean, who learned the Russian language and quickly took up useful work, Burgess spent much of his time reading, drinking and complaining to the authorities about his treatment–he had not intended his stay to be permanent. He expected to be permitted to return to England, where he thought he could brazen out his MI5 interrogation. Despite Soviet legal intolerance of homosexuality, he was allowed to retain a Russian romantic partner, Tolya Chisekov. By early 1956 Burgess had moved back to Moscow, to a flat on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street and was working part-time at the Foreign Literature Publishing House, promoting the translation of classic British novels.

In February 1956, the Soviet government allowed Burgess and Maclean to hold a brief press conference, which included two Western journalists, Richard Hughes of The Sunday Times and Sydney Weiland of Reuters–the first concrete proof to the West that the missing diplomats were still alive. In a short statement, they denied they were communist spies and claimed they had come to Moscow "to achieve better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West". In Britain, reaction to their reappearance was strongly condemning, epitomized in a series of articles in The People, purportedly written by Burgess's former friend Rees. The articles, which described Burgess as "the greatest traitor in our history", sought to emphasize his dissolute lifestyle and, in the opinion of his biographer Sheila Kerr, "did much to prolong and accentuate repressive attitudes to homosexuality" in Britain.

In July 1956, the Soviet authorities allowed Burgess's mother to visit her son. She stayed a month, mainly in the holiday resort of Sochi. During August the journalist and Labour politician Tom Driberg flew to Moscow to interview Burgess, the two having first met through The Week in Westminster. On his return, Driberg wrote a book in which Burgess was portrayed relatively sympathetically. Some assumed that the content had been vetted by the KGB as a propaganda exercise; others thought its purpose was to trap Burgess into revealing information that could lead to his prosecution, should he ever return to Britain.

Over the following years, Burgess received numerous visitors from England. Sir Michael Redgrave arrived with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in February 1959; this visit led to Burgess' meeting with the actress Coral Browne, a friendship that became the subject of Alan Bennett's play An Englishman Abroad. In the same year Burgess did a filmed interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In it, Burgess revealed that while he wished to continue living in the Soviet Union, he maintained an affection for his home country. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited Moscow in 1959, Burgess offered his expertise to the visiting party (he had once spent an evening with Macmillan at the Reform Club). His offer was declined, but he used this opportunity to lobby officials for permission to visit Britain where, he said, his mother was sick. Although aware of legal advice that a successful prosecution against Burgess would be problematic, the Foreign Office issued statements implying he would face instant arrest in Britain. Burgess chose not to put the issue to the test.

Decline and death

Burgess suffered from increasing ill health, largely due to a lifestyle based on poor food and excessive alcohol. In 1960 and 1961 he was treated in hospital for arteriosclerosis and ulcers, on the latter occasion being close to death. In April 1962, writing to his friend Esther Whitfield, he indicated how his belongings should be allocated should he die – Blunt, Philby and his romantic partner Chisekov were all named as beneficiaries.

In January 1963 Philby defected to Moscow, having finally been unmasked after official exoneration by Macmillan in November 1955. He and Burgess kept apart, though they may have met briefly when the latter was on his deathbed in August 1963. Burgess died on 30 August 1963, of arteriosclerosis and acute liver failure. He was cremated five days later; Nigel Burgess represented the family, and Maclean delivered a eulogy describing his co-defector as "a gifted and courageous man who devoted his life to the cause of a better world". Burgess's ashes were returned to England, and on 5 October 1963 were interred in the family plot at St John the Evangelist Churchyard in West Meon.

Assessment

Modin considered Burgess the leader of the Cambridge spies: "He held the group together, infused it with his energy and led it into battle". He sent quantities of information to Moscow–thousands of documents including policy papers, Cabinet minutes and notes of Imperial General Staff meetings. According to Holzman, "Burgess and Maclean ensured that hardly anything done by the British Foreign Office was not known to the Soviet foreign intelligence services". However, views are divided as to what use the Soviets made of this information, or whether they trusted it. Released papers by the Foreign Intelligence Services of the Russian Federation record that "of particular value was the information [he] obtained about the positions of Western countries on the postwar settlement in Europe, Britain's military strategy, NATO [and] the activities of British and American intelligence agencies". But the apparent ease with which Burgess and his colleagues could acquire and send such volumes of data also created suspicions in Moscow that they were being fed misinformation. Thus, the extent of damage to British interests suffered by Burgess's activities is a matter of conjecture; Kerr concludes that "despite much-fevered speculation ... there is too little evidence on the effects of [Burgess's] espionage and his influence upon international politics for a credible assessment to be feasible."

The British establishment found it difficult to accept how someone of Burgess's background and education could betray the system that had sustained him in comfort and privilege. According to Rebecca West in The Meaning of Treason, the demoralisation and panic caused by Burgess's defection was of greater value than the information he passed to the Soviets. The damage to U.S. intelligence co-operation was severe; all atomic intelligence liaison between the two countries was suspended for several years. Foreign Office complacency about recruitment and security was shattered, and although positive vetting was belatedly introduced, the diplomatic service suffered what Burgess's biographer Andrew Lownie calls "a culture of suspicion and mistrust that was still being played out half a century after the 1951 flight".

Against the popular denunciations of "traitor" and "spy", Burgess was, in Holzman's words, a revolutionary and idealist, identifying with those who thought that their society "was deeply unjust and that its Empire spread this injustice throughout the world". He never deviated from the ideological justification that he gave on his reappearance in 1956; he believed that the stark choice to be made in the twentieth century was between America and the Soviet Union. Noel Annan, in his account of British intellectual life between the world wars, states that Burgess "was a true Stalinist who hated liberals more than imperialists" and "simply believed that Britain's future lay with Russia not America". Burgess insisted there was no viable case against him in England (a view secretly shared by British authorities), but would not visit there, since he might be prevented from returning to Moscow where he wished to live "because I am a socialist and this is a socialist country".