Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  Not only did he prove to be indispensable to Russia, but also to his friends Philby, Burgess and McLean, who fled to Moscow in 1951. Aware that the authorities would want to search Burgess’s flat, Blunt, who was in possession of a key, made sure he was there to let them in. While they were searching the flat, Blunt noticed three letters that would implicate his friends in espionage, so he quickly concealed them in his pocket. As a valuable asset, and because they knew he would be interrogated, the Russians advised Blunt to defect immediately. Blunt, who was so pleased with his new royal position, was not so keen to leave the UK, and he told the Russians that he would be able to withstand any type of interrogation. He proved this fact when, for the next twelve years Blunt was interrogated eleven times, and on not one occasion did he crack.

  In 1963, Blunt’s luck ran out. A former university friend was offered a job as art consultant to President Kennedy. However, before taking the job he decided to clear his conscience and named Blunt as the Soviet agent who had recruited him. When Blunt was accused by an MI5 agent, he was told that if he confessed he would be immune from prosecution. Blunt confessed, and the slate was wiped clean. During his confession, Blunt told MI5 the names of other people he had recruited, but also gave them some misleading advice to protect his friends, Burgess, McLean and Philby.

  No one really knows why Blunt was offered immunity, but many believe it was because of his royal connections. In 1946, he was asked to go on a mission to Germany to retrieve some papers. Although the full details of this mission have never been revealed it resulted in him not only being presented with the Commander of the Royal Victorian Order but a knighthood as well.

  It wasn’t until 1979, when a book was published about the Cambridge Spies, that Blunt was publicly exposed and stripped of all of his titles. He died in disgrace in 1983.

  GUY BURGESS

  Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, was the rather eccentric son of a naval commander. He was at Cambridge University from 1930 studying History. He met Anthony Blunt when he joined the Cambridge Apostles, but was often an embarrassment to the society due to his heavy drinking and open homosexuality.

  Burgess became a personal assistant to Jack McNamara, a Conservative MP, and quickly fitted into the rich and influential lifestyle. As well as working for McNamara, Burgess also worked for the BBC, which gave him the opportunity to meet influential people and obtain important information, which he subsequently passed on to Moscow. Using his contacts he managed to ingratiate himself with members of the British intelligence, and in 1939, he was offered a full-time job with MI6.

  At the beginning of the war the Secret Service were desperate for new recruits, and Burgess was given the job of finding suitable candidates. He chose to look for these men in the elite drinking clubs of London, but by the 1950s his heavy drinking lost him his job. He was posted to Washington, where Kim Philby took him under his wing and tried to get him to amend his ways. This was something that he later regretted, when he asked Burgess to do him a favour.

  British intelligence had got wind that another member of the Cambridge spies, Donald McLean, was spying for Russia. Both Philby and the Russians were worried about him cracking under interrogation and it was decided to send him to Moscow without delay. Burgess was sent to make sure that McLean stayed one step ahead of MI6. When Burgess learned how close the MI6 were, he packed up his car and headed to McLean’s house, and drove them to Southampton. Nothing was heard from either of them for a few months, when they eventually turned up in Moscow. McLean was supposed to travel on his own, but Burgess decided he would be his travelling companion, much to the disgust of Philby and the KGB.

  Guy Burgess, who never really gave up his drinking lifestyle, died in misery in Russia in 1963. He never settled in his new homeland and was said to have always felt out of place.

  DONALD McLEAN

  Donald McLean was rather shy, the son of a puritanical Liberal MP. He arrived at Cambridge in 1931 and studied French. In 1935, he passed the entrance exam to join the Foreign Office and was posted to Paris. He soon made a name for himself in the Diplomatic Corps, and in 1944 was made Head of Chancery at the embassy in Washington. The KGB could not believe their luck, as secret documents about the heads of the UK, Canada and the USA landed on their desks.

  Russia was even more delighted when McLean was made secretary of the combined Policy Committee, which was dealing with the classified Manhattan Project. He passed secret after secret, making himself one of the best agents the KGB had ever used.

  By the early 1950s, just like Burgess, the strains of a double life were starting to take their toll. He was drinking heavily and started making indiscreet comments in inappropriate places. However, instead of losing his job, he was transferred to a high position in Cairo where his anti-American opinions became too much of an embarrassment. He was arrested and deported back to the UK where he was told he had to ‘sort himself out’. After a few months he was given the job as head of the American Desk at the Foreign Office, which left the floodgates open for him to pass information on to Moscow about America’s involvement in the Korean War.

  Following the decoding of the Venona Transcripts, McLean was named as one of the spies involved in passing nuclear secrets. Moscow was frightened that he would crack under interrogation and ordered him to flee the country. He arrived in Moscow with his friend Burgess, where he was given a job in the Soviet Foreign Office. He died in 1983, an unhappy man, because his wife had left him and gone to live with Kim Philby.

  KIM PHILBY

  Harold Adrian Russell Philby was the son of St John Philby, a British diplomat, an explorer, author and adviser to King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia. He got his nickname ‘Kim’ from a book of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, which was a story about a young Irish-Indian boy who was a spy for the British in India. Philby studied History and Economics at Cambridge from 1929.

  Philby became a committed communist and went to Vienna to help refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. He even went as far as marrying his landlady’s daughter, Litzi Friedman, a Jewish communist, to help her flee Austria as a British subject.

  On the orders of Moscow, in 1936, Philby toned down his communist beliefs, appearing at Anglo-German meetings and editing a pro-Hitler magazine. In 1937, as a freelance journalist, Philby went to Spain to report on the war from Franco’s point of view. A car he was travelling in with three other journalists was hit by a shell, and Philby was the only one to survive. Franco was grateful for his support and in 1938 awarded him the Red Cross of Military Merit.

  In 1940, Guy Burgess introduced Philby to the chief of staff, Marjorie Maxse, at MI6, and suggested that she should recruit him. Philby impressed Maxse and after being given security clearance by Guy Liddell of MI5, he was given a key job in Iberia. His aim was to try and counter Nazi spies that had penetrated Spain and Portugal.

  Later the same year a senior Soviet intelligence officer, Walter Krivitsky, who had defected to the West, was brought back to London to be questioned by MI5. Krivitsky spilled the beans and gave details of sixty-one agents who were working in the UK. Although he was unable to disclose any names the description of one particular man – a journalist who had worked for a British newspaper during the Civil War – fitted Philby exactly. Another man he described was a Scotsman who had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, an idealist who worked for the Russians for no remuneration – just like Donald McLean. MI5 were not convinced with the Russian’s testimony and they decided not to follow up any of his leads.

  On February 10, 1941, Walter Krivitsky was found dead in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington. The first reports were that he had committed suicide, but most people within intelligence believed that his hiding place had been disclosed by a Soviet mole working for the MI5 and that he had been murdered by Soviet agents.

  During World War II, Philby was placed in charge of a propaganda training programme for the Special Operations Executive. By 1943 he was responsible for Spanish, French, Italian and African affairs and was
so successful that he caught the attention of Major General Stewart Menzies. Menzies was the Director-General of MI6, and he was so impressed with Philby that he placed him in charge of Section IX, which was responsible for Soviet Affairs.

  When the war was over, Philby was assigned to monitoring Soviet espionage. This was the perfect role for him because it meant he was able to protect his good friends, Burgess, McLean and Blunt. Their security was under threat in September 1945, when a Russian diplomat by the name of Constantin Volkhov approached the British vice-consul in Istanbul in Turkey. He said that he had information regarding three Soviet agents who were working within the Foreign Office. Philby was able to tell the KGB, who quickly arrested Volkhov and had him returned to the Soviet Union. Later the same month a cipher clerk in the Russian Legation who had defected to the West was also interviewed by MI5. However, even though he said he had evidence of a Soviet spy ring based in the UK, MI5 seemed to show little interest in the matter and no action was taken.

  In 1949, Philby was appointed as a liaison officer for MI6 in Washington. While in this post, he discovered that the SIS planned to overthrow Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator of Albania. Philby passed this information on to the KGB, who arrested all the Albanians involved in the plot and had them executed. Philby’s betrayal had cost 300 Albanians their lives.

  In 1950, Philby was put forward for the job as Director General of MI6. However, there was concern about the way Philby had been so willing to switch from being a communist sympathiser to a supporter of pro-fascist organisations and they decided to produce a report on him. When delving into his past, MI6 realised for the first time that the descriptions given to them by Krivitsky and Gouzenko were so close to that of Philby, that there was every possibility that he was a double agent.

  When Burgess and McLean defected to Russia in 1951, the finger pointed at Philby as the man who had tipped them off that they were being investigated by MI5. Under pressure from the prime minister, Clement Attlee, and several heads of MI5, Philby was interrogated by MI6. However, he was exonerated, but was recalled to London by the CIA. Due to pressure, Philby resigned his position at MI6 but continued to work for them on a part-time basis and was also paid £4,000 to compensate him for the loss of his job.

  The headlines in the New York Sunday Times on October 23, 1955, reported that Kim Philby was a Soviet spy. There was uproar in the House of Commons when politicians demanded to know if the prime minister had decided to cover up the dubious activites of Philby. Although the prime minister, then Anthony Eden, refused to give a reply, the foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan issued a statement a couple of days later:

  While in government service he [Philby] carried out his duties ably and conscientiously, and I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called ‘Third Man’, if indeed there was one.

  Although Macmillan knew that Philby was a spy, there was little he could do about it as there was no concrete evidence, other than order MI6 never to use him again. Philby, who now realised that he was safe, called a press conference, adamantly denying that he was a spy.

  I have never been a communist and the last time I spoke to a communist knowing he was one, was in 1934.

  Unbelievably, MI6 ignored the advice of Macmillan and continued to use the services of Philby, but on a more casual basis. Philby moved to the Middle East where he worked as a foreign correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, using this post as cover. While in the Middle East the CIA decided to keep him under observation.

  In 1961, a KGB agent by the name of Anatoli Golitsin, defected to the CIA and gave a very detailed debriefing about a man named Philby who had tipped off McLean and also as the man who lead a KGB operation in the Arab states. Golitsin was immediately flown to the USA and placed in a safe house called Ashford Farm near Washington. When MI5 interviewed Golitsin, he provided firm evidence that suggested that Philby had been a member of a ring of four, maybe five, agents who were based in the UK.

  The MI6 sent one of his agents, Nicholas Elliott, to Beirut to interview Philby. The Attorney General gave him instructions that Philby could be offered immunity from prosecution if he made a full confession. The KGB were one step ahead, and aware that Philby was about to be interrogated and planned an escape route for him. However, Philby was unable to run, because he knew it would endanger the informer who had warned Russia that he was in trouble. Instead, Philby made a carefully worded confession, full of misleading statements, which was designed to protect KGB moles in the UK. Philby signed his statement and the MI6 agent then flew back to the USA to show it to the CIA.

  Aware that he was on the verge of being arrested, Philby planned his own escape. On the night of January 23, 1963, when he was on his way to a dinner party with a female friend, he sent a message to London to say that he would be a little later. In fact he never arrived, and he turned up in Moscow six months later.

  Philby settled into his life in Moscow far better than Burgess and McLean. He was given a senior position in the KGB and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and full Russian citizenship. He wrote a book in 1968 called My Silent War, in which he openly admitted that he had been a Soviet spy for over thirty years. Kim Philby died in 1988 in Russia and was buried with full military honours.

  Of course, if communism had not fallen in 1989, the full story of these four remarkable pro-Soviet spies would never have been told. The most bitter fight between the Soviet Union and the West during the fifty years of the Cold War was on the espionage front. The aim of each side was to try and steal secrets and peer inside the inner depths of the enemy. In this new political climate, it allowed the Cambridge Spies to become notorious for being the most devastatingly successful spies in the history of modern intelligence. The four men had very little in common, except for their mutual belief in communism, and it is remarkable that they actually remained loyal to each other over such a long period of time. They were idealists, who were driven, above all, by their abhorration of fascism. Philby, the most successful of the four, had always dreamed of being a spy, thriving on the adventure and excitement. The greatest sacrifice all four men made was having to run away to Moscow, which was rather ironic as they spent the majority of their life doing everything for the Soviet Union. However, when they were actually forced to live there, they found it an incredibly grim place.

  ‘Falcon’ and ‘Snowman’

  Between April 1975 and January 1977, two young men, one a drug dealer and the other an intelligent dropout, sold sensitive US government secrets to the Soviet Union. The two men were Christopher Boyce, nicknamed ‘The Falcon’ because of his love of falconry, and his childhood friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, a heroin and cocaine dealer by trade, hence his nickname ‘The Snowman’.

  insight into their backgrounds

  Christopher Boyce was born on February 16, 1953, in Santa Monica, California. Christopher’s father, Charles, a former FBI agent, had moved west after he resigned from the intelligence services to work as a security executive for an aircraft manufacturer. Boyce was the eldest of nine children and was brought up under the strict Catholic beliefs of his mother, Noreen. The children grew up surrounded by law enforcement agents and police officers who loved to exchange stories about their work, and from an early age Boyce became enthralled with the thoughts of adventure and excitement. To him, undercover work sounded thrilling, feeding his already daredevil spirit and love of taking uncalculated risks. Very often Boyce’s love of adventure had disastrous consequences.

  Boyce’s best friend at the St John Fisher elementary school was Andrew Daulton Lee (more commonly known as Daulton), the adopted son of a wealthy physician. Daulton also had a pious Catholic upbringing, and the two boys attended the same church, both becoming altar boys. Although the boys spent much of their time together, their academic levels were very different. Boyce achieved ‘A’ grades with ease, while his friend struggled to obtain ‘C’s. Daulton found it hard
at school, preferring to work with his hands rather than his mind.

  As a teenager, Boyce joined a falconry club and, unlike his friends who drifted off to pursue other sports, Boyce became an expert. Daulton also shared his passion for the hunting birds and this caused the two teenagers to form an even closer bond.

  By sixteen, Boyce had grown into a handsome young man with an exceptionally amiable personality, which made him very popular with his fellow pupils. However, at school his grades started to slip as he found that some of the subjects were starting to get boring. He also suffered a crisis of faith and began to doubt many of the Catholic beliefs. He was becoming more and more disillusioned with the country he was living in as night after night he watched horrific pictures of the Vietnam War. He also began to doubt US politics during the Watergate scandal, and he questioned the abilities of the people who were supposed to be in charge of his country.

  Daulton, on the other hand, had very different problems. Neither his appearance or his personality attracted any close friends, and he became obsessed with his height, which was only 157 cm (5 ft 2 in). He developed a complex and became extremely obsessed by his appearance, believing that he was not attractive to the opposite sex. Although his grades were poor, Daulton showed a great talent in woodworking and impressed his teachers with intricate and detailed work. He decided he would like to become a carpenter, but his idea was ridiculed as he lived in a neighbourhood where people were respected for their brains not their brawn.

  Daulton soon found a way of making himself popular and numbing his feelings of worthlessness – he turned to marijuana and cocaine. Like many of his schoolmates he loved the false sense of security these substances provided, but Daulton went one step further in exchanging the drugs for sex.