![]() ![]() This suspicion tainted the KGB careers of all four. Could the British authorities be so stupid to as to allow men of such left-wing backgrounds into positions of trust in the establishment? How could Philby, who had helped Communists escape from Vienna and had then married a Viennese Communist, get through the security checks that the SIS must carry out on all those it recruited? Officers argued that it had been all too easy for the Cambridge ring. ![]() The KGB files show that a powerful section of the KGB believed that this was the case. And all the while they were establishing themselves in these positions, these four men were reporting to Moscow. Even more astoundingly, Philby was an officer in the SIS. By the time World War Two was underway, Maclean was climbing the ladder in the Foreign Office, Burgess was an intimate of prominent politicians, and Blunt was an officer in the Security Service - MI5. The KGB believed that recruiting clever people from a respected university was a good game plan, because the chances were that sometime in the future these young men would be among Britain's rulers and well placed to betray their country's secrets. So, when they were approached by a recruiter from Moscow, the four young men agreed to serve the KGB. They also thought that only the Soviet Union would be powerful enough to defeat Fascism. They believed that the democracies would prove too weak to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, and they knew that many people in Britain did indeed admire these leaders. To many young students at Cambridge University, privileged though they were, this was worrying and unacceptable.įour of them - Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt - wanted to do something about it. Fascism was on the march in Germany and Italy. The Great Depression had caused widespread unemployment. ![]() In the early 1930s, the democratic world appeared to be in trouble. And from this tale we can draw some startling conclusions about the nature of espionage and its real value in the modern world. In the new political climate, it became possible to tell the story both from Britain's point of view and through the eyes of the KGB. The present author once wrote that the truth could not be told 'until the files of the KGB, the CIA and the SIS are all opened to public scrutiny' - little dreaming that this would ever happen.īut when Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, this is exactly what did occur, and thus it became possible to tell the story of the four most remarkable spies of the Cold War, four larger-than-life Englishmen: HAR (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom betrayed their country to spy for Moscow. The soldiers in this war were the spymasters, the spies and their agents, all of whom operated in a world of shadows where deception and betrayal flourished.ĭuring the spy war it was impossible to write authoritatively about it. The aim of each was to steal the secrets of the other side, to try to peer inside the mind of the enemy, to fathom his intentions, and to neutralise them before they could be executed. ![]()
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