The Cambridge Five - Five Men, One Betrayal, Thirty Years

Episode Title: The Cambridge Five — Five Men, One Betrayal, Thirty Years

Season 1, Episode 7 — The Spies & Secret Wars

Every story this season has been about deception aimed outward — at Nazi Germany. This one is different.

Five men. Recruited as students at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. Educated at one of the finest universities in the world. Trusted completely by the British establishments they entered — the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6, and Bletchley Park itself.

For decades, they passed everything they learned to Moscow.

Kim Philby rose to become head of MI6's counter-Soviet operations — the man responsible for stopping Soviet espionage, who was himself a Soviet agent. Donald Maclean gained access to the most sensitive Anglo-American atomic intelligence discussions of the war. Anthony Blunt walked through Bletchley Park and handed decoded German signals intelligence to Moscow at the same time it was shortening the war for the Allies. John Cairncross worked at Bletchley Park directly. And Guy Burgess was everywhere, passing everything.

They weren't recruited for money. They were recruited in the 1930s — when fascism was rising, when the Spanish Civil War was burning, when communism looked to many intelligent young people like the only serious response to what was coming. That context doesn't excuse what followed. But it explains how it began.

What followed cost real people their lives.

This is the episode that changes the shape of the entire season — and sets up the finale.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most significant intelligence failures in the history of the Western world.

Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com

Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to World War II Unwound, here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network, where every story matters, every truth deserves to be told, and every question is worth asking. I'm Alan Best. Every episode this season has been about deception aimed outward at Nazi Germany. Juan Puhol Garcia deceived the Abwehr. Eddie Chapman deceived the Abwehr. The body of Major William Martin deceived German intelligence at the very highest level. Even the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, in their own way, were turning German secrets against Germany. Today's story is different, and it is the hardest one this season to tell, because the deception in this story was not aimed at the enemy. It was aimed at Britain by five British citizens, educated at one of the finest universities in the world, who spent their careers inside the British Foreign Office, inside MI5, inside MI6, inside Bletchley Park itself, quietly handing what they learned to the Soviet Union. For decades. We're going to tell this story the way we tell every story on this show. Honestly, in full, without flattening anyone into a cartoon. These were five specific young men who came to a specific set of conclusions at a specific moment in history, the 1930s, when fascism was rising and democracy looked to many intelligent people like it might be losing. That context does not excuse what came after, but it explains how it began, and what came after cost people, real people with real names, their lives. This is the story of the Cambridge Five. Here is Harry.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Thanks, Alan. Between 1941 and 1945, the years Britain and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany, four men who held positions of trust inside the British government and British intelligence services handed thousands of classified documents to Soviet intelligence. By one accounting, more than 16,000 documents passed from these four men alone in that period. Close to 2,000 from one of them, over 4,000 each, from two others, and nearly 6,000 from the last. They did this while wearing British uniforms, holding British security clearances, and in some cases, working at the very heart of Britain's most secret codebreaking operation. The same operation we told you about in our third episode this season, the one that read Germany's ciphers and may have shortened the war by years. Some of that intelligence, intelligence Britain shared with no one, not even its closest allies, because revealing it could cost Britain the war, was quietly copied and sent to Moscow as well. And for most of that time, almost nobody suspected a thing. Not because these men were especially careful, although some of them were, it was because of who they were. They had been to the right schools, they had been to Cambridge, they moved in the right circles, had the right accents, knew the right people. In the British establishment of the mid-20th century, that was very often considered evidence enough. Five men recruited as students in the early 1930s, before any of this began. This is their story.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Harry, start at the beginning. Who were these five men and what was actually happening at Cambridge in the early 1930s that made this possible?

SPEAKER_02 3:33

The five men were Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known to everyone as Kim, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairn Cross. All five attended Cambridge University in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and all five were recruited at different times and by somewhat different routes into Soviet intelligence during that decade. To understand why, you have to understand what 1930s Cambridge actually felt like to a clever, idealistic young person. This was the height of the Great Depression. Mass unemployment had thrown the entire premise of liberal capitalist democracy into question across Europe and the United States. And looking at the alternatives on offer, fascism was visibly on the march, Mussolini already in power in Italy, Hitler taking power in Germany in 1933, and within a few years, the Spanish Civil War, in which an elected government was under direct assault from a fascist uprising backed by Hitler and Mussolini, while the Western democracies stood by and did, in the eyes of many on the left, essentially nothing. For a significant number of bright young people at Cambridge in this period, communism did not look like an exotic foreign ideology. It looked like the only political movement actually willing to fight fascism. Kim Philby went to Vienna after Cambridge and worked directly with Austrian socialists, helping Jewish and left-wing refugees escape the country after Austria's fascist government crushed an uprising in 1934. Anthony Blunt would later write, in his own account, that the rise of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War made it impossible, in his words, to stand aside any longer.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

So, this wasn't five people independently deciding to betray their country for money or for thrills. There was a real ideological current here.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

There was, and it is important to be honest about that, because it is the only way the rest of the story makes sense. None of the five were recruited primarily for money, this was not mercenary espionage in the way some Cold War spy cases were. Philby was the first, recruited in 1934 in London by a Soviet talent spotter named Arnold Deutsch, who was posing as an academic researcher. Philby, in turn, recommended two Cambridge friends, Donald McLean and Guy Burgess, who were both recruited the following year in 1935, and given specific instructions. Go into the British establishment, specifically diplomacy and government service, and build careers there. Not in obviously left-wing circles, but in the establishment itself. That instruction is, in retrospect, the single most consequential piece of tradecraft in the entire story. Anthony Blunt followed, recruited by Burgess sometime around 1936 or 1937, and the last of the five, John Carcross, was recruited by Blunt in 1938, which is why Cancross became known within the group and later in the historical record as the fifth man. By the time war broke out in 1939, all five were already positioned, or positioning themselves, inside institutions that would matter enormously over the next decade.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

And the instruction to blend into the establishment, that's the part that explains why nobody caught them for so long.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Precisely, and it interacted with something specific about British class culture in this period that made it devastatingly effective. The British security services of the 1930s and 1940s operated on an assumption, rarely stated explicitly but deeply embedded, that a certain kind of background, the right school, the right university, the right accent, the right social connections, was itself a form of vetting. People from that world simply were not the sort of people who became Soviet spies in the prevailing assumption, regardless of what radical opinions they might have flirted with as undergraduates. Plenty of respectable people had been mildly left-wing at university and grown out of it. Guy Burgess was famously well connected socially, by some accounts a friend of Winston Churchill's own niece. Donald McLean came from a distinguished political family. His father had been a cabinet minister. Anthony Blunt would go on to become a genuinely eminent art historian, eventually overseeing the royal collection itself as surveyor of the King's and later the Queen's pictures. These were not outsiders trying to break in. They were already inside, by birth and by education, and the institutions they joined extended to them exactly the kind of trust that comes automatically with that kind of belonging.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Take me through where each of them actually ended up during the war. Because I think the scale of this only becomes real when you understand exactly which doors they had access to.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

Let's go through it, because the placements are genuinely staggering taken together. Kim Philby joined the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1940 and rose with real speed. By the end of the war, he was head of the section dealing with counter-Soviet operations, which meant the man responsible for British efforts against Soviet espionage was himself a Soviet agent. Donald McLean was in the Foreign Office, and over the following years held postings in Paris, in Cairo, and, most consequentially, in Washington, where he gained access to early Anglo-American-Canadian discussions about atomic weapons cooperation, information of the highest possible sensitivity, which he passed to Moscow. Guy Burgess moved through several positions. The BBC, the Foreign Office, a period in British intelligence itself, and was a prolific source throughout. Anthony Blunt joined the Army's Intelligence Corps, and then MI-5, Britain's domestic security service, where he had access to material from Bletchley Park, including decoded German signals intelligence, the ultra material from the story we told you in episode 3. And John Cancross, the fifth man, worked for a time directly at Bletchley Park itself, with access to some of the most sensitive decrypted German military traffic in the entire war, including, by some accounts, intelligence relating to the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, fought on the Eastern Front in 1943.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Wait, so some of the ultra intelligence from Bletchley Park? The thing we spent an entire episode on was going to Moscow too through Blunt and Cairncross?

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Some of it, yes, and this is one of the strange wrinkles of the wartime period specifically, because for these particular years, the moral picture is genuinely more complicated than it would become later. Britain and the Soviet Union were allies. The Soviet Union was bearing an enormous share of the fighting and dying against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. There is a real argument, made at the time by some and by historians since, that intelligence about German military movements on the Eastern Front passed to an ally that was actively using it to kill German soldiers, served the same broad purpose the intelligence was gathered for in the first place, defeating Hitler. That argument has genuine force for the years 1941 to 1945. It has essentially none for what came next. Because none of the five stopped in 1945. The wartime alliance ended. The Cold War began almost immediately. And the same channels, the same habits, the same access, simply continued. Except that now the recipient was not a wartime ally fighting the same enemy. It was a rival superpower, and the information being passed now included things like the West's atomic secrets, NATO planning, and the identities of Western agents operating inside the Soviet bloc, people whose exposure, in several documented cases, got them killed.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

So walk me toward how this actually started to come apart. Because for 15, 20 years, apparently nothing.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

Yes, for roughly 15 years, essentially nothing, which is itself remarkable given the number of people involved and the sensitivity of what was being passed. The first crack came via a Soviet intelligence channel, known to history by its decryption codename, Venona, a joint American-British project that, beginning in the 1940s, slowly and painstakingly began decrypting old Soviet diplomatic cables. By 1951, Vanona analysis had narrowed in on evidence pointing toward Donald McLean, then serving in a senior foreign office role in Washington, Kim Philby, at that time MY6's own liaison officer in Washington, with direct access to the Venona findings, because his job was literally to be Britain's man inside that investigation, realised McLean was about to be exposed. In May 1951, Philby got word to Guy Burgess, who was also in Washington at the time, that McLean needed to be warned. Burgess travelled back to Britain, warned McLean, and on 25 May 1951, McLean and Burgess together fled Britain and disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

Disappeared to where? Because I assume everyone worked out fairly quickly where they'd gone.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Everyone assumed Moscow, and everyone was right, but it took five years for that to be confirmed publicly. Burgess and McLean simply vanished in May 1951 and were not seen again until February 1956, when the two of them held a small, carefully staged press conference in Moscow, confirming they had been living there the whole time as, in their own description, committed communists. The flight of Burgess and McLean was the first public rupture in the entire network. And it immediately threw suspicion onto Philby, since it was Philby who had been the last person known to have spoken to Burgess before the disappearance. Philby came under sustained suspicion for years. He was questioned. He was, in effect, professionally sidelined. And in 1955, in one of the more remarkable moments in this entire story, the British Foreign Secretary stood up in the House of Commons and formally cleared Philby's name, stating there was no evidence against him. There was, in fact, substantial circumstantial evidence, but pursuing it openly would have meant revealing the existence of Venona, which would have compromised an intelligent source of enormous ongoing value. So Philby was publicly exonerated by Parliament itself, while privately remaining under a cloud, for eight more years. Philby's eight years of half-exoneration ended in January 1963, in Beirut, where he had been living and working, nominally as a journalist, but in fact still doing occasional work for MY6, which says something remarkable on its own about how thoroughly his old colleagues still wanted to believe in him. An old friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliott, travelled to Beirut and confronted Philby directly with new evidence. Evidence that this time was not going to go away. Philby gave Elliot a partial confession, and then, within days, Philby vanished from Beirut entirely. He turned up in Moscow not long afterward, where he would live for the rest of his life. By most accounts adjusting to Soviet life better than Burgess or McLean ever had, continuing to work in some capacity with Soviet intelligence, and receiving, when he died in 1988, a state funeral. In 2010, the headquarters of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service unveiled a memorial plaque to him. Of the first three to be exposed, Burgess, McLean, and now Philby, all three ended their lives in the Soviet Union they had spent their careers serving.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

And Blunt and Karncross, the fourth and fifth men, their stories played out very differently and much more quietly?

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Very differently indeed. And this is in some ways the most uncomfortable part of the whole story for the British establishment, because of how long it took and how it was handled. The crack that eventually led to Blunt came from an unexpected direction. An American named Michael Strait, who had also been at Cambridge in the 1930s and had also been recruited by Blunt himself, came forward voluntarily to American authorities in 1963 and named Blunt. M.I. 5 interviewed Blunt in 1964. He confessed, in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution. And then, extraordinarily, he simply continued in his role as surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, the senior position responsible for the Royal Art Collection, for another eight years, until 1972. His confession remained a closely guarded secret for 15 years after that. The Queen herself was apparently not formally told until 1973, and reportedly took the news, according to a note from her private secretary, very calmly and without surprise. It was not until November 1979 that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stood up in the House of Commons and publicly named Anthony Blunt as the fourth man. He was stripped of his knighthood. He was never prosecuted, under the terms of the immunity he had been given 15 years earlier. He died in 1983.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

And Cairncross, the fifth man, and was the last to be named.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

The last, by a considerable margin. Suspicion had attached to Cairncross as early as 1951. Correspondence found after Burgess and McLean's disappearance pointed toward him, and he was quietly forced to resign from the civil service at that time. But he denied everything, for over a decade, and was not formally confronted until after Philby's defection in 1963. At which point, like Blunt, he confessed and was given immunity in exchange for cooperation. Unlike Blunt, though, Cairncross's role was not made public for decades. He was not publicly named as the fifth man until the 1990s, by which point he was an old man, living quietly in France. He spent his final years working on a memoir, which was published after his death in 1995. By the time the full shape of the Cambridge Five was publicly known, all five names confirmed, more than 60 years had passed since Philby's first recruitment in 1934.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

What is the honest full assessment of what these five men actually did?

SPEAKER_02 19:09

The honest assessment has to hold two things at once, and neither one cancels the other out. The first is that their initial motivation in the 1930s was real. A genuine, intelligent, and in its own context, defensible response to the rise of fascism, shared by many thoughtful people of that generation who never went anywhere near espionage. The second is that what they actually did, sustained over decades, caused damage that is very difficult to overstate. The wartime intelligence transferred between 1941 and 1945 exists in a genuinely grey moral space, given the alliance with the Soviet Union at that time. Everything after 1945 does not. Western agents operating behind the Iron Curtain were identified through information these men provided, and in a number of documented cases were arrested and executed as a direct result. Atomic secrets were transferred that accelerated the Soviet nuclear weapons program by some estimate of years. And the institutional damage, the decades-long climate of suspicion, the wasted investigative effort, the genuine question of how much else was compromised that was never discovered, reshaped British and American intelligence culture for the rest of the Cold War. Five clever young men, in the 1930s, decided they knew better than the institutions that would go on to trust them completely. People died because of what they did with that trust. Both of those sentences are true, and this story does not work if you only tell one of them.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Okay. This one is harder to sum up than the others, and I think that's the point. Every other story this season has had a clear shape. Someone deceiving an enemy, someone escaping an enemy, even a dead man fooling an enemy. This story doesn't have an enemy in that sense, not for most of it. It has five young men who looked at the world in the 1930s, saw something genuinely terrifying happening, and made a choice that felt to them like the only serious response to it. And then that choice just kept going. Long after the moment that justified it. If it ever fully did, had passed. And the part that sits with me most is how long it took, and how quiet it stayed. Blunt confessed in 1964 and kept his job at the palace for eight more years. The Queen wasn't told for almost a decade after that. Karen Cross wasn't publicly named until the 1990s. This wasn't a dramatic unmasking. It was decades of people who knew, choosing, for their own reasons, not to say so out loud. Five men recruited as students, thirty years, in some cases more, before the full truth was told. And real people whose names we'll likely never know who paid for it. Before Alan wraps us up, this episode asked us to hold two true things about the same people at the same time. A genuine, understandable motivation at the start, and a genuinely devastating outcome at the end. What part of the story resonated the most with you? Send your thoughts to beststorypublishing at gmail.com. We read everything, and your responses make this show better.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

And that's a wrap on today's episode of World War II Unwound here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. It genuinely means everything to this team, especially on an episode like this one. If today's episode sparked something in you, visit us at beststorypublishing.com and send your thoughts, your reactions, and your show ideas to beststorypublishing at gmail.com. As Amanda said, we read every single one. Next week is our season one finale, and after this episode, I think we all need it. We're closing out the season with one of the most genuinely unbelievable true stories of the entire war. A professional baseball catcher, a Princeton graduate who spoke multiple languages and had played in the major leagues, who ended up working for American intelligence in Europe, and who, in 1944, sat in a lecture hall in Switzerland listening to a speech by one of Nazi Germany's top nuclear scientists with a pistol in his pocket and instructions that if the lecture suggested Germany was close to building an atomic bomb, he was to use it. Mo Berg, Season 1 finale next week. Until then, keep asking questions, keep digging deeper, and never stop being curious. I'm Alan Best, and this is the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network.