GUY BURGESS deliberately fled to Russia regardless of the consequences for his fellow Cambridge spies, according to his old friend Anthony Blunt.
The flight of Burgess and his fellow Russian agent Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951 has long been one of the most hotly debated episodes in the history of the infamous Cambridge spy ring.
Burgess’s departure immediately threw suspicion on two of the remaining members of the group – his old associates Kim Philby and Blunt himself.
It was particularly puzzling as, while Blunt was then of limited value to his Russian spymasters, having stopped working for MI5 at the end of the second World War, Philby was being groomed as the next chief of MI6 and was a prize KGB asset.
Some accounts have suggested that Burgess was ordered to go by his Soviet controllers because they feared he was cracking up and would be a liability if he remained in Britain.
But in his memoir, made public yesterday in the British Library after a 25-year restriction, Blunt said he was in “no doubt” that Burgess chose to go, even though it would put his friends in danger.
The defection of the two spies was prompted by the discovery by Philby – who was at that time the senior MI6 officer in Washington – that Maclean was about to be unmasked following the cracking of the Russians’ wartime codes.
According to the generally accepted account, he decided to get a message back to Maclean through Burgess who was working in the British embassy in Washington and was staying with Philby and his wife. Burgess then famously managed to get himself sent home in disgrace after being arrested three times on the same day for speeding.
In his memoir, Blunt rejects the idea that it was an “artfully pre-planned” incident, as some writers have suggested, but acknowledges that it was an “incredibly lucky” coincidence from Maclean’s point of view. He said that, on his return to England, Burgess immediately contacted Maclean to warn him that the “net was closing round him” and that he would almost certainly be interrogated in a matter of days.
Blunt insists that he played no “active part” in arranging their escape plan via a cross-channel ferry to France, although he acknowledged that he had been in “constant contact” with Burgess throughout.
He said that, at first, Burgess’s meetings with his Russian contact were purely to discuss Maclean’s escape and no mention was made of Burgess going as well, but at some point the plan changed.
“I remember Guy coming to see me at Portman Square and saying ‘they’ – ie those in control of his contact – had decided he should go with Donald, on the grounds that Donald was not in a fit state to carry out the complicated arrangement which had been made.”
Blunt said that, at the time, he accepted this at face value, unaware that, before leaving America, Burgess had been urged by Philby not to defect as well as it would jeopardise his own position.
“It was only much later that Kim told me that his last words to Guy in America were ‘Don’t you go too’,” he wrote. “In fact I have no doubt that the suggestion was made by Guy himself. In fact, he knew he was finished and decided to get out, not taking into account the consequences that this action might have for his friends.”
The disappearance of the two diplomats together finally brought home to the British authorities that they had a Russian spy ring in their midst. Philby and Blunt both came under suspicion – although Blunt was still able to use his MI5 contacts to offer to let them into Burgess’s flat without the need for a search warrant.
He said he managed to use the opportunity to remove two incriminating documents linking him and Philby to the case from under the noses of the investigators.
One was a note Blunt had written to Burgess arranging for him to meet John Cairncross – the so-called “Fifth Man” in the spy ring – and the other was from Philby urging Burgess to make a decision quickly as “the heat was very great” in Washington.
Despite the suspicions no evidence was found to prove either man was a spy and Philby was able to carry on working for MI6.
In 1955, after Philby was publicly accused of being the “Third Man” after Burgess and Maclean, Blunt said cryptically that he was able pass on a message that enabled Philby to re-establish contact with the Russians.
“This was my last contact with the Russians,” he stated.
Meanwhile, Philby was moved to Beirut – under the cover of being a newspaper correspondent – from where he too defected to Moscow in 1963. – (PA)
The ‘Fourth Man’: part of most effective spy ring in modern espionage
It began in the heady days of Cambridge in the 1930s when enthusiasm for the Communist cause had an “almost religious quality” and ended with him contemplating suicide in the face of public disgrace.
Anthony Blunt - surveyor of the queen’s pictures and Russian agent - was the so-called “Fourth Man” in the infamous Cambridge spy ring, probably the most effective in the history of modern espionage.
A quarter of a century after his death his own account of his extraordinary life, was finally made public yesterday in a 30,000-word manuscript lodged in the British Library in London.
The document, written after he was publicly exposed in 1979, was given to the library anonymously in 1984 - shortly after Blunt's death - on condition that it should remain closed for 25 years.
While it stays largely silent about his spying activities it nevertheless offers his own version of how he came to be recruited and eventually unmasked as an agent for the NKVD - forerunner of the KGB.
In it, Blunt describes his decision to spy for Russia, urged on by his friend and fellow agent Guy Burgess, as "the biggest mistake of my life". Although Blunt, like Burgess, was homosexual, he reiterates in the manuscript his public insistence that there was "nothing sexual" in their relationship.
He was, however, caught up in Burgess's enthusiasm for left-wing politics which had gained an "almost a religious quality" in the university.
In late 1935 or 1936, Blunt said that his friend made clear he had been recruited by Stalin’s Comintern with orders to “go underground”, giving up his Communist Party membership and taking a job in government service or the BBC. He urged Blunt to follow him.
While the memoir contains a wealth of fascinating detail, it is also devoid of any startling new revelations, not least the details of his own espionage activities, passing secret documents to the Russians while serving as an MI5 officer during the second World War. Above all he is at pains not to incriminate anyone not already implicated in the world of the Cambridge spies - failing to name any of his Russian contacts. - (PA)