era. His
, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.
. An assiduous networker, he embraced left-wing politics at Cambridge and joined the
Burgess was
recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future
double-agent Harold "Kim" Philby. Early in 1934
Arnold Deutsch, a longstanding Soviet secret agent, arrived in London under the cover of a research appointment at
University College, London. Known as "Otto", his brief was to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities, who might in future occupy leading positions in British institutions. In June 1934 he recruited Philby, who had come to the Soviets' notice earlier that year in Vienna where he had been involved in demonstrations against the
Dollfuss government. Philby recommended several of his Cambridge associates to Deutsch, including Maclean, by this time working in the
Foreign Office. He also recommended Burgess, although with some reservations on account of the latter's
erratic personality. Deutsch considered Burgess worth the risk, "an
extremely well-educated fellow, with valuable social connections, and the inclinations of an adventurer". Burgess was given the codename "
Mädchen", meaning "Girl", later changed to "Hicks". Burgess then persuaded Blunt that he could best fight
fascism by working for the Soviets. A few years later another Apostle,
John Cairncross, was recruited by Burgess and Blunt, to complete the spy ring often characterised as the "
Cambridge Five".
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
Anthony Blunt, several times, the well-connected writer-politician
Harold Nicolson (a fruitful source of high-level gossip), the poet
John Betjeman, and
Harold (“Kim”) 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 the statesman 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 the British intelligence agencies, 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 the British prime minister,
Neville Chamberlain, and his French counterpart
Edouard Daladier, during the period leading to the 1938 Munich summit.
38-10-6 Frederick Wolff Ogilvie ⇒ BBC Chief 6 Oct 1938 - BrMo > .
At the BBC, Burgess thought his choices of speaker were being undermined by the BBC'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.
As well as making programmes for the public, the
wartime BBC was involved in a range of
top secret activity, working with closely with the intelligence agencies and military.
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.
In
mid-January 1941 Burgess rejoined the BBC Talks Department, while continuing to carry out
freelance intelligence work, both for
MI6 and its
domestic intelligence counterpart MI5, which he had
joined in a supernumerary capacity in 1940. After
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the BBC required Burgess to select speakers who would
depict Britain's new Soviet ally in a favourable light. He turned again to Blunt, and to his old Cambridge friend Jim Lees, and in 1942 arranged a broadcast by Ernst Henri, a Soviet agent masquerading as a journalist. No transcript of Henri's talk survives, but listeners remembered it as pure Soviet propaganda. In
October 1941 Burgess took charge of the
flagship political programme The Week in Westminster, which gave him
almost unlimited access to Parliament. Information gleaned from
regular wining, lunching and gossiping with MPs was invaluable to the Soviets, regardless of the content of the programmes that resulted. Burgess sought to maintain a political balance; his fellow Etonian
Quintin Hogg, a future Conservative
Lord Chancellor, was a regular broadcaster, as, from the opposite social and political spectrum, was
Hector McNeil, a former journalist who became a
Labour MP in 1941 and served as a
parliamentary private secretary in the
Churchill war ministry.
Burgess had lived in a Chester Square flat since
1935. From
Easter 1941 he shared a house with Blunt and others at No. 5
Bentinck Street.
Burgess's casual work for MI5 and MI6 deflected official suspicion as to his true loyalties, but he lived in constant fear of exposure, particularly as he had revealed the truth to
Goronwy Rees, a young Fellow of
All Souls College, when trying to recruit the latter in
1937. ... Always seeking ways of further penetrating the citadels of power, when in June 1944 Burgess was offered a job in the
News Department of the Foreign Office, he accepted it. The BBC reluctantly assented to his release, stating that his departure would be "a serious loss".
BBC - Guy Burgess ..
