Guy Burgess

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Guy Burgess

Born Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess
April 11, 1911(1911-04-11)
Devonport, Plymouth, Devon, England
Died August 30, 1963 (aged 52)
Moscow, Russia
Cause of death alcoholism
Nationality British

Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed allied secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy.

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[edit] Biography

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born on 16 April 1911 at 2 Albemarle Villas, Devonport, the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep Schooland the a period at Eton College Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos (1932) and an aegrotat in part two (1933), and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. Whilst at Cambridge , where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt. Like Blunt, Burgess was gay.

Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the Producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in that conflict. Burgess and the other members of the "Five" were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals.

Wanted poster of Burgess (right) with Donald Duart Maclean.
Wanted poster of Burgess (right) with Donald Duart Maclean.

Burgess was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington DC, Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things: "the race thing", contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. "Oh," quipped Burgess, "you mean I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson?"

Assigned to the British embassy in the USA, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties. The FBI described him in a report as "a loud, foul-mouthed queer with a penchant for seducing hitchhikers."[citation needed]

Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany MacLean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the USSR very well. Homosexuality was far less acceptable in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

Harold Nicolson, diplomat and writer, describes Burgess a year before his defection in a letter to his wife:

'I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.'
-Harold Nicolson to his wife Vita Sackville-West, 25 January 1950

[edit] Chronology

[edit] Works based on his life

[edit] Biographies, etc.

Deacon, Richard (1986), The Cambridge Apostles: a History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society.

Modin, Yuri (1994), My Five Cambridge Friends.

Newton, Verne W. (1991), The Cambridge Spies: the Untold Story of Maclean, Philby, and Burgess in America.

[edit] See also

  • Mitrokhin Archive
  • Barrie Penrose & Simon Freeman, "Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, New York, 1987.
  • Kim Philby, "My Silent War," New York, 2002. ISBN 0-375-75983-2.