The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies, recruited in part by Russian talent spotter Arnold Deutsch in the United Kingdom, who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and at least into the early 1950s. Four members of the ring have been identified: Kim Philby (cryptonym: Stanley), Donald Duart Maclean (cryptonym: Homer), Guy Burgess (cryptonym: Hicks) and Anthony Blunt (cryptonym: Johnson); jointly they are known as the Cambridge Four.
Several people have been suspected of being the "fifth man" of the group; John Cairncross (cryptonym: Liszt) was identified as such by Oleg Gordievsky, though many others have also been accused of membership in the Cambridge ring.
The term "Cambridge" in the name Cambridge Five refers to the conversion of the group to communism during their education at Cambridge University in the 1930s. The four known members all attended the university, as did the alleged fifth man, Cairncross. Debate surrounds the exact timing of their recruitment by Soviet intelligence; Anthony Blunt claimed that they were not recruited as agents until they had graduated. Blunt, a Fellow of Trinity College, was several years older than Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; he acted as a talent-spotter and recruiter.
Both Blunt and Burgess were members of the Apostles, an exclusive and prestigious society based at Trinity and King's Colleges. John Cairncross, long suspected of having been the 'Fifth Man', and formally identified as a Soviet agent in 1990, was also an Apostle.
Other Apostles accused of having spied for the Soviets include Michael Whitney Straight, Victor Rothschild, research fellow Lewis Daly and Guy Liddell.
Contents |
All four were active during World War II, to various degrees of success. Philby, when he was posted in the British embassy in Washington, D.C. after the war, learned the U.S. and the British were searching for a British Embassy mole (cryptonym Homer) who was passing information to the Soviet Union, relying on material uncovered by VENONA.
Philby learned one of the suspects was Maclean. Realizing he had to act fast, he ordered Burgess, who was on the embassy staff as well and living with Philby, to warn Maclean in England, where he was serving in the Foreign Office headquarters. Burgess was recalled from the United States due to "bad behaviour" and upon reaching London warned Maclean.
In early summer 1951, Burgess and Maclean made international headlines by disappearing. Their whereabouts were unclear for some time. Strong suspicion that they had defected to the Soviet Union turned out to be correct, but was not made public until 1956, when the two appeared at a press conference in Moscow.
It was obvious they had been tipped off and Philby quickly became prime suspect, due to his close relations with Burgess. Though Burgess was not supposed to defect at the same time as Maclean, he went along. It has been claimed that the KGB ordered Burgess to go to Moscow. This move damaged Philby's reputation, with many speculating that had this not been the case, Philby could have climbed even higher in MI6.[1]
Investigation of Philby found several suspicious matters but nothing for which he could be prosecuted. Nevertheless he was forced to resign from MI6. In 1955 he was named in the press, with questions also raised in the House of Commons, as chief suspect for "the Third Man" and he called a press conference to deny the allegation.
Philby was officially cleared by then Foreign Secretary Harold MacMillan; this later turned out to be an error based on incomplete information and bureaucratic inefficiency in the British intelligence organizations.
In the later 1950s, Philby left the secret service and began working as a journalist in the Middle East; The Economist magazine provided his employment there. MI6 then re-employed him at around the same time, to provide reports from that region.
In 1961, defector Anatoliy Golitsyn provided information which pointed to Philby. An MI5 officer and friend of Philby from his earlier MI6 days, John Nicholas Rede Elliott was sent in 1963 to interview him in Beirut and reported that Philby seemed to know he was coming (indicating the presence of yet another mole). Nonetheless, Philby confessed to Elliott.
Shortly afterward, apparently fearing he might be abducted in Lebanon, Philby defected to the Soviet Union under cover of night aboard a Soviet freighter.
MI5 received information from American Michael Straight in 1964 which pointed to Blunt's espionage; the two had known each other at Cambridge some 30 years before and Blunt had tried to recruit Straight as a spy; Straight, who initially agreed, changed his mind afterwards.
Blunt was interrogated by MI5 and confessed in exchange for immunity from prosecution. By 1979 Blunt was publicly accused of being a Soviet agent by investigative journalist Andrew Boyle, in his book Climate of Treason. In November 1979, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher admitted to the House of Commons that Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet spy fifteen years previously.
As he was by 1964 without access to classified information, he had secretly been granted immunity by the Attorney General in exchange for revealing everything he knew. He provided a considerable amount of information, and preventing the Soviets from discovering his confession increased the value of his information.
The term "Five" began to be used in 1961, when KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn named Maclean and Burgess as part of a "Ring of Five", with Philby a 'probable' third, alongside two other agents whom he did not know.
Of all the information provided by Golitsyn, the only item that was ever independently confirmed was the Soviet affiliation of John Vassall. Vassall was a relatively low ranking spy who some researchers believe may have been sacrificed to protect a more senior one.
At the time of Golitsyn's defection, Philby had already been accused in the press and was living in a country with no extradition agreement with Britain. Select members of MI5 and MI6 already knew Philby to be a spy from VENONA decryptions. Golitsyn also provided other information that is widely regarded as highly improbable, such as the claim that Harold Wilson (then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) was a KGB agent.
Golitsyn's reliability remains a controversial subject and as such there is little certainty of the number of agents he assigned to the Cambridge spy ring. To add to the confusion, when Blunt finally confessed, he named several other people as having been recruited by him.
On the basis of the information provided by Golitsyn, speculation raged for many years as to the identity of the "Fifth Man". The journalistic popularity of this phrase owes something to the unrelated novels The Third Man and The Tenth Man, both written by Graham Greene - who, coincidentally, knew and worked alongside Philby during the Second World War.
It is now widely accepted that the spy ring had more than five members, possibly many more, since three other persons are known to have confessed, several more were nominated in confessions, and circumstantial cases have been made against others. The following were certainly Soviet spies.[2]
Ludwig Wittgenstein is alleged to have been a Soviet recruiter at Cambridge by Kimberley Cornish in his 1998 book The Jew of Linz, but his theories about Wittgenstein and the influence of Wittgenstein on Hitler have found little acceptance.