Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era.

[1] His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.

This post gave Burgess access to secret information on all aspects of Britain's foreign policy during the critical post-1945 period, and it is estimated that he passed thousands of documents to his Soviet controllers.

[27] In June 1931 Burgess designed the stage sets for a student production of Bernard Shaw's play Captain Brassbound's Conversion, with Michael Redgrave in the leading role.

[32] This gave Burgess a greatly extended range of networking opportunities;[33] membership of the Apostles was ostensibly lifelong, so at the regular meetings he met many of the leading intellectuals of the day, such as G. M. Trevelyan, the university's Regius Professor of History; the writer E. M. Forster; and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

[35] Such events radicalised opinion in Cambridge and elsewhere;[36] according to Burgess's fellow Trinity student James Klugmann, "Life seemed to demonstrate the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and shouted aloud for some sort of quick, rational, simple alternative".

The protestors' objective, laying a wreath bearing a pacifist message at the Cambridge War Memorial, was achieved, despite attacks and counter-demonstrations which included what the historian Martin Garrett describes as "a hail of pro-war eggs and tomatoes".

[47] In February 1934 Burgess, Maclean and fellow members of CUSS welcomed the Tyneside and Tees-side contingents of that month's National Hunger March, as they passed through Cambridge on their way to London.

[79] 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.

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.

[85][86][87] 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.

[90] He was trusted sufficiently to be used as a back channel of communication between Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Edouard Daladier, during the period leading to the 1938 Munich summit.

[92] MI6 was by now convinced of his future utility, and he accepted a job with its new propaganda division, known as Section D.[93] 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.

[99] After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Burgess and Philby, the latter of whom had been brought into Section D on his recommendation,[100] ran a training course for would-be saboteurs at Brickendonbury Manor in Hertfordshire.

Philby was posted to a SOE training school in Beaulieu and Burgess, who in September had been arrested for drunken driving (the charge was dismissed on payment of costs), found himself at the end of the year out of a job.

[119] Burgess's casual work for British intelligence deflected official suspicion as to his true loyalties,[120] but he lived in constant fear of exposure, particularly as he had revealed the truth to Rees when trying to recruit the latter in 1937.

[145] Later in 1949, a holiday in Gibraltar and North Africa became a catalogue of drunkenness, promiscuous sex and arguments with diplomatic and MI6 staff, exacerbated by the openly homophobic attitudes towards Burgess by some local officials.

[157] Early in 1951 a series of indiscretions, including three speeding tickets on a single day, made his position at the embassy untenable, and he was ordered by the ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, to return to London.

[158][n 11] Meanwhile, the United States Army's Venona counterintelligence project, investigating the identity of a Soviet spy codenamed "Homer" who had been active in Washington a few years earlier, had unearthed strong evidence that pointed to Maclean.

[176] The news of the double flight alarmed the Americans, following the recent conviction of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and the defection of the physicist Bruno Pontecorvo the previous year.

[196] By early 1956 Burgess had moved back to Moscow, to a flat on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street [Wikidata][192] and was working part-time at the Foreign Literature Publishing House, promoting the translation of classic British novels.

[194] In February 1956, the Soviet government allowed Burgess and Maclean to hold a brief press conference, which included two Western journalists, Richard Hughes of The Sunday Times and Sydney Weiland of Reuters–the first concrete proof to the West that the missing diplomats were still alive.

Redgrave came with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in February 1959; this visit led to Burgess's meeting with the actress Coral Browne, a friendship later the subject of Alan Bennett's play An Englishman Abroad.

He was cremated five days later; Nigel Burgess represented the family, and Maclean delivered a eulogy describing his co-defector as "a gifted and courageous man who devoted his life to the cause of a better world".

[229] Foreign Office complacency about recruitment and security was shattered, and although positive vetting was belatedly introduced,[203] the diplomatic service suffered what Burgess's biographer Andrew Lownie calls "a culture of suspicion and mistrust that was still being played out half a century after the 1951 flight".

[230] Against the popular denunciations of "traitor" and "spy", Burgess was, in Holzman's words, a revolutionary and idealist, identifying with those who thought that their society "was deeply unjust and that its Empire spread this injustice throughout the world".

[232] Noel Annan, in his account of British intellectual life between the world wars, states that Burgess "was a true Stalinist who hated liberals more than imperialists" and "simply believed that Britain's future lay with Russia not America".

[235] Holzman stresses the high price of Burgess's political continuing commitment, which "cost him everything else he valued: the possibility of fulfilling intimate relationships, the social life that revolved around the BBC, Fleet Street and Whitehall, even the chance to be with his mother as she lay dying".

An early (1954) novel, The Troubled Midnight by Rodney Garland, was followed by, among others, Nicholas Monsarrat's Smith and Jones (1963), and Michael Dobbs's Winston's War (2003),[244] which builds on the pre-war meeting between Burgess and Churchill.

A book review in The Guardian included this conclusion: "[leaving] us all the more astonished that such a smelly, scruffy, lying, gabby, promiscuous, drunken slob could penetrate the heart of the establishment without anyone apparently noticing that he was also a Soviet master spy.