Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

In the 1950s and 1960s, the British Intelligence community was shocked by a series of high-profile defections to the Soviet Union.  These defections proved to be devastating to British intelligence during the Cold War and may have led to the death or imprisonment of hundreds of undercover British operatives.  These defections changed Western intelligence gathering forever in ways that can still be felt today. Learn more about the Cambridge Five and how they influenced the Cold War on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Mint Mobile Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/eed MasterClass Get up to 50% off at MASTERCLASS.COM/EVERYWHERE Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! ButcherBox New users that sign up for ButcherBox will receive 2 lbs of grass-fed ground beef in every box for the lifetime of their subscription + $20 off your first box when you use code daily at checkout! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1950s and 1960s, the British intelligence community was rocked by a series of high-profile defections to the Soviet Union. These defections proved to be devastating to British intelligence during the Cold War and may have led to the death or imprisonment of hundreds of undercover British operatives. These defections changed Western intelligence gathering forever in ways that can still be felt today. Learn more about the Cambridge Five and how they influence the Cold War on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The Cold War was cold because it never got to a point where both sides engaged in a large-scale shooting war. That being said, there was a great deal of competition between the two sides that was just below that level. There were proxy wars that were fought in third-party countries. There was competition in sports. And there was competition in intelligence services.

Both sides ran extensive intelligence operations trying to gather information about the intentions and capabilities of the other side. A major part of intelligence operations was trying to get assets or double agents who were trusted figures on the other side who had access to high-level intelligence. This was far easier said than done. Turning an agent from the other side was difficult, and it often took years. In many respects, turning someone from the east block to the west was relatively easy. And I'm not saying it was easy, only comparatively so. Western nations could offer the promise of freedom and a better life for them and their families. Most people in the East were very much aware of the repression that they lived under

and what life was like in the West, if only by room. Gets. Getting someone to go from the west to the east, however, was another matter. The way the Soviets usually turned Western operatives was either through greed, love, or ideology. The spies who are the subject of this episode, who are known as the Cambridge Five, were all turned because of ideology. The story starts in 1929 in Cambridge University. Universities like Cambridge became hotbeds for ideological communism. The communist revolution in Russia was still fresh, and many idealistic students felt that the experiment unfolding in the Soviet Union was going to be the future of humanity.

Many of these students saw communism as the best response to the rising threat of fascism in continental Europe. This was a prime breeding ground for the Soviets to recruit assets to work on their behalf. Agents of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, were placed in universities like Cambridge and Oxford to recruit promising students who were ideologically committed to the communist cause. During the period from 1929 to 1935, Soviet agents identified five promising students from upper-class families who had become committed ideological communists. Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, John Karen Cross, and Kim Filby.

These students all knew each other, but despite the name Cambridge Five, they were not an organized group acting in unison. They were simply five men who were all recruited by the Soviets at roughly the same place and same time, who all shared the same ideological sympathies. Not all of them were recruited while they were attending Cambridge. Some of them were approached after they graduated. These five men were all extremely long-term projects. They were instructed to infiltrate British government institutions while pretending to be staunch anti-communists. In 1936, John Karencross joined the British Foreign Service. When Britain entered the war in 1939, positions opened up across the Civil Service.

In 1940, Kim Filby joined MI6, Guy Burgess joined MI5, and Donald McLean joined the foreign office. MI6 is the British equivalent of the CIA. They're responsible for foreign intelligence. MI5 is closer to the equivalent of the FBI in that they're responsible for domestic intelligence. During the war, the men were responsible for the passing of an enormous amount of intelligence to the Soviets. Given their positions within the government, they were able to get their hands-on highly classified information. In 1942, John Karencross began working at Bletchley Park, where work was being done on cracking the German Enigma Code.

And in 1943, he then moved to MI6. For the most part, the five thought that what they were doing was acceptable because the Soviets were the allies of the British during the war. So whatever they did was simply helping their side of the war. While they brought a lot of high-level intelligence to the Soviets, the Soviets didn't necessarily think very highly of them. The Soviets saw McLean and Burgess as drunks. All of them often had the intelligence that they brought to the Soviets ignored because the Soviets weren't sure if they could be trusted. All the while, the five men were getting promoted in their respective services. In 1944, Kim Filby became the head of MI6's anti-Soviet section.

The man whose job it was to protect British agents from Soviets and who led efforts to recruit Soviet agents was himself a Soviet mole passing along secrets. In 1945, Anthony Blunt was appointed surveyor of the King's pitchers. While this sounded like a relatively innocuous position curating the Royal Art Collection, it gave him access to the royal household. That same year, Blunt secretly retrieved sensitive documents from a captured Nazi intelligence officer and handed them to the Soviets. In 1948, John Karencross leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets, which were related to the Manhattan Project.

These documents allowed the Soviets to accelerate their nuclear program. By the end of the 1940s, the number of classified documents were, documents that were given to the Soviets numbered in the thousands. It included the identities of British agents working in the Soviet Union, many of whom were later killed or sent to the Gulag. By 1950, there were concerns that something was wrong, and this concern was raised by the Americans, not the British. The Americans had been running an operation since 1943, known as the Verona Project. The Verona Project was a top-secret U.S. counterintelligence program by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, which later became the NSA, to decrypt Soviet diplomatic

and intelligence communications. The project successfully intercepted and partially deciphered thousands of Soviet messages sent between Moscow and Soviet embassies worldwide. Via these communications intercepts, the Americans knew that there was a high-ranking mole in the British Intelligence Service. By early 1951, cryptographic work from the Verona Project had partially identified Donald McLean as a Soviet agent, although they had not yet gathered conclusive proof. Kim Filby, who again was in charge of Soviet counterintelligence, gave word to the Soviets that McLean was about to be discovered.

Guy Burgess, who was stationed in Washington as part of the British embassy staff, had recently been recalled to London due to his erratic behavior and reckless lifestyle. This provided an opportunity for the Soviets to extract both Burgess and McLean. On May 25, 1951, the two men abruptly disappeared. They traveled by ferry from Southampton, England to France, and then made their way through Europe before reaching the Soviet Union. Their disappearance caused a political and intelligence scandal in Britain, as it confirmed the presence of Soviet spies at the highest level of government.

It also raised the question, how could this have happened? Attention immediately turned to the head of Soviet counterintelligence in MI6, Kim Filby. Not only was it his job to find moles, but he was also known to socialize with both men. While there was no hard proof against Philby, the suspicion was enough that he was forced to resign later that year. No one really knew what had happened to Burgess and McLean. For years, it was assumed that the two had been killed. However, in 1956, the Soviets revealed that they had defected to the Soviet Union and now lived there. More on that in a bit. Philby, having resigned, didn't sulk off to live in obscurity.

He moved to Beirut and began a career as a journalist, writing for outlets such as the observer and the economist. While working as a writer, he continued to funnel information to the Soviets for years. By the early 1960s, new evidence emerged implicating Kim Filby. A former Soviet intelligence officer, Anatoly Galitzen, defected to the West and provided clues about a high-level British mole. Under renewed scrutiny, Philby was confronted by MI6 in January of 1963, and realizing that his capture was imminent, fled to the Soviet Union on January 23rd. He was officially granted asylum in Moscow where he lived under the protection of the KGB.

While there had been suspicion about Philby for over a decade, his defection was a bombshell, as he knew everything about anti-Soviet intelligence, at least as recently as 1951. The Americans by this point had become extremely hesitant to share any information with the British who clearly didn't have their house in order. The total scope of the damage, however, still hadn't been totally uncovered. The information from Golitsin and further descriptions from the Verona Project pointed to the existence of yet another high-level mole within the British establishment. By 1964, MI5 had gathered enough intelligence to confront Anthony Blunt. In a secret interrogation, he confessed to his espionage activities in exchange for immunity from prosecution, an arrangement that allowed him to avoid the fate of his fellow spies. For years, his treachery remained a closely guarded secret,

but in 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly exposed Blunt's espionage in the House of Commons. The revelation caused a national scandal, leading to his removal from royal and academic positions, and the stripping of his knighthood. Although he lived the rest of his life in disgrace, he never faced jail time. After the revelation of Anthony Blunt, he and the three defectors became known as the Cambridge Four. However, there was still one more. John Cairn Cross was the least known member of the Cambridge Five, but was responsible for leaking some of the most sensitive intelligence to the Soviets. Unlike Kim Philby or Donald McLean, Karen Cross never openly associated with Soviet sympathizers,

which helped him evade suspicion for a long time. By 1964, Karen Cross was identified as a potential spy, and MI5 confronted him. He confessed, but, like Blunt, was granted immunity in exchange for silence. He lost his government positions and lived mostly in exile in France, avoiding the public scandal that engulfed the other members of the Cambridge Five. His treason wasn't made public until 1981. Anthony Blunt died in 1983, and Karen Cross died. died in 1995. Both lived the ends of their life in disgrace, and neither were prosecuted or served

any time in prison. The three men who made it to the Soviet Union, Philby, Burgess, and McLean, had very different lives than they probably expected when they defected. Burgess, who was flamboyant and openly gay, was miserable in the Soviet Union. He deeply missed British life from its social clubs to its culture. He even asked Western visitors to bring him British newspapers, clothes, and food. He never learned Russian properly, making it even harder to integrate into Soviet society. The Soviets never trusted him and never allowed him to participate in intelligence efforts. He drank heavily and died in 1963 at the age of 52 from alcohol-related health problems. Unlike Burgess, McLean spoke Russian fluently and was given a serious

role in Soviet foreign policy analysis. He worked at Moscow's Institute of World Economy and international relations advising the Soviets on British and American diplomatic affairs. Like Burgess, McLean drank heavily, a sign of underlying stress. McLean never publicly renounced communism, but he seemed less enthusiastic about the Soviet system as time went on. Some sources indicate that he considered defecting back to Britain, but ultimately stayed in Moscow until his death in 1983. Kim Filby lived in Moscow for the remainder of his life. Although initially treated with suspicion by Soviet authorities, he eventually integrated into Soviet society marrying a Russian woman. He received several honors

from the Soviet government, but never held a prominent role in intelligence work again. Despite being a hero in Soviet circles, Philby struggled with disillusionment, alcoholism, and feelings of isolation. Like the others, Philby never renounced communism, but as later life suggests a degree of regret and disillusionment with the Soviet system. He remained in Moscow until his death on May 11, 1988. The damage done by the Cambridge Five is difficult to comprehend. Combined, the five men likely gave the Soviets between 20 to 25,000 classified documents. All of the British efforts to hide their secrets from the Soviets were for naught,

given that the person in charge of keeping the secrets was working for them. The defections severely damaged British credibility with the United. United States, leading to a period of distrust between MI6 and the CIA. The full extent of the betrayal of the Cambridge Five took years to unravel, but their actions had a lasting impact on Cold War Intelligence, Anglo-American relations, and Soviet geopolitical strategy. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oatkin and Cameron Kiefer.

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