Guy Burgess

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. 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.

Born into an upper middle class family, Burgess was educated at Eton College, the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and Trinity College, Cambridge. An assiduous networker, he embraced left-wing politics at Cambridge and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Burgess was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future double agent Harold "Kim" Philby. After leaving Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC as a producer, briefly interrupted by a short period as a full-time MI6 intelligence officer, before joining the Foreign Office in 1944.

At the Foreign Office, Burgess acted as a confidential secretary to Hector McNeil, deputy to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. 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. In 1950 he was appointed second secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, a post from which he was sent home after repeated misbehaviour. Although not at this stage under suspicion, Burgess nevertheless accompanied fellow spy Donald Maclean when the latter, on the point of being unmasked, fled to Moscow in May 1951.