THE MOST PROMISCUOUS MAN WHO EVER LIVED
He’d sleep with ANYONE from 17 to 75 — but it was Guy Burgess’s passion for treachery that soon made him the Kremlin’s darling
GUY BURgESS was his usual slovenly mess as he staggered into the Foreign Office in London after another night out on the booze. There was a touch of make-up on his handsome face to hide the excesses as he chewed on garlic and chain- smoked cigarettes.
Locked in the drawer of his desk was evidence of his twin vices: a bottle of gin and a book on flagellation.
It was well known that he exploited the blackout in wartime London to pounce on and pick up young servicemen for his own pleasure. Equally revolting was his loud and boorish manner around the office. He would enliven boring news briefings by handing around half-naked pictures of his latest male conquest.
The dangerous flaws in his character were obvious to all, yet his job in the news department, briefing the Press, meant he was privy to almost all material produced by the Foreign Office, including top secret telegraphic communications, along with the keys for decrypting them.
Here was a rich source of inside information for his secret masters in Moscow. Burgess — code name Madchen — had been an agent for the Soviet Union since his clandestine recruitment shortly after leaving Cambridge University in 1935.
Since then, he had been through numerous jobs: PA to a Tory Member of Parliament, a subeditor on The Times, a producer in the Talks Department of the BBC, a liaison officer in the Ministry of Information. For a while, he was even a junior civil servant in MI6, instructing its officers on propaganda. He networked ferociously, cruising through the Establishment ranks and reporting to Moscow everything that came his way.
But it was when he was appointed an information officer in the Foreign Office in 1944 that he hit the jackpot.
In a department that was busy and short- staffed, he offered to work Saturday afternoons, when no one else was around. He had permission to take documents home at night, too.
Burgess made good use of the freedom. Soviet documents reveal a note from his Russian handler in London that ‘ Madchen has for the first time brought a large number of authentic materials to the Embassy. We have photographed ten rolls of film, six of them decrypted telegrams.’
Shortly after: ‘Madchen gives most valuable documentary material. He has become the most productive source.’ Hundreds of the Foreign Office documents he handed over were classified ‘ top secret’. Moscow authorised a bonus payment to him of £250 — a huge sum in those days.
The material he was supplying was dynamite. A crucial issue as World War II came to its end was the future of Poland, which the Soviet Union wanted to bring under its sway.
BURgESS copied sensitive cables outlining Britain’s position on this and sent them to Moscow, giving the Russians an edge in their negotiations with the Western powers.
Other vital issues on which he betrayed his country’s confidential thoughts and plans were the post-war division of germany and the setting up the United Nations.
He also passed to Moscow a military report outlining contingency plans if there should ever be war between the British Empire and Soviet Union in the Middle East.
Burgess was also the courier for an urgent message from another spy, Kim Philby — a chum of Burgess’s in their Cambridge days and now embedded inside British Intelligence — that a Soviet KgB officer in Turkey was on the point of defecting to the West.
The KgB officer was caught by the Russians, interrogated and shot — as was his wife.
Apart from actual documents, Burgess was also in a position to provide inside information about any MI5 and MI6 agents he knew. Through social contacts and through his Foreign Office work, he hunted out secrets like a hound after truffles. And the juicy bits went straight to Moscow.
Towards the end of 1946, Burgess made an even greater breakthrough for his Russian masters when he managed to worm his way into the heart of the new Labour government.
During his time at the BBC, he had commissioned young MPs to give talks on the radio. Now, one of them, Hector McNeil, was a minister at the Foreign Office and, on occasions, stood in for the Foreign Secretary himself, Ernest Bevin.
Attracted by Burgess’s range of contacts and apparent sophistication, McNeil appointed Burgess as his private secretary. It helped that both men were heavy drinkers and shared an interest in London’s seedier side.
Reporting his coup to the Russians, Burgess explained: ‘great opportunities are opened to us by this. I hope to see minutes and private letters from and to ambassadors, and to be present at conversations in which future decisions are canvassed and discussed before being arrived at.’
This was just the sort of high-level access that Moscow had recruited ‘sleepers’ like Burgess for.
McNeil held Cabinet rank, and in Bevin’s absence, he often had to act as Foreign Secretary. Thus Burgess had access to almost all Foreign Office papers, including the minutes of meetings of the Cabinet and the Defence Committee.
He had complete run of the inner sanctum of the Foreign Office, as well as access to the safe and all the secrets of State, according to spy expert Andrew Boyle. ‘If he needed
the minister’s keys, he asked for them. If he wanted access to classified files, he secured the necessary authorisation without question.’
What made his spying easier was that whenever McNeil was asked to draw up a report or analyse a set of classified documents, he passed the job straight to Burgess, who was only too happy to oblige.
Burgess acquitted himself well at first, arriving punctually at work and seldom missing appointments. A black mark against him was the untidiness of his desk with its overflowing ashtrays and dirty cups.
‘Confidential papers were strewn over it like confetti,’ a colleague noted. ‘Messengers entered, looked vainly for in-trays under the deluge of paper, and dropped their files wherever Guy indicated with a negligent gesture of his hand.’ Similar slovenliness crept into his spy-craft, causing Moscow anxiety.
There was a complaint that during a hand- over meeting in a pub, he dropped Foreign Office documents on the floor and had to scramble to pick them up before anyone noticed.
Yet overall, the Russians were thrilled by Guy Burgess’s new access. Moscow now considered him so important, that in 1947 the intelligence officer in charge of translating and analysing the flood of documents from him was despatched to London to meet the source himself.
The rendezvous was in a park in a London suburb. Burgess had a newspaper tucked under his arm as a signal. ‘It was dusk,’ Yuri Modin recalled, ‘and we walked off side by side.’ Modin suggested that, if caught together and questioned, he would simply pretend that he was asking for directions.
Burgess had another suggestion. ‘You’re a good-looking boy, and I’m a fiend known all over London for my insatiable appetite for goodlooking boys. All we need to say is we’re lovers looking for a bed.’
Modin, who was newly married, was not amused.
AT MOSCOW’S insistence, Burgess was supplied with money to buy a car to make his assignations with Modin easier. True to character, he bought himself a second- hand, two- seater gold Rolls-Royce.
Modin was to be Burgess’s handler for the next three years. At particular moments of international crisis, the two met daily.
Burgess would dial a number in London that was manned day and night by a Russian agent. Burgess would give a code number before hanging up, then proceed to a prearranged rendezvous.
Modin remained impressed by Burgess. ‘Despite his reputation as a drunken philanderer, to my surprise he turned out to be an extremely conscientious worker and a great pro.
‘His reports were thoughtful, layered and clear. He took no notes, because his memory was faultless. When he passed me documents, he unfailingly told me which should be sent to Moscow without delay and which could wait till later.’
Modin came to the conclusion that Burgess was a spy for strictly ideological reasons. ‘He believed world revolution was inevitable, and, though he often berated Russian leaders, in the end he saw the Soviet Union as the world’s best hope’.
But there was one step he refused to take for his masters in Moscow. They instructed him to marry as a cover for his espionage activities, and an old friend of his, Clarissa Churchill, daughter of Winston Churchill’s younger brother John, was selected as the ideal candidate.
Burgess thought about it and may even have broached an engagement with her. But in the end he couldn’t go through with it. It simply wasn’t in his nature.
After more than a year as minister McNeil’s right-hand man, Burgess was poached for a new secret government department whose task was to launch a propaganda offensive at the Soviet Union.
The so- called Information Research Department was approved by the Cabinet in January 1948. With close links to MI6, the department’s role was to brief ministers and delegates to international conferences and place anticommunist articles in the widest range of publications.
Burgess was reluctant to make the move, seeing it as backward step. But his Moscow masters insisted: they wanted an insider in this new and potentially threatening organisation.
But Burgess’s brief secondment was not a success. Before he had a chance to report anything of signi f icance to Moscow, he was sacked for being ‘lazy, careless, unpunctual and a slob’.
That could — and should — have been the end for Guy Burgess in government circles. But the gullible McNeil took him back, and pretty
soon he was at the minister’s side at a meeting in Brussels to set in train the Western defence organisation that would become Nato, tasked with combating the Soviet Union. He took the minutes at secret meetings and promptly passed them to Moscow.
Firmly back in business, he forwarded an estimated 700 Foreign Office documents to Moscow in just six months during the nail-biting international crisis over Berlin.
In Moscow, his information was seized on and distributed to the foreign minister Molotov, Russian Army intelligence and even to Stalin himself. The delighted Russians paid Burgess an extra £200.
But how much longer could he get away with his treachery? The pressures of his double life continued to take their toll. He was drinking whisky throughout the day from a flask, and was perpetually taking sedatives to calm his nerves — followed, then, by stimulants to keep him buzzing. ‘He munched his way through whatever tablets he had on hand, like a child with a bag of dolly mixtures,’ according to a friend. His moods swung alarmingly from depression to hyperactivity.
In his cups at his flat just off Piccadilly — decorated (incongruously for a man who was betraying the flag) in red, white and blue — he would play the harmonium and sing his own bawdy version of the aria ‘La donna è mobile’, which began: ‘Small boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.’
And, when drunk, he would still tell anyone who would listen that he was a Russian spy. Surely it was time for someone to blow the whistle on him?
ADAPTED by Tony Rennell from Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives Of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie, to be published by Hodder on September 10 at £25. © Andrew Lownie 2015. To buy a copy for £20, visit mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Pre-publication discount until September 5. P&P free.