The Spy Who Saved MI5 (Encore) | How the Cambridge Five Changed MI5 | 5

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0:16From Wondery, I'm Tristan Donovan and this is The Spy Who. I'm one of the executive producers on The Spy Who and usually I'm part of the team behind the scenes. Usually I work on the scripts, but today I've been taken out of the safe house to try and find out more about our latest story. That story, of course, was The Spy Who Saved MI5, the tale of Oleg Lelin. His information led to the biggest expulsion of Soviet spies by any Western government during the Cold War. MI5 regarded it as an important turning point in their battle with Soviet intelligence. This was a tricky one because the full story is still locked away in MI5's vaults.

1:00So we had to go through old newspaper articles, books, archive material and piece this together bit by bit. And it's a story with lots of parallels today with hundreds of Russian spies who have been expelled from European cities following the invasion of Ukraine. But Leland's story wasn't just about getting rid of spies. It was also about rehabilitating MI5. In this episode, we're going to explore why MI5 was in the doghouse as the 70s began, and with me to discuss it is Andrew Loney, author of Stalin's Englishman.

1:37Hello, Andrew. Hello. Thanks for joining us. Pleasure. So, before we get cracking, in a few words, how much of an impact would you say the Cambridge spy scandal had on British intelligence and even Britain itself? Well, I think it had a huge impact, and we're still seeing the impact to this day. I mean, it created a witch hunt, basically, within MI5. So it really sowed seeds of discord within the intelligence community in this country, and indeed its relationship with the intelligence agencies abroad. And the Americans found it very hard to forgive them. Right. And is this what drew you to writing about the Cambridge Five?

2:15I went up to Cambridge at the time when the whole blunt story was breaking. Every week, the Sunday Times, seemed to have a new spy being discovered. And it was very exciting. It was cops and robbers from cowboys and Indians for a young man. Excellent. Looking forward to finding out more.

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3:44So, let's get into it. For a lot of listeners, and I do count myself among this, I've grown up, I've heard the Cambridge Five, and it's like this mythical thing. You hear quite a lot about it, but the details are kind of sketchy. It's some time ago, and the ins and outs are vague. You know, there's people like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, but you don't entirely know what they did. So I guess for your basic kind of understanding, who were the Cambridge Five? Well, the Ring of Five, as it was described by the Russians, were in order. Kim Philby, Donald McLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cancross.

4:25All of them, apart from McLean, had been at Trinity College Cambridge. All of them were contemporaries. But actually, we shouldn't really be talking about the Cambridge Five. We should probably be talking about the Cambridge 50. We know that there were 20 recruitments between 1934 and 1937 by the Russians. And there are many more names, really, that should be in this list, people like Leo Long, Michael Strait, and others. So though people tend to always think of those five as the only people in the ring, it was much broader than that. And, of course, they recruited other people, and they, in turn, recruited other people.

4:56We may well be seeing the descendants of those recruitments still active to this day. So how did they get recruited? Well, they were recruited originally by Philby. Philby had left Cambridge in 1933. He'd gone to Vienna, where he'd actually got involved with a sort of underground communist movement there, and married, in fact, a woman who was a recruiter. And he was sort of nurtured, sent back to Cambridge to recruit his fellow sort of communists. And he targeted basically people who'd been in something called the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which was a communist front. and the top of his list was Donald McLean the bottom of his list of five was Guy Burgess we don't know who numbers 2, 3 and 4 were if they refused they offer or they have never been discovered and McLean readily joined, now there was some concern about Burgess because he was very indiscreet, indiscretion is not normally the characteristic of a spy but he sort of got to hear about it, he wanted to be part of the action and so they sort of felt they had to have him in and then Burgess was used very much as a recruiter, he was still at Cambridge as a postgraduate and doing some teaching.

6:06And he recruited Blunt and indeed then brought in Cairncross. And Blunt stayed on at Trinity Cambridge for a while and he was again used as a recruiter. Burgess would spend a lot of time in Oxford, so he would go across and recruit people in Oxford. And so that's how the whole thing began to grow. They basically just went to their friends who they knew would be sympathetic. It's almost like a pyramid scheme in a way. You know, they recruit one, get them to recruit more, who recruit more, who recruit more. Absolutely, yes. And that's why, you know, we probably have the descendants of those original recruits still operating now.

6:41And what was their motivations? Why were these people getting involved with the Soviet Union? Well, their motivations varied, but I think there was a mixture for all of them, a very strong ideological identification with the Soviet Union, often artistic, for example, but also a sense that in the power blocks that were likely to take place in the 20th century, that it was a battle between Russia and America. A lot of them were very anti-American. A lot of them had absent fathers. Either their fathers had died young, like Maclean and Burgess, or were away, like Filby's father. And the Russian Secret Service became their parents, really, their fathers.

7:22But a lot of it was petty bourgeoisie. It was a way of getting back at the establishment, that they were ostensibly part of the establishment. They've been to good schools here at Oxbridge, members of London clubs and various things. But I think they still felt outsiders and the Russians helped them to create a sense of belonging. When did the Soviets target Cambridge and Trinity College? Wasn't it kind of specific? Well, I think the Russians targeted all sorts of places. I mean, there is an Oxford ring. We don't know about the Oxford ring either because they were clever enough not to get caught or were so useless that they never achieved anything.

7:54But I think there's also something in the nature of the two universities. I mean, Cambridge is a much more Puritan, a much more scientific university, so therefore more attractive in some ways. Oxford is more cosmopolitan and is more worldly and I think was less attractive. But the Russians aimed at, for example, the Imperial College in London. They recruited a spy known as Basel. They also recruited even at Sandhurst, Birmingham, which was a centre for scientific research. So we only really know about Cambridge because that sort of caught the public imagination. But there must be lots more. Yeah.

8:30And so this is 1930s kind of it starting with... Yes, recruitment for Philby was 1934, Philby, Maclean and Burgess. And then it continues through really to 37, as I say, that's the period. And that was, of course, a very attractive time for the Russians. It was a time when it was a sense that no one was standing up to fascism, to Hitler. So they're all five Cambridge contemporaries recruited by the Russians as part of a long-term penetration project. They go into the civil service, the foreign office, the intelligence services, the journalism, and they begin very quickly to provide very useful information for the Russians.

9:10And that continues through till 1951 when McLean is discovered and escapes with Burgess. And then gradually over the years, other names were emerged. So Cairncross was the last to be publicly revealed in 1990. Right. I guess back in the Cambridge Five time, it was an ideological war. At least that's how the Cold War was framed. It was communism versus capitalism, democracy versus authoritarianism. The ideological kind of divide isn't quite there anymore. It's kind of more just rivalries. Do you think it was easier in that time because there was an ideological debate or was that just a myth? If you think of the war on terror and Islamic fundamentalism, I mean, that is ideological.

9:58I mean, the battles going on in the Middle East are not dissimilar to what happened in the 1930s in terms of ideology. But yes, we have other factors now. I mean, we always talk about what's called mice in terms of why people become spies. Money, ideology, compromise and ego. And there's always an element of all of those things. Ego played a large part, for example, with the Cambridge spies. And those things still apply. The Americans found that a lot of people that they had spying, the Aldrich James and people, a lot of it was done for money. But a lot of it is done because people feel pissed off that they're not getting promotion, their boss doesn't trust them, the problems in their marriage there are all sorts of reasons why people go and spy Why do you think people like Guy Burgess sort of held the line once they'd been recruited?

10:49They kind of saw the deal Stalin did with Hitler, they started probably hearing about some of the atrocities that went on in the Soviet Union What was it about their commitment to that cause that made them go I'm going to carry on being this spy? Well, it's a good question. I mean some tried to get out. People like Blunt were very keen to get out. He had a career as an art historian. I think people like Burgess and Philby particularly liked to hunt with the hares and the hounds. They liked the sense of being insiders. They liked the, they'd pick their football team and they were going to stick with it.

11:23I think a lot of them were under pressure, like Blunt. Basically, he'd been caught. It was very difficult for him to get out. And so he kind of just jogged along in there. But from all of them, I think there was a mixture of the personal and the political. So they were drawn to it ideologically. Burgess came to it because of his interest in Marxism as a historian. And he saw this as big power, you know, the power play was between the Russians and the Americans. And indeed, Blunt was brought in because of this Marxist interpretation of art. But I think others just love that sense of power it gave them.

11:58They were insiders, they were people, They're very well managed by the Russians who made them feel important. And I think that they continue to justify to themselves why they were doing this. I mean, Burgess ironically taught on the evils of communism at the Foreign Office Summer School. It's kind of ironic. I mean, how did they sort of pass intel? How were they useful to the Soviets? Were they just literally taking files out of MI5 and MI6 and passing them along in dead drops? I mean, how was the exchanges and uses? They were useful in all sorts of different ways. And each of them had a slightly different role depending on where they were.

12:38So Philby had got into MI6, foreign intelligence, through the help of Burgess. And clearly he knew all the agents, all the operations, intelligence operations that were going on. if there were suspicions about particular Russian agents. So that was his role. He could pass information back, and he would do that partly through deadlought drops, partly from meetings with his controllers. And they had very sophisticated controllers from Central Europe who spoke lots of languages and who, one of them was, for example, an expert in psychology and a sex psychologist. So they knew how to sort of play them.

13:15People like Cairncross worked in the Treasury, so he was able to give sort of economic information. He was later at Bletchley and was able to betray Ultra. What was Ultra? Ultra was basically we were able to read the German codes, and that really won the war for us. So that was a top secret that we didn't even want our allies to know about, and he betrayed that. Burgess actually had a very interesting role because he worked in the BBC. He was an agent of influence. He was able to bring people in and give them a voice. so you heard a lot of communists on the radio because of that. He had also worked in MI5 and MI6 so he was able to again give orders of battle and readings of people.

14:00He would lend his flat for assignations to people for their love affairs and then blackmail them. So he was able to give that information to the Russians. Right. So this is extremely useful to the Soviet Union, very deep penetration of the intelligence services And it seems like a very successful plan by the Soviets. You recruit some young students at Cambridge and they rise to the top and give you all these secrets. I mean, how much of that is it looked like a great strategy in hindsight? Or was it really just that masterful puppeteering? No, I think it was a masterful way of doing it. They concentrated on people who were going to go to the very top.

14:42They saw that British society was pretty closed and people who've gone to these universities would probably rise to the top. Almost all of them, apart from Philby, got firsts. So these were the brightest and the best. Maclean went into the Foreign Office, who was able to betray the secrets of the Foreign Office. So they all had their particular role and the Russians would push them in certain directions. So, for example, Burgess was too old to go into the Foreign Office. He was pushed towards the Times, failed to get in there. They tried to push him to conserve to central office. He didn't get in there.

15:15And the BBC was a third choice. So they all had their own particular role. But yeah, it was masterful. And of course, these are the ones we know about. Michael Strait, who's also part of this network, also at Trinity at the same time, went into the State Department and was the American dimension to the spy ring. So they had these huge tentacles right out across the whole of the establishment.

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17:06A detergent that tackles the worst stains and odors? Seventh Generation handles it all without any dyes or artificial fragrances. Real clean doesn't have to come with a long list of add-ons. Upgrade to a powerful clean without anything extra. Look for Seventh Generation dish soap and laundry detergent wherever you shop for your cleaning products. Let's talk a bit more about the Intel. What do you think was the most important secrets that these spies shared with the Soviet Union? I mean, it's very difficult to do a damage assessment. I mean, the people tried. The view of the Americans was basically everything that was across their desk was compromised.

17:47All the codes, for example, had to be changed. A lot of the documents. And if you think this was the creation of NATO, the UN, the OECD, the position at the four power conferences was that the Russians often knew the British negotiating position before the British negotiators themselves. Burgess, for example, took out over 4 ,000 documents in space for a few years just in the Foreign Office in the beginning of the war. So lots of stuff. I mean, Maclean had access to atomic secrets. Those were betrayed. But Cairncross knew about Ultra, which was betrayed. So some really, really big subjects. I mean, they probably are the most important spy ring of the 20th century.

18:27Wow. And how did they get caught? Where did it start to unravel for them? It began to unravel really at the end of the war. In 1944, the Americans had begun to break Russian codes. They established that there was a spy in the Washington embassy in 1944 called Homer. And Homer's wife was having a baby in New York. That's what they were able to discover. And only one person really fitted the bill there, and that was McLean. So this really happened at the beginning of 1951. It had taken them that long to break the codes. And Philby was tipped off about this because he was the liaison officer for MI6 and actually MI5 a bit too in Washington.

19:12So he was alerted to the fact. They also were aware that defectors were beginning to emerge. So the net was beginning to draw in. In fact, the spies were beginning to drink very heavily. Burgess was taking drugs because they knew their days were numbered. Right. And I mean, this is hugely embarrassing for the British establishment and the intelligence services that these people have risen so high in their ranks. I mean, was there a reluctance to accept or deal with this problem? Well, I mean, security was very lax at this point. In the past, the people who've been spies have been sort of code clerks and very junior people.

19:52The idea that people who'd gone to good schools, been at Cambridge, could be spies was just anathema to the establishment. There was also a very strong sense that the Foreign Office, for example, was a family, that they didn't betray each other, that they would tolerate eccentricities. For example, Burgess turned up at one event with lipstick and makeup and people were slightly shocked. And the ambassador said, well, we allow this idiosyncrasy in the Foreign Office. There was a sense they didn't want to be like the McCarthy witch hunt that was going on in the States. So, you know, people were able to take documents out.

20:28They were not searched. People had access to keys to safes. So it was very, very easy. And, of course, one of the big consequences of this whole case was that security was tightened up. There was positive vetting was brought in. And there was a realization that everyone had the potential to be a spy. Right. It seems now very naive that the establishment would have even fought in those kind of ways. That, oh, our people couldn't possibly be spies. We kind of know their family. It seems rather bizarre looking back. I mean, was there any kind of reasoning for that or was it just naivety? Well, I think it's your point that you made, that these people often recruited by word of mouth.

21:09People knew their parents. That was one of the reasons that Phil got into intelligence. People knew about his father. and there was a great it was a it was a very closed shop there was a lot of deference and there was no proper sort of recruitment policy it was all done I mean this is why so many of the spies were able to get in the intelligence services at the beginning of the war it was done a nod and a wink they needed to expand rapidly these were intelligent people often with language skills and so they were able to penetrate the system very easily There were security officers brought in as a result of the Cambridge case, but the Admiralty, for example, didn't have a proper security officer until 1961.

21:48And there was still this reluctance for people to snitch on each other. Right. As the net sort of closed in and they start being interrogated and caught, was there a sense from any of them that they regretted what they had done or were they still pretty much wedded to the communist cause as they had long been? Well, they all reacted slightly differently. So Philby, for example, was suspected in 1951 after Burgess and McLean fled. But he was able to basically talk himself to remain on the books of MI6 until 1963 when he fled to Russia. And he in effect was allowed to flee. He was interviewed with an open window.

22:30The traffic drowned out the tapes recording him. He was told that he would be picked up. And so, of course, he fled. Burgess never had any regrets. He did say when he was in Russia that he was a communist, but he was a British communist. That was different to being a Russian communist. So it was a kind of a la carte menu. But amazingly, you know, though he was miserable in Moscow and very lonely and missed his mother and his friends, you can imagine how bleak Moscow wasn't from the 1950s. He never once regretted it. I think he was a Huguenot. He'd made his choice and he was going to stick with it.

23:04He made his bed. Philby when he got to Moscow was a bit more unhappy I mean his wife left and went back to America he tried to commit suicide he was drinking very heavily and it was only by marrying a young Russian woman that he actually in a sense got used to it and also he was not treated as a as a hero of the Soviet Union he was just Agent Tom and a bit later on they realized that they could do more with their spies and began to teach at intelligence academies and be given the order of the red banner and then life got a bit better for them. Cairncross, of course, was basically fingered in 1951, but allowed to get off.

23:42And they interviewed him. And he went and lived in Italy and Rome and France and America. And he was only really revealed publicly in 1990. And Blunt, of course, was given immunity in 1963 and only revealed in 1979 when Mrs. Thatcher announced in the House of Commons as a result of Andrew Boyle's book that he'd be given immunity. So they had a pretty easy time when you think of how many spies did go to prison. Yeah, I was going to ask about that because I mean, MI5 and MI6 are kind of, I don't think officially they were even known to exist back then. I think that came much later. It came in the 1990s.

24:22They were, you know, we had this ridiculous position where they were not publicly acknowledged. No, we knew they existed. People wrote books about them and people wrote memoirs. But they were not avowed. So it is a very odd thing. And, of course, there were various cover names used. Ministry of Defence was often used for MI5 and the Foreign Office clearly for MI6. Yeah. So, I mean, were the public fairly unaware this was going on in the 50s and 60s? Was it because obviously these are spies officially in an organization that doesn't exist? Well, I think there were books coming out. I mean, even, you know, there were wartime adventures that people talked about.

25:02So the public did know about them. They were reported in the papers, often very sanitized and fictionalized versions. And the story when it broke in 1951, Burgess MacLean disappearing, the line that was put out by the Foreign Office where there were basically two gays who got drunk and probably fallen in the river. And it was only the French police leaking the story after the flight and the fact that people were looking for them that allowed the story to break. But even then, the white paper that came out to review what happened was called the whitewash paper because it just told so many lies about what had happened.