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Marshal and Snelgrove. Morecambe and Wise. Burgess and Maclean. For a generation growing up in the 1960s, the names of these infamous Russian double-agents were all as familiar and inseparable as, say, Ant and Dec.

Guy Burgess was one of the two ‘diplomats’ who mysteriously absconded to the Soviet Union in 1951. To be followed in 1963 by the ‘Third Man’, Kim Philby.

And there was a Fourth Man, and a Fifth Man. And certainly many further of Stalin’s Men (and Women) who remained unnumbered and unidentified. It was Moscow who coined the term ‘the Magnificent Five’. It was in its interests to constrain the number.

Yet Burgess remains in many ways the most intriguing, partly because of the many connections he maintained with the British establishment, and the way he hoodwinked them all. Later, everyone attempted to deny their true associations with him.

Even the House of Commons was misled. In 1955, Sir Patrick Reilly, who had worked for the head of MI6 during the war, told the House that Burgess joined the Foreign Office from the BBC in 1948.

(Image: PA)

That was a lie. Reilly knew very well that Burgess had worked for MI6’s ultra-secret Section D at the beginning of the war. D stood for ‘Destruction’. It was a sabotage organisation.

However, perhaps the greatest act of sabotage he undertook was for the enemy. An audacious act that played its part in launching the Cold War and which can only now — with the recent release of previously classified documents — be told in full.

Burgess had set out on a mission to Moscow in the summer of 1940. His goal? To persuade the Soviet Union to abandon Hitler and join the Allies.

It is frequently forgotten that the Russians had signed a pact with Nazi Germany shortly before war broke out. They were providing aid and intelligence in Hitler’s campaign against Britain.

And a defector from Soviet military intelligence, Walter Krivitsky, had been called to London in 1940 from the USA after revealing a communist spy in the heart of the Foreign Office. Under interrogation by MI5 and MI6, he gave broad hints to the identities of Soviet moles in Britain’s institutions.

(Image: Getty)

Krivitsky was the golden goose who could have helped rout out the Communist spies within the government, but MI5 squandered their opportunity.

For MI5 did not really understand defectors. ‘Not a gentleman’, said the only man to head MI5 and MI6, Dick White, of Krivitsky. So they did not take him seriously enough.

Moreover, a comprehensive report on Krivitsky was written, and then carelessly distributed around government corridors. That was not good tradecraft.

It was seen at the Home Office by Sir Alexander Maxwell and his secretary, Jenifer Hart. Her signature is on the copy.

The trouble was that Hart had been a member of the Communist Party, had been recruited as a mole by the Russians, and had promised to look out for valuable material as a civil servant.

Moreover, Hart had an intimate friend who would at some time become her lover. Her beau stated that their affair did not start until 1949. But they had been close friends for a long time.

And her sometime lover was none other than the celebrated academic, Isaiah Berlin, knighted in 1957. He was also a very close friend of Guy Burgess.

(Image: Anthony Percy)

When Burgess saw the report, and realised the peril any further investigation might cause to him and his colleagues, he moved quickly to have the threat of Krivitsky neutralised.

He introduced other agents into MI5 (Anthony Blunt and Victor Rothschild), distracted attention from communists by fuelling ‘Nazi Fifth Column’ rumours, and as I have uncovered for the first time while researching my new book about the blunders of MI5 during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Misdefending the Realm, made plans to tell his bosses in Moscow what was going on.

His links with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, enabled him to cook up a scheme to go to Moscow, ostensibly to remind Stalin that Britain’s resolve against the Nazis was firm.

He needed an interpreter, and contrived to take Berlin along as ‘Press Attaché’. Not that Izvestia or Pravda would have listened much to bourgeois spokespersons.

Burgess and Berlin got as far as Washington, where they were able to alert another Cambridge Spy, Michael Straight, and the Soviet Ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky.

Mission accomplished. Burgess was recalled to London, and Berlin eventually worked throughout the war as a political analyst in the Washington Embassy.

Krivitsky was predictably murdered in Washington by Stalin’s goons in February 1941. Burgess had done his job in allowing him to be watched, and Britain had lost forever its big chance to deal with the Communist subversion.

Burgess carried on spying during the war, acting as courier and using his cover as a disreputable but brilliant diplomatist to disarm his colleagues. They never seemed to ask themselves: How come Guy had friends in the Comintern?

“I am working for the Russians!”, he would declare when drunk. His drinking friends – including several MI5 officers ̶ would roll their eyes. “There goes Guy again! What a performer!” And he thus got way with everything. They were all caught in his web.

(Image: Antony Percy)

Thanks to Burgess and his associates, communists had infiltrated themselves into multiple branches of government. And the subversion also enabled Germany scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had been recruited to the top-secret Tube Alloys project developing a British atomic bomb, to betray atomic secrets to the Russians.

Back in Russia, Stalin knew everything that His Majesty’s Government was planning. Emboldened, he was able to get he wanted in negotiations with his allies as the war drew to a close – the realisation of a mighty Eastern Bloc that would carve Europe in half and usher in the Cold War.