Guy Burgess born 16 April 1911 (d. 1963)Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent who worked for the Soviet Union and was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring who betrayed allied secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy.
Burgess was the son of a naval officer and although he attended Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, he failed to follow in his father's footsteps.
Like most of the Cambridge five, he came from a privileged background, attending Eton College, and eventually attending Cambridge University, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite, debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby.
Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Burgess and the other members of the 'Five' were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals as Soviet Russia and the Nazis agreed on the division of most of Eastern Europe.
He was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning.Assigned to the British embassy in the USA, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties. The FBI allegedly described him in a report as 'a loud, foul-mouthed queer with a penchant for seducing hitchhikers'.
After he was unmasked as a double agent, Burgess moved to Moscow on a moonlit flight with Donald Maclean, arranged by controller Yuri Modin. However, unlike Donald Maclean who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until the 1980s, Burgess seems not to have taken to life in the USSR so well. Homosexuality was much more frowned upon in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Saville Row tailor.
Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.
The Julian Mitchell-penned play and film Another Country and the Alan Bennett play An Englishman Abroad were both either inspired by or directly based on Burgess's life.