| Activity |
In many ways Burgess was the most improbable spy, frequently drunk, a compulsive homosexual, his social behaviour and habits were outrageous and yet he charmed his way through Eton and Cambridge, becoming a member of the secretive and elitist Apostles society. Recruited at University as a Soviet agent, he joined various pro-Fascist or pro-German organizations as a cover. When World War Two began, Burgess was working for the BBC. However his involvement with members of the intelligence community grew, partly at Soviet insistence, but more because Burgess with friends like Blunt naturally moved in the right social circles. Also like Blunt, Burgess used homosexual blackmail to win over and then retain agents. In 1941 to ensure a wavering Donald Macleans allegiance, he got his old friend drunk and photographed him nude and in a sexual embrace with a young man.
In 1944 he joined the Foreign Office, being appointed a personal assistant to the Minister of State, Hector McNeil. Burgess spent a short time billeted upon Philby at the Washington embassy in 1950,much to Philbys embarrassment, the horror of the embassy and the puzzlement of his American hosts. Warned either before or so after his return to London that Maclean was under suspicion, Burgess decided to flee Britain with Maclean. Thus creating the first serious doubts about his friend Philby in the minds of the security services. Burgess spent his last unhappy years with a succession of pretty boys in Moscow, thoroughly disapproved of by his Soviet colleagues both for his outlandish habits and for wrecking an important espionage network and died of a heart attack in 1964. However, there has been increasing interest in the idea that Burgess was a far more important Soviet asset than his biography would suggest. He may indeed have been the link with a number of other important spies who after his defection simply went to ground and who have never been positively identified. |
