Best Books About The Spy Guy Burgess

by Andrew Lownie
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5 books
I spent thirty years researching a biography of the spy Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge Ring of Five, and read many books. These five books, I believe, give the greatest insight into his character and were invaluable.
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The Climate of Treason

Andrew Boyle, 1982
A landmark espionage book about the Cambridge Spies, which has stood up surprisingly well though published almost forty years ago and before the release of Russian and British archives, and first made me interested in ‘The Climate of Treason’. It not only gives the historical background to their recruitment during the 1930s but, drawing on a deathbed confession from Goronwy Rees, named two new spies ‘Maurice’ and ‘Basil’. After leaks to the satirical magazine Private Eye , Margaret Thatcher confirmed that ‘Maurice’ was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt who had been granted immunity sixteen years earlier. ‘Basil’ was identified as an atomic scientist, serving in the Washington Embassy alongside Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, called Wilfrid Mann. Mann fended off the accusations at the time and the story died but subsequent research for my book has proved Mann was a spy. Patrick Reilly , the Foreign Office Under-Secretary in charge of intelligence, wrote in his unpublished memoirs, “that “Basil”, who can easily be identified, was in fact a Soviet spy is true: and also that he was turned round without difficulty.” Mann for his services was later given American citizenship and died in 2001.

Kim Philby

The Unknown Story of the KGB's Master Spy
Tim Milne, 2014
Kim Philby’s most personal betrayal was not of Nicholas Elliott, as suggested in Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends , but his school friend and another MI6 colleague Tim Milne , the nephew of Winnnie the Pooh author AA Milne, whom he falsely accused of being a spy in order to deflect attention from himself. Milne’s memoirs were finally permitted to be published four years after his death and provide a fascinating and fresh glimpse into both Philby and Burgess especially Milne’s teenage European travels with Philby and his August 1948 visit to Philby in Turkey where he remembered fellow guest Burgess ‘lolling in a window seat, dirty, unshaven, wearing nothing but an inadequately fastened dressing-gown”, singing on jeep rides into the countryside and diving into the Bosphorus from a second floor balcony. His conclusion was that after Philby’s wife Aileen,who died in mysterious circumstance, “Guy is the most tragic character in this whole story. Almost everything he touched turned to failure in the end. Unlike Kim he did not have the nerve for the role he was called upon to play.”

Missing Diplomats

Cyril Connolly, 1952
The first account of the Burgess and Maclean story – it was published a year after their flight – this fifty page essay, based on a collection of articles in the Sunday Times , by someone who knew both men contains shrewd pen portraits of the two spies and the roots of their spying. “Politics begin in the nursery; no one is born patriotic or unpatriotic, right-wing or left-wing, and it is the child whose craving for love is unsatisfied, whose desire for power is thwarted or whose innate sense of justice is warped that eventually may try to become a revolutionary or dictator.” Connolly remembered Burgess as “tall-medium in height, with blue eyes, an inquisitive nose, sensual mouth, curly hair and alert fox-terrier expression…immensely energetic, a great talker, reader, boaster, walker, who swam like an otter and drank…like some Rabelaisian bottle-swiper whose thirst was unquenchable.”

Guy Burgess

A portrait with background
Tom Driberg, 1956
The journalist and Labour politician Tom Driberg had known Guy Burgess in London. After Burgess appeared publicly at a press conference in February 1956 five years after his flight to Russia, Driberg approached him asking to write his authorised life and Burgess agreed. In the absence of a memoir, this biography, based on a series of interviews, is our nearest insight into the spy’s mindset tracing his alienation from the Establishment from his schooldays at Eton, his politicisation at Cambridge University, concerns about McCarthyism whilst in Washington to the escape to Russia. According to Burgess, awaiting a flight from Zurich to Prague he “went and looked at motor-cars” whilst Maclean “lay on his bed reading Jane Austen. We were both rather in a Jane Austen mood.” Burgess was careful not to incriminate himself and its lies are as revealing as the important childhood memories. The book was censored by both the British and Russian intelligence services to add a further layer of disinformation. It was supposedly Driberg in Moscow who found Burgess a boyfriend whilst himself picking up men in the urinal behind the Hotel Metropol.

A Chapter of Accidents

Goronwy Rees, 1972
The writer and academic, Goronwy Rees, was one of Burgess’s closest friends and this volume of memoir best conveys Burgess’s character and charm. Rees wrote after first meeting him in 1934 – not 1932 as he says in his book - “I had heard of Guy before, because he had the reputation of being the most brilliant undergraduate of his day at Cambridge…At first he made tentative amorous advances, but quickly and cheerfully desisted when he discovered that I was as heterosexual as he was the opposite; he would have done the same to any young man, because sex to him was both a compulsion and a game, which it was almost a duty to practise.” The two men saw much of each other during the 1930s, and Rees was one of Burgess’s first recruits, but the relationship foundered when Rees decided during the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to stop spying and threatened to betray his friend. Burgess, godfather to one of Rees’s sons, suggested to the Russians he kill Rees and lived in terror of being exposed by him. After Burgess surfaced in Moscow, Rees penned a series of sensational articles about Burgess’s dissolute private life, probably as a damage limitation exercise, which backfired and led him to losing his academic post but he soon was to have his revenge.