Cambridge Five
The Cambridge Five were a spy ring of the NKVD and later the KGB in the British secret service MI5 and partly also in the CIA . They are considered to be the most successful agents in Western intelligence services .
Kim Philby (code name: son), Donald Maclean , Guy Burgess , Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were in the 1930s at Trinity College of Cambridge University recruited. Blunt and Burgess were also members of the elite Cambridge Apostles .
They supplied the Soviet Union with important information during the Second World War until the early 1950s . Speculations about other members of the spy ring continue to this day. In 1941 they were led by Anatoli Gorski ( NKVD , † 1980).
They were recruited during their studies in order to later be able to get into high positions in the British secret service. During the Second World War , they provided the Soviet Union with information about the war strategy and weapons technology of the Western allies. Some of them later moved to the United States to help set up the CIA. For years, Stalin mistrusted their information, mistaking them for double agents.
Burgess and Maclean fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, Philby was active as an agent until 1963 before he also fled to the USSR. There he worked as an advisor to the KGB until his death in 1988 . Blunt was exposed in 1964. As head of the royal picture gallery, however, he was granted political immunity so as not to draw the royal family into the scandal. It was not until 1979 that his knighthood, which had meanwhile been awarded, was revoked.
In addition to the Cambridge connection, there was probably also an Oxford connection, but so far only the code names Bunny and Scott , code name of the chief recruiter, have been found in the KGB archives . The exact number of agents on this Oxford ring is unknown.
Reception in art
- Alan Bennett , A Question of Attribution (1988)
- Another Country (1981), play by Julian Mitchell , based on the life of Guy Burgess, on which the film Another Country is based .
- John le Carré Lady, King, Ace, Spy (1974)
- John le Carré: The Blinding Spy (1986)
- John Banville : The Untouchable (1997)
- The Jigsawman (1983), feature film by Terence Young with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier , based on the story of the same name by Dorothea Bennett
- Cambridge Spies (2003), BBC TV movie about the Cambridge Five by Tim Fywell, with Tom Hollander as Guy Burgess, Toby Stephens as Kim Philby , Samuel West as Anthony Blunt, Rupert Penry-Jones as Donald Maclean. Screenplay Peter Moffat .
- Frederick Forsyth : The Fourth Protocol (1984)
- Blunt: the Fourth Man , TV movie with Anthony Hopkins as Guy Burgess and Ian Richardson as Anthony Blunt.
- Ian McEwan : The Innocent (1990), with a spy tunnel similar to the one discovered by Philby in Berlin, but which the Soviets also initially allowed to run.
- The Third Identity (2004)
- The Company - On behalf of the CIA (2007)
literature
- Oleg Gordijewski , Christopher Andrew: KGB. The history of his overseas operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. Bertelsmann, Munich 1991. ISBN 3-570-06264-3
- Peter Stephan Jungk: The darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart, S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 2015, ISBN 3100023986