1920s-1950s
Various individuals

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

The UK’s Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909 with 19 Military Intelligence (‘MI’) departments. MI5 (counter-espionage) and MI6 (foreign intelligence) still exist today. MI5 in particular received strong early support from Churchill ahead of World War I; it describes him as ‘the greatest intelligence enthusiast in all the cabinets in which he served’.¹ Both services played a vital role while he was prime minister during World War II and the Cold War. The development of nuclear weapons made espionage an increasingly high-stakes activity, and intelligence leaks caused significant damage to American-UK nuclear co-operation.

2. Stories

• Soviet spies in the UK included the Cambridge Spy Ring, Klaus Fuchs, numerous other moles and perhaps even – according to MI5 at the time – Churchill’s own cousin.
• Guy Burgess visited Churchill at home the day after the Munich Agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938.
• Donald Maclean processed his espionage photos and drank with Burgess in Churchill’s home town, until suddenly disappearing in 1951.
• Anthony Blunt prepared MI5 intelligence reports for Churchill during World War II.
• Ivan Maisky was Soviet ambassador to the UK from 1932 to 1943, gaining high-quality information from his wide range of contacts.
• The conviction of Klaus Fuchs added to US resolve not to share nuclear information with the UK.
• Churchill’s cousin, Clare Sheridan, was suspected by MI5 of being a Russian spy.

Soviet spies in the UK included the Cambridge Spy Ring, Klaus Fuchs, numerous other moles and perhaps even – according to MI5 at the time – Churchill’s own cousin.

Some of the best-known Soviet spies belonged to the Cambridge Spy Ring (1930s-1950s), sometimes known as the Cambridge Five, although the number and precise composition have never been confirmed. Guy Burgess visited Churchill at his home; Donald Maclean developed some of his espionage photos in Churchill’s local village, Westerham in Kent; and Anthony Blunt prepared monthly MI5 summaries for Churchill. Kim Philby claimed to have met him; Philby’s maverick father St John Philby, also an intelligence agent, certainly did. The alleged ‘Fifth Man’, John Cairncross, has no known close connection.

The consequences of the Cambridge spies’ activities have been much debated, with the contributions of Philby and Cairncross usually being deemed the most significant. However, the intelligence gathering of Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky in the 1930s and early 1940s may have been more effective. He charmed a wide range of influential figures in the UK, including Churchill.

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born naturalised British citizen, disclosed many British and North American nuclear secrets to the Soviets from 1941 to 1948. The consequences of his actions have also been much discussed, but it seems that he was instrumental in Stalin being considerably more aware of Western nuclear programmes than Western leaders realised.

Other UK-based Soviet spies during Churchill’s prime ministerial tenures included Ursula Kuczynski (Klaus Fuchs’s handler), Len Beurton (who married Kuczynski to give her a British passport), George Blake (who switched to the KGB during the Korean War), and Melita Norwood (the Soviets’ longest-serving UK spy of over 40 years).

Arnold Deutsch was only active in the UK during Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’, but his novel recruitment approach had a much longer-term impact: targeting communist-leaning students who were likely to gain positions of influence and could dismiss their youthful associations as something they had left behind.

Soviet espionage was also a major issue after the Bolshevist revolution in 1917. Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan had left-wing and anarchist leanings at the time, causing a temporary family rift and attracting the attention of MI5. Arthur Ransome, later a bestselling children’s author, married Trotsky’s secretary and may have provided intelligence to the Soviets as well as to UK authorities.

Guy Burgess visited Churchill at home the day after the Munich Agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938.

Burgess was a producer at the BBC and had tentatively secured Churchill’s agreement to give a radio talk, which Churchill had cancelled. The two had also met socially on a couple of occasions. On 30 September 1938, the Munich Agreement was concluded which endorsed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. Like Churchill, Burgess was strongly opposed to fascism, but for different reasons that would later become clear. He called Churchill, asking if he could visit him the next day at Chartwell. Churchill agreed, perhaps partly to make amends for cancelling the radio talk.

While discussing their shared concern about the Munich Agreement, Churchill pulled a letter out of his pocket, saying it was from ‘Herr Beans’, and gave it to Burgess, asking how to reply. It was from Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš (pronounced BEN-esh), requesting advice on how to handle his country’s crisis. Churchill declared himself to be an old man, without power. How should he reply? Burgess proposed that Churchill could offer Beneš his eloquence, giving speeches to awaken the UK to Czechoslovakia’s situation. Churchill was pleased with the suggestion.

Churchill gave Burgess a copy of Arms and the Covenant (1938), a collection of his speeches, with the inscription, ‘To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments. September 1938’.² Burgess later wrote ‘Munich’ in pencil underneath.

Churchill said that if he was returned to power then Burgess should contact him about a job. Instead, Burgess was hired by MI6 in November 1938, rejoined the BBC in 1941 (while also being on the books of MI6 and MI5) and was employed by the Foreign Office in 1944 until his defection to the Soviet Union in 1951. He died there in 1963, aged 52, of arteriosclerosis and liver failure.

Anthony Blunt told Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher (1987), that the Soviets tasked Burgess with marrying Churchill’s niece, Clarissa, the daughter of his younger brother John (‘Jack’).³ Blunt said that Burgess was appalled, as he was gay and Clarissa already had an infatuated suitor, but that he made some efforts all the same (not supported by Clarissa in a later interview). Clarissa remained single until 1952, when she married Anthony Eden, Churchill’s de facto deputy prime minister and later successor.

Donald Maclean processed his espionage photos and drank with Burgess in Churchill’s home town, until suddenly disappearing in 1951.

Maclean lived with his wife Melinda and two sons in a secluded house in Tatsfield, Surrey, five miles from Churchill’s home, Chartwell, in Kent. Between them was the town of Westerham, which had a chemist’s shop with a darkroom for developing photos, belonging to Ernest White. He was an eccentric, leaving snakes out in the shop overnight for security, and would sometimes have tea with Churchill’s wife Clementine at Chartwell.

Maclean was given private use of the darkroom on some evenings, where he processed photographs of secret documents, on an unknown pretext. By mistake, he left a print with a faint outline of the Foreign Office seal, but White did not say anything until the official announcement of Maclean’s defection, four years after his disappearance.

Also in Westerham was the King’s Arms pub, frequented by Maclean with his co-conspirator Burgess. They also drank at the White Hart pub in Brasted, close to Fort Halstead, a nuclear research and design facility, perhaps listening for injudicious comments. They were later described as an odd pair: ‘one was so smart and well-dressed [Burgess] and the other untidy and bleary-eyed [Maclean]’.⁴

On the night of his thirty-eighth birthday, Maclean finished his dinner at his house in Tatsfield and kissed pregnant Melinda goodbye. He gave her half of a ripped postcard, telling her to trust only the person with the other half. He then drove off with Burgess and defected to the Soviet Union.

Melinda kept up a good pretence that she did not know where he was. A year later she was approached by Yuri Modin, KGB handler of the Cambridge Five, with the other half of the postcard.

After two more years, in September 1953, she was with her mother in Switzerland and said she was going to stay with friends for the weekend. She disappeared with her three children and it later transpired that she had made her way to Austria from where they were flown to the Soviet Union by the KGB.

Kim Philby arrived in Moscow ten years later, after which Melinda had an affair with him. She tired of living in the Soviet Union and moved to New York in 1973, dying there in 2010. Maclean died in Moscow in 1983, aged 69.

Anthony Blunt prepared MI5 intelligence reports for Churchill during World War II.

Duff Cooper was appointed minister for information in May 1940 and was given cabinet responsibility for MI5. After familiarising himself with MI5 activities, he told Churchill about some of the more interesting ones including the recruitment of double agent Eddie Chapman (codename ‘Zigzag’) and suggested the production of a monthly report for Churchill’s eyes only. This was met with enthusiasm and MI5 director-general Sir David Petrie requested Guy Liddell, head of counter-espionage, to prepare the reports. Liddell gave the task to his assistant Dick White who used Anthony Blunt as his editor. This effectively gave Blunt a free rein to investigate anything he wanted to know about in MI5.

Blunt studied maths and modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he and Guy Burgess were members of the Apostles, an intellectual discussion group. Burgess’s increasingly left-wing views had an influence on Blunt, as did a strong Marxist trend amongst Cambridge students at the time. Blunt became an art historian and a fellow of Trinity College and was recruited in 1937 as a student talent spotter for the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB.

He was hired by MI5 in 1940 with the main role of spying on foreign embassies in London, opening diplomatic bags and using cleaning staff to obtain documents. His additional function of preparing summaries for Churchill brought him into contact with ‘Ultra’ (ultra secret) decrypts from Bletchley Park.* He passed over 1000 documents to the NKVD but their ultimate value has been questioned due to NKVD inefficiency and its ambivalent view of the Cambridge ring.

He left MI5 towards the end of the war and was appointed to look after the royal picture collection. He also became director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. His handler Yuri Modin tried to persuade him to defect with Burgess and Maclean but he refused and survived several interrogations.

In 1963 another Cambridge recruit, Michael Straight, made a confession that implicated Blunt who finally confessed in exchange for immunity. His espionage activities were not officially acknowledged until 1979. He died at home in London from a heart attack in 1983, aged 75.

* Bletchley Park was the main location for the UK’s code-breaking activities during World War II, accessing Axis messages using Lorenz and Enigma ciphers, amongst others. It was run by the Government Code and Cypher School (‘GC&CS’), renamed Government Communications Headquarters (‘GCHQ’) in 1946.

Ivan Maisky was Soviet ambassador to the UK from 1932 to 1943, gaining high-quality information from his wide range of contacts.

Maisky was not strictly a ‘spy’ as he did not act covertly. He was, however, a highly effective information gatherer for a foreign power and was possibly a far richer source of strategic information for the Soviets than the Cambridge Spy Ring and others.

Maisky’s charm and hard work resulted in a large network of relationships with influential politicians, business people and others including Churchill, Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, Neville Chamberlain and David Lloyd George.

In 1935, for example, Churchill told him that he was ‘abandoning his protracted struggle against the Soviet Union’⁵ as it was no longer a threat to Britain; they needed to work together against Nazi Germany.

During World War II, Maisky was permitted to visit the Foreign Office almost daily to keep in touch with the latest events. Officials complained about his level of access, to no avail.

Many others also took this approach, particularly after the outbreak of war. In June 1942, for example, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden showed Maisky a stack of secret cipher messages including a War Cabinet questionnaire about the latest situation in Libya and General Auchinleck’s replies.

In his diaries, Maisky describes various other conversations with Churchill. He made his first trip to Chartwell in 1938, two days before Guy Burgess’s visit. Churchill said that he had a bottle of wine from 1793 in his cellar which he was keeping for a truly exceptional occasion. Maisky asked what that could be. Churchill replied, ‘We’ll drink this bottle together when Great Britain and Russia beat Hitler’s Germany!’ Maisky’s diary entry says, ‘I was almost dumbstruck. Churchill’s hatred of Berlin really has gone beyond all limits!’⁶

However, Maisky did not taste the wine as he was recalled to Moscow in 1943, which he blamed on not having persuaded Britain to open a second front against Hitler but was possibly more to do with Maisky being disliked and distrusted by Molotov, minister of foreign affairs. He was arrested in February 1953 and, somewhat ironically, was accused of spying on behalf of Churchill. Stalin’s death the next month probably saved his life. He was exonerated in 1955 and died in 1975.

The conviction of Klaus Fuchs added to US resolve not to share nuclear information with the UK.

In 1943 and 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt secretly signed the Quebec Agreement and the Hyde Park Aide-Memoire which provided for US-UK nuclear cooperation, enabling British participation in the US-led Manhattan Project (in which Canada also participated), producing the world’s first nuclear weapons. Fuchs provided many calculations for the project, spending three years in the USA.

Fuchs had left Germany for the UK in 1933, aged 21, fearful of the Nazis as he was a member of the Communist Party. He completed postgraduate degrees in theoretical physics in the UK and was interned as a potential German threat upon the outbreak of war. One of his academic supervisors campaigned successfully for his release and his abilities were soon used to assist the Tube Alloys project, the UK’s early nuclear programme.* He gained British citizenship in 1942. After his time with the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1946, he worked at the Harwell nuclear research centre in Oxfordshire.

In 1946, UK nuclear scientist Alan Nunn May was convicted as a Soviet spy, contributing to the passage of the McMahon Act in the USA which terminated the sharing of nuclear information with allies. In 1948, under Truman and Attlee, a top secret Modus Vivendi agreement cancelled prior arrangements. In 1950, Fuchs was convicted of handing British and American nuclear secrets to the Soviets from 1941 to 1948, adding to US concerns about British trustworthiness. Like Maclean, Fuchs was discovered through US army decryption of Soviet intelligence signals, known as the ‘Venona project’.

On Churchill’s return as prime minister in 1951, he was horrified to learn about the Modus Vivendi. He discovered that Congress had been unaware of both the Quebec and Hyde Park agreements.** In 1952, McMahon told him, ‘If we had seen this [Quebec] Agreement, there would have been no McMahon Act’.⁷ Some cooperation was restored in 1958 after the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite and Britain’s independent development of the hydrogen bomb.

On Fuchs’s release from jail in 1959, he emigrated to East Germany where he continued nuclear research until retirement. He died in East Berlin in 1988, aged 76, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

* ‘Tube Alloys’ was the innocuous cover name given to the project, launched in 1941 with Churchill’s approval.

** The Quebec Agreement was an executive agreement under the Roosevelt administration, a political rather than a legal document. The Hyde Park Aide-Memoire was kept in Roosevelt’s private papers.

Churchill’s cousin, Clare Sheridan, was suspected by MI5 of being a Russian spy.

In 1920, while Churchill was secretary of state for war, Clare invited him to lunch, during which he said furiously that the Bolsheviks were crocodiles and that he would like to shoot every one he saw. He did not know that she had been doing a sculpture of one of them, Lev Kamenev, that very morning, while he was leading a Russian trade delegation to the UK.

She had an affair with him and accompanied him back to Moscow after he was expelled from Britain for propaganda. There she sculpted Trotsky, Lenin and others while Churchill fumed: ‘Clare’s in Russia with those filthy communists. She’s mad, I tell you. Mad! It’s absolutely typical of Clare, but this time she’s really gone too far.’⁸ He refused to meet her on her return.

MI5 asked its former agent Sidney Russell Cooke, a friend of Clare’s, to keep tabs on her and Kamenev. Clare allowed him to read her diary from her Russian trip, which described how she was enraptured by the Bolshevik leaders. Partly as a result, MI5’s summary in its file on her was ‘Anti-British Propagandist’ and ‘Serving Russia’.⁹ Ironically, Russell Cooke’s attentions were noticed by the Russians who then suspected Clare of being a British agent.

MI5’s suspicions increased when she started associating with two journalists identified as Soviet agents. She lived for a while in a Soviet property in Constantinople. In 1925 Russell Cooke reported that she was free of debt for the first time in ten years, concluding that she was being paid by the Soviets.

The same year, MI5 secured a warrant to intercept her mail and its chief, Sir Vernon Kell (‘K’), visited Churchill to explain the situation. Churchill told him that he would take any action required. However, nothing significant was found in the correspondence and the warrant was discontinued the following year.

Clare and Churchill reconciled and over time her views changed. In 1942 she wrote, ‘Before the war for many years I lived as an anarchist […] Now, I’m just the contrary.’¹⁰ The MI5 file was finally closed in 1949, with no substantiation of any espionage activity.

3. Biographical summary

An example of the Soviet spies:

Name	Anthony Blunt
Occupation	Art historian, UK intelligence agent, Soviet spy
Country	UK
Career	Fellow, Trinity College (1932-37). Art writer, especially on Poussin (1932-79). Talent spotter for Soviet NKVD (1937). Cultural history researcher, Warburg Institute (1937). Army intelligence officer (1939-40). MI5 intelligence agent (1940-45). Soviet spy (1940-51). Surveyor of the King’s (later Queen’s) Pictures (1945-72). Recovery of royal possessions from Germany and Netherlands (1945-47). Director, Courtauld Institute (1947-74). History of art professor, University of London (1947). National Trust’s first picture advisor (1948). Fellow, British Academy (1950-80, resigned under pressure). Knighthood (1956). Spy confession with immunity from prosecution (1964). Confession publicly acknowledged (1979). Knighthood annulled (1979). Unfinished memoir published (2009).
Born	1907 at Holy Trinity vicarage, Bournemouth, Hampshire (now in Dorset) (32 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Stanley Blunt (1870–1929), British embassy chaplain in Paris
Mother	Hilda Master (1880–1969), daughter of a civil servant in India; second cousin of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of the Queen Mother; also distantly related to Oswald Mosley (see UK Fascists)
Siblings	Youngest of three sons: 1. Wilfrid Jasper Walter (1901-1987), art teacher, gallery curator 2. Christopher Evelyn (1904-1987), banker, numismatist 3. Anthony Frederick (1907-1983)
Education	Marlborough College, Wiltshire; Trinity College, Cambridge (maths and modern languages); member of the Apostles
Spouse	–
Relationships	Possibly Guy Burgess; long-term partner John Gaskin, former Irish Guards bandsman; at least two affairs with women
Children	–
Died	1983 at home at 45 Portsea Hall, Portsea Place, Westminster, London, aged 75 (18 years after Churchill); heart attack
Buried	Cremated in Roehampton, south-west London. Buried at Putney Vale Cemetery, Wimbledon, south-west London.
Nickname	Tony, Johnson and Yan (Soviet codenames); the Fourth Man (of the Cambridge Five)
Height
Time magazine	–

4. See also

MI5 surveillance

• Sheridan, Clare
• UK fascist groups

Soviet leadership

• Stalin, Joseph
• Trotsky, Leon

Nuclear weapons

• Tojo, Hideki (Japan)

Espionage

• Wells, H.G. (affair with Moura Budberg)

Churchill’s intelligence staff

• Bracken, Brendan (Minister of Information)
• Cooper, Duff (Minister of Information)
• Denniston, Alastair (head of GC&CS)
• Masterman, John (head of Twenty Committee, MI5)
• Menzies, Stewart (head of MI6)

Churchill controversies

• Bombing (nuclear)

5. Further reading

Cambridge Five

• Carter, Miranda, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Pan Macmillan, 2017)
• Lownie, Andrew, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015)
• Philipps, Roland, A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean (Random House, 2018)
• Purvis, Stewart, and Jeff Hulbert, Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone (Biteback Publishing, 2016)

Klaus Fuchs

• Close, Frank, Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History (Penguin Books Limited, 2019)
• Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike, Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs (Penguin Publishing Group, 2020)

Other Soviet spies

• Burke, David, The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage (Boydell & Brewer, 2008)
• Hermiston, Roger, The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake (Aurum, 2013)
• Macintyre, Ben, Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy (Penguin Books Limited, 2020) (Ursula Kuczynski Burton)
• McDonald, Deborah, and Jeremy Dronfield, A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy (Oneworld Publications, 2015) (Moura Budberg)

Ivan Maisky

• Maisky, Ivan Mikhailovich, The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932-1943, ed. by Gabriel Gorodetsky, trans. by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready (Yale University Press, 2015)

Miscellaneous

• Andrew, Christopher, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (Penguin Books Limited, 2012)
• Chambers, Roland, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber & Faber, 2009)
• Macintyre, Ben, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal (Harmony Books, 2007)
• Phillips, Timothy, The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians and the Jazz Age (Granta Publications, 2017)
• Wright, Peter, Spycatcher (Stoddart, 1987)

6. References

1. Christopher Andrew, ‘The Establishment of the Secret Service Bureau’, Security Service MI5.

2. Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956), p. 46.

3. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (Stoddart, 1987), pp. 242–43.

4. Muriel Jakubait and Monica Weller, Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life (Little, Brown Book Group, 2012), p. 297.

5. Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932-1943, ed. by Gabriel Gorodetsky, trans. by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 50.

6. Maisky, p. 125.

7. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Hydrogen Bomb’, Hansard, 1954.

8. Anita Leslie, Cousin Clare: The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan (Hutchinson, 1976), p. 103, quoting from the diary of her brother Oswald Frewen (a friend of Churchill), 17 August 1920.

9. ‘PF 38453/VI in KV 2/1033’, National Archives, 1925.

10. ‘PF 38453/VI in KV 2/1033’.