How It's Used

“During and immediately after World War II the Cambridge five [sic] passed top-secret Western intelligence, much of it gleaned from the British Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, to the Soviets.”

—Mark Lloyd, The Guinness Book of Espionage, (New York:  Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 106

“Scattered throughout these books are references to the role played by academic and other cultural institutions in sponsoring Soviet espionage. The ‘Cambridge Five’ group emerged first as students, and an 'Oxford ring' from the 1930s awaits exposure from Moscow's records. Between 1940 and 1990 the KGB was relentless in trying to set up newspapers and magazines to promulgate Soviet perspectives throughout Western Europe, a practice the CIA used briefly in the postwar decade but gradually abandoned. For the KGB, such publications often served as recruitment as well as propaganda vehicles.”

—Allen Weinstein, “Uncloaking the Soviet Spy Effort,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 1999, p. A22.

“Among the book's (The Sword and the Shield) intriguing revelations are these: For a time, almost a year, the KGB gave way to paranoia and suspected that the Cambridge Five, including Philby, were actually British double agents; nothing in the files seen by [Vasili] Mitrokhin suggests that the KGB had any role in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II; the most important objective of 'Service A,' the KGB's disinformation arm, was to prevent Ronald Reagan's election to a second term (a goal shared by Walter Mondale, who had no better luck); one famed Soviet 'illegal,' a spy operating without benefit of diplomatic cover, created his own by becoming a top Costa Rican diplomat; another illegal, Anatoly Rudenko, became the piano tuner for Nelson Rockefeller and Vladimir Horowitz, which meant he must have been a pretty good piano tuner, although he found few secrets inside the Steinways; the KGB bugged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Air Force One and Henry Kissinger; and it hatched plans 'to disrupt the power supply of the entire state' of New York (which Con Edison managed to accomplish last summer without any help at all).”

—David Wise, “Our Man in Britannia,” The Washington Post, December 6, 1999, p. C03.

“In the history classroom, introduce students to the work of spies from different eras (www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists-spies/spies/index.html). As part of a wider study of Europe during the second world war, focus on the story of the Cambridge Five, who included Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby (www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/cambridge-spies-01.shtml). Older students might find the FBI's online archive a good place to research espionage in the cold war era (www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/famcases.htm).”

—Lyndsey Turner, “Poisoned chalice: The death of the former Russian spy in London has put espionage and the cold war back on the agenda,” The Guardian (UK), December 12, 2006.

“The interview [in Granta by Donald Maclean] is included in a Cambridge University Library exhibition about espionage, which opens tomorrow. Also on show will be the student cards of the Cambridge Five—Maclean, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and John Cairncross—which show their academic progress. John Wells, the exhibitions officer, said of the cards: ‘They show the ease with which they went through the establishment without drawing attention to themselves.’”

—Stephen Adams, “How spy Maclean showed his many faces,” The Daily Telegraph (UK), January 18, 2010.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
Double Agent
MI-5
MI-6

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Cambridge Five

Product Links
Cambridge Spies. (BBC, 2003).