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PHILBY, BURGESS, MACLEAN SPY CASE FBI FILES
3219 pages of files copied from FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., covering the Philby, Burgess and MacLean Cambridge University spy ring. Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean were British diplomats who disappeared in 1951 and surfaced in Moscow in 1956. There was speculation that Harold "Kim" Philby, head of the Soviet section of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was the "third man" who alerted them before they could be arrested for espionage.
Many consider the three to be the most successful spies recruited by the Soviet Union. Burgess and Maclean joined the British Foreign Office, from which they supplied secrets, including highly classified nuclear information and secrets relating to the formation of NATO. Philby entered the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6), becoming head of counterespionage operations after World War II and the top British intelligence officer in Washington in 1949. Burgess and Maclean delivered a flow of information on Western policy to Moscow in the 1940s, including the West's intentions on the Marshall Plan. Maclean and Philby betrayed agents infiltrating the Balkans, who were apprehended and shot.
In 1951, Allied counterintelligence began to suspect Maclean was a mole. Philby got wind of this and warned Maclean, through Burgess. Both Burgess and Maclean immediately fled to Moscow. Philby had saved his friends, but his close association with them brought suspicion upon himself. In 1951 he was relieved of his intelligence duties; in 1955 he was dismissed from MI-6. With counterintelligence closing in on him, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. When Kim Philby died in 1988, he was buried with full honors in a Moscow cemetery. |
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