Guy Burgess

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess ( born April 16, 1911 in Devonport, Plymouth, England; † August 30, 1963 in Moscow, Soviet Union ) was a British secret agent and double agent, who worked simultaneously for the Soviet Union. He belonged to the spy ring of the Cambridge Five within the MI5.

Life

How many members of the British upper class went through Burgess Eton College, the Royal Naval Academy Dartmouth and later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he became involved in a student debating society, where he met Anthony Blunt, were both homosexual. Later he joined, like many members of his generation, the Communist Party. There he was introduced at the Cambridge Apostles, one at this time strictly Marxist, secret association.

In order to hide his pro-Communist attitude, he told himself officially from communism and stepped to the 1934 Anglo - German Fellowship at, a pro- Nazi group, who was next to British celebrity Kim Philby. Between 1936 and 1944 he worked for the BBC, where he produced the program The Week in Westminster. Between 1939 and 1941 he supported MI5 to the creation of war propaganda. In 1944 Burgess at the Foreign Office, where he worked in the news department. 1947 Burgess was a second secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, DC active. Kim Philby and Donald Maclean Burgess warned in 1951 that Maclean was under suspicion and both would probably be revealed. Both fled and went into hiding. 1956 both reappeared in Moscow. Burgess died in 1963 in Moscow. His ashes were transferred and buried on 5 October at his father's grave in West Meon.

Books and Movies

• Alan Bennett: An Englishman Abroad. In: Single Spies. ( Filmed in 1983 by John Schlesinger for the BBC ) Faber & Faber, London 1998, ISBN 0-571-14105-6
• Verne Newton: Cambridge Spies: the untold story of Maclean, Philby and Burgess in America. Madison Books, Lanham, Md., 1991, ISBN 0-8191-8059-9
• Cambridge Spies, four-part television series of the BBC ( 2003)