![]() ![]() There is also a copy of a memoir by Philby written some 15 years before his 1968 autobiography My Silent War. They confirm Burgess’ ‘roaring affair’ at Cambridge with Maclean, that he had unsuccessfully tried to stay in MI5 after the Second World War, how he came close to being sacked several times from the Foreign Office for poor work and that at his death he was writing a memoir which named Blunt ‘as having been the man who warned him that the security net was closing around him’ a memoir which vanished on his death. ![]() They provide chapter and verse on Burgess’s engagements to Clarissa Churchill – niece of Winston Churchill and wife of Anthony Eden – and Esther Whitfield, Kim Philby’s secretary and mistress. The new releases provide more detail on the investigations into their disappearance and the introduction of new security measures. The recent release of some 400 files by the Foreign Office and MI5 – the first full-scale release of documents on the case – should have cleared up some of the mysteries even though a fifth of the release is redacted or remains unreleased. Why should clever men at the heart of the Establishment, who enjoyed its trappings, seek to betray it? Why, given their drunken and promiscuous lifestyles, were they never caught and are there still spies to be uncovered? It is more than 65 years since Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled from the latter’s home in Kent to the Soviet Union on Friday 25th May, 1951, but the story of the Cambridge Spies continues to fascinate.
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