Two of the Cambridge Five

Canada’s Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean Dossier

Sam Eberlee has done it again, creating a fantastic Canada Declassified briefing book with records related to two of the Cambridge Five spies. I’ve pasted Sam’s excellent introduction below, but it is also worth visiting the briefing book itself, as Sam has included more content in each section of his briefing book. Enjoy!

Ottawa was on the margins, rather than at the centre, of the story of British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean’s disappearance in the summer of 1951. Still, Canadian officials paid close attention to their mysterious flight, and to subsequent revelations that the duo were Soviet agents recruited in the early 1930s. Burgess and Maclean are now known as two members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, a group of British intellectuals with Marxist-Leninist leanings who were recruited by the Soviet NKVD during or after their studies at Cambridge University. All had successful careers in the British civil service, which made them prolific Soviet agents. Maclean was of particular interest from the Canadian vantage point because during a late 1940s posting to the British Embassy in Washington, he was part of tripartite discussions of atomic energy, uranium requirements, and resuming North Atlantic nuclear cooperation (CDMB00001 & CDMB00004). Initially, diplomats at the Canadian High Commission in London could only transmit terse statements by the UK Foreign Office – which claimed it had "no information of their whereabouts since they left this country” – and conflicting gossip. Some of their British counterparts leaned into espionage rumors, while others were privately confident that Burgess and Maclean were simply travelling abroad “on a spree” (CDMB00002 & CDMB00003).

Canada’s postwar security and intelligence community followed British patterns of organization and examples, and many of its key figures had experience in UK intelligence services. The head of Canada’s Security Panel, which was created in 1946 to advise Cabinet on internal security in Ottawa, was a British expatriate. Peter Dwyer was a former MI6 officer who had overlapped with Maclean in Washington and knew him well through professional and social channels (Dwyer’s successor in that post was none other Kim Philby, later revealed to be the third member of the Cambridge spy ring). His assessments of Maclean blurred personal and professional lines. Dwyer recalled two alter egos. “Sir Donald” was usually a consummate gentleman-diplomat. But in rarer instances, this façade was pricked by irreverent, suspicious behaviour.  Dwyer assessed that it was “very probable that Maclean was in fact a Soviet agent” of “exceptional value.” If this was the case, Dwyer expressed concerns about both security and the likely impact of Maclean’s “clandestine work” on the lives of his sons Fergus and Donalbain (CDMB00012).

In the years that followed, Canada’s Department of External Affairs maintained a robust, growing file on Burgess and Maclean. The US State Department concluded that the classified information at Maclean’s disposal in 1947-48 would have been of great interest to the Soviets at the time. But “because of great changes that have taken place in [the nuclear] field in the intervening years, the information available to him then would not now be of any appreciable aid to the Soviet Union” in the 1950s (CDMB00005). Canadian consuls in the US reported on the fallout from Maclean and Burgess’s disappearance, which planted seeds of mistrust among close allies (CDMB00025). Officials in Ottawa wondered if security lessons could be learned from the Burgess and Maclean fiasco, so Canadian diplomats in London monitored press leaks, parliamentary debates, white papers, and privy councillors’ reviews of 1952-56. Finally, there was a real element of human interest in the story. G.G. “Bill” Crean, a wartime MI5 officer who headed External Affairs’ political intelligence division, circulated press clippings about the British diplomats to other Canadian officials under cover notes that they might “enliven a dull moment” (CDMB00020). Crean joked that as an Oxford graduate, he “hasten[ed] to declare [his] lack of personal interest” in spies recruited at Cambridge (CDMB00019).

Burgess and Maclean’s presence in Moscow was revealed in 1956, and Canadians and their allies speculated the Soviet motive was to further contribute to a “worsening of Anglo-American relations” (CDMB00026). In 1959, a Canadian journalist bought Guy Burgess’s contact details on the Moscow black market and convinced the defector to record a remarkable television interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Burgess shared that he had a grandmother from Montreal, so he was one-quarter Canadian. The documents in this briefing book touch on a second, even lesser-known interview that resulted from this encounter. Upon his return to Canada, the journalist shared his impressions of Burgess, Soviet surveillance, and his unsuccessful attempts to locate Maclean with Ottawa’s Joint Intelligence Bureau (CDMB00029). This was not unusual. In the 1950s-60s, Canada’s JIB did not run spies, but did interview willing Canadian travellers who might have gleaned useful intelligence in the normal course of their travels to places of interest.

The documents in this briefing book are all derived from the Department of External Affairs’ “G.F. de M. Burgess and D.D. Maclean: British Foreign Officials (Disappearance of)” file. The file was released as Library and Archives Canada ATIP A-2023-02971. The complete release package is available as CDMB00030.

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In other history news: TVO recently aired a four-part series called “Forgotten War,” with excellent segments on Korea, Afghanistan, Cyprus, and Yugoslavia. The episodes can be found here. On Remembrance Day, I joined Steve Paikin, along with Arne Kislenko and Kerry Buck, for a broader discussion titled “Has Canada Forgotten Its Military History?” A podcast version of the discussion is available here, as well as a video version on Youtube.