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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Tristan Donovan and this is The Spy Who. I'm one of the executive producers on The Spy Who and usually I'm part of the team behind the scenes. Usually I work on the scripts but today I've been taken out of the safe house to try and find out more about our latest story.
That story of course was the spy who saved MI5, the tale of Oleg Lelin. His information led to the biggest expulsion of Soviet spies by any Western government during the Cold War. MI5 regard it as an important turning point in their battle with Soviet intelligence.
This was a tricky one because the full story is still locked away in MI5 vaults. So we had to go through old newspaper articles, books, archive material and piece this together bit by bit. And it's a story with lots of parallels today with hundreds of Russian spies who have been expelled from European cities following the invasion of Ukraine.
But Leland's story wasn't just about getting rid of spies. It was also about rehabilitating MI5. In this episode, we're going to explore why MI5 was in the doghouse as the 70s began. And with me to discuss it is Andrew Loney, author of Stalin's Englishman. Hello, Andrew. Hello. Thanks for joining us. Pleasure.
So before we get cracking, in a few words, how much of an impact would you say the Cambridge spy scandal had on British intelligence and even Britain itself? Well, I think it had a huge impact and we're still seeing the impact to this day.
I mean, it created a witch hunt, basically, within MI5. So it really sowed seeds of discord within the intelligence community in this country and indeed its relationship with the intelligence agencies abroad. And the Americans found it very hard to forgive them. Right. And is this what drew you to writing about the Cambridge Five? I went up to Cambridge at the time when the whole Blunt story was breaking. Every week, the Sunday Times seemed to have a new spy being discovered.
And it was very exciting. It was cops and robbers from cowboys and Indians for a young man. Excellent. Looking forward to finding out more. We get support from Dove. Hey, everyone. This is your girl, Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Listen up, because there's some messed up stuff we got to talk about. Currently, race-based hair discrimination is still legal in some states in the U.S.,
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So let's get into it. For a lot of listeners, and I do count myself among this, I've grown up, I've heard the Cambridge Five, and it's like this mythical thing. You hear quite a lot about it, but the details are kind of sketchy. It's some time ago, and the ins and outs are vague. You know, there's people like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, but you don't entirely know what
So I guess for your basic kind of understanding, who were the Cambridge Five? Well, the Ring of Five, as it was described by the Russians, were in order. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cancross. All of them, apart from Maclean, had been at Trinity College, Cambridge. All of them were contemporaries.
But actually, we shouldn't really be talking about the Cambridge Five. We should probably be talking about the Cambridge Fifty. We know that there were 20 recruitments between 1934 and 1937 by the Russians. And there are many more names that really should be in this list, people like Leo Long, Michael Strait and others.
So, though people tend to always think of those five as the only people in the ring, it was much broader than that. And, of course, they recruited other people and they, in turn, recruited other people. We may well be seeing the descendants of those recruitments still active to this day. So, how did they get recruited? Well, they were recruited originally by Philby. Philby had left Cambridge in 1938.
Three, he'd gone to Vienna where he'd actually got involved with a sort of underground communist movement there and married, in fact, a woman who was a recruiter. And he was sort of nurtured, sent back to Cambridge to recruit his fellow sort of communists. And he targeted basically people who'd been in something called the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which was a communist front.
And the top of his list was Donald Maclean. The bottom of his list of five was Guy Burgess. We don't know who numbers two, three and four were. If they refused, they offer or they have never been discovered. And Maclean readily joined. Now, there was some concern about Burgess because he was very indiscreet. Indiscretion is not normally the characteristic of a spy. But he sort of got to hear about it. He wanted to be part of the action. And so they sort of felt they had to have him in.
And then Burgess was used very much as a recruiter. He was still at Cambridge as a postgraduate and doing some teaching. And he recruited Blunt and indeed then brought in Cancross. And Blunt stayed on at Trinity Cambridge for a while and he was again used as a recruiter. Burgess would spend a lot of time in Oxford, so he would go across and recruit people in Oxford.
And so that's how the whole thing began to grow. They basically just went to their friends who they knew would be sympathetic. It's almost like a pyramid scheme in a way. You know, they recruit one, get them to recruit more, he'll recruit more, he'll recruit more. Absolutely, yes. And that's why, you know, we probably have the descendants of those original recruits still operating now. And what was their motivations? Why were these people getting involved with the Soviet Union?
Well, their motivations varied, but I think there was a mixture for all of them, a very strong ideological identification with the Soviet Union, often artistic, for example, but also a sense that in the power blocks that were likely to take place in the 20th century, that it was a battle between Russia and America. A lot of them were very anti-American people.
A lot of them had absent fathers. Either their fathers had died young, like Maclean and Burgess, or were away, like Philby's father. And the Russian Secret Service became their parents, really, their fathers.
But a lot of it was petit le bourgeoisie. It was a way of getting back at the establishment that they were ostensibly part of the establishment. They've been to good schools. They're at Oxbridge. They're members of London clubs and various things. But I think they still felt outsiders and the Russians helped them to create a sense of belonging. Why did the Soviets target Cambridge and Trinity College, wasn't it, kind of specifically?
Well, I think the Russians targeted all sorts of places. I mean, there is an Oxford ring. We don't know about the Oxford ring either because they were clever enough not to get caught or were so useless that they never achieved anything.
But I think there's also something in the nature of the two universities. I mean, Cambridge is a much more puritan, a much more scientific university, so therefore more attractive in some ways. Oxford is more cosmopolitan and is more worldly and I think was less attractive. But the Russians aimed at, for example, the Imperial College in London. They recruited a spy known as Basil. They also recruited even at Sandhurst, Birmingham, which was a center for scientific research.
So we only really know about Cambridge because that's caught the public imagination. But there must be lots more. Yeah. And so this is 1930s kind of it starting with. Yes. Recruitment for Philby was 1934. Philby, McLean and Burgess. And then it continues through really to 37, as I say, that's the period.
And that was, of course, a very attractive time for the Russians. It was a time when it was a sense that no one was standing up to fascism, to Hitler. So they're all five Cambridge contemporaries recruited by the Russians as part of a long-term penetration project.
They go into the civil service, the foreign office, the intelligence services, the journalism, and they begin very quickly to provide very useful information for the Russians. And that continues through till 1951 when McLean is discovered and escapes with Burgess.
And then gradually over the years, other names were emerged. So Cairncross was the last to be publicly revealed in 1990. Right. I guess back in the Cambridge Five time, it was an ideological war. At least that's how the Cold War was framed. It was communism versus capitalism, democracy versus authoritarianism. The
the ideological kind of divide isn't quite there anymore. It's kind of more just rivalries. Do you think it was easier in that time because there was an ideological debate or was that just a myth? If you think of the war on terror and Islamic fundamentalism, I mean, that is ideological. I mean, the battles going on in the Middle East are not dissimilar to what happened in the 1930s in terms of ideology.
But yes, we have other factors now. We always talk about what's called mice in terms of why people become spies. Money, ideology, compromise and ego. And there's always an element of all of those things. Ego played a large part, for example, with the Cambridge spies. And those things still apply. The Americans found that a lot of people that they had spying, the Aldrich Jameson people, a lot of it was done for money.
But a lot of it is done because people feel pissed off that they're not getting promotion, their boss doesn't trust them, the problems in their marriage. There are all sorts of reasons why people go and spy. Why do you think people like Guy Burgess sort of held the line once they've been recruited? They kind of saw the deal Stalin did with Hitler. They started probably hearing about it.
some of the atrocities that went on in the Soviet Union. What was it about their commitment to that cause that made them go, I'm going to carry on being this spy? Well, it's a good question. I mean, some tried to get out. People like Blunt were very keen to get out. He had a career as an art historian. I think people like Burgess and Philby particularly liked to hunt with the hares and the hounds. They liked the sense of being insiders. They'd pick their football team and they were going to stick with it.
I think a lot of them were under pressure, like Blunt. Basically, he'd been caught. It was very difficult for him to get out. And so he kind of just jogged along in there. But from all of them, I think there was a mixture of the personal and the political. So they were drawn to it ideologically. Burgess came to it because of his interest in Marxism as a historian. And he saw this as big power. You know, the power play was between the Russians and the Americans, basically.
And indeed, Blunt was brought in because of this Marxist interpretation of art. But I think others just love that sense of power it gave them. They were insiders. They were people. They were very well managed by the Russians who made them feel important. And I think that they continue to justify to themselves why they were doing this. I mean, Burgess ironically taught on the evils of communism at the Foreign Office Summer School.
It's kind of ironic. I mean, how did they sort of pass intel? How were they useful to the Soviets? Were they just literally taking files out of MI5 and MI6 and passing them along in dead drops? I mean, how was the exchanges and uses? They were useful in all sorts of different ways, and each of them had a slightly different role depending on where they were. So Philby had got into MI6, foreign intelligence, through the help of Burgess.
And clearly he knew all the agents, all the operations, intelligence operations that were going on
if there were suspicions about particular Russian agents. So that was his role. He could pass information back and he would do that partly through deadlocked drops, partly from meetings with his controllers. And they had very sophisticated controllers from Central Europe who spoke lots of languages and who one of them was, for example, was an expert in psychology and a psychologist. So they knew how to sort of play them.
People like Cairncross worked in the Treasury, so he was able to give sort of economic information. He was later at Bletchley and was able to betray Ultra. What was Ultra? Ultra was basically we were able to read the German codes and that really won the war for us. So that was a top secret that we didn't even want our allies to know about and he betrayed that. Burgess actually had a very interesting role.
because he worked in the BBC. He was an agent of influence. He was able to bring people in and give them a voice. So you heard a lot of communists on the radio because of that. He had also worked in MI5 and MI6, so he was able to, again, give orders of battle and readings of people. He would lend his flat for assignations to people for their love affairs and then blackmail them.
So he was able to give that information to the Russians. Right. So this is, you know, extremely useful to the Soviet Union, a very deep penetration of the intelligence services. And it seems like a very successful plan by the Soviets. You recruit some young students at Cambridge and they rise to the top and give you all these secrets. I mean, how much of that is it looked like a great strategy in hindsight or
Or was it really just that masterful puppeteering? No, I think it was a masterful way of doing it. They concentrated on people who were going to go to the very top. They saw that British society was pretty closed and people who've gone to these universities would probably rise to the top. Almost all of them, apart from Philby, got firsts. So these were the brightest and the best universities.
McLean went into the Foreign Office, who was able to portray the secrets of the Foreign Office. So they all had their particular role, and the Russians would push them in certain directions. So, for example, Burgess was too old to go into the Foreign Office. He was pushed towards the Times, failed to get in there. They tried to push him to conservative central office. He didn't get in there. And the BBC was a third choice.
So they all had their own particular role. But yeah, it was masterful. And of course, these are the ones we know about. Michael Strait, who's also part of this network, also at Trinity at the same time, went into the State Department and was the American dimension to the spy ring. So they had these huge tentacles right out across the whole of the establishment.
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Let's talk a bit more about the intel. What do you think was the most important secrets that these spies shared with the Soviet Union? I mean, it's very difficult to do a damage assessment. I mean, the people tried. The view of the Americans was basically everything that was across their desk was compromised. All the codes, for example, had to be changed.
A lot of the documents, and if you think this was a creation of NATO, the UN, the OECD, the position of the four power conferences was that the Russians often knew the British negotiating position before the British negotiators themselves. Burgess, for example, took out over 4,000 documents in space for a few years just in the Foreign Office in the beginning of the war. So lots of stuff. I mean, Maclean had access to atomic secrets. Those were betrayed.
But Cancross knew about Ultra, which was betrayed. So some really, really big subjects. I mean, they probably are the most important spy ring of the 20th century. And how did they get caught? Where did it start to unravel for them? It began to unravel really at the end of the war. In 1944, the Americans had begun to break Russian codes. They established that there was a spy in the Washington embassy in 1944 called Homer.
And Homer's wife was having a baby in New York. That's what they were able to discover. And only one person really fitted the bill there, and that was Maclean. So this really happened at the beginning of 1951. It had taken them that long to break the codes. And Philby was tipped off about this because he was the liaison officer for MI6, and actually MI5 a bit too, in Washington.
So he was alerted to the fact. They also were aware that defectors were beginning to emerge. So the net was beginning to draw in. In fact, the spies were beginning to drink very heavily. Burgess was taking drugs because they knew their days were numbered. Right. And I mean, this is hugely embarrassing for the British establishment and the intelligence services that these people have risen so high in their ranks. I mean, was there a reluctance to...
accept or deal with this problem? Well, I mean, security was very lax at this point. In the past, the people who've been spies have been sort of code clerks and very junior people. The idea that people who'd gone to good schools, been at Cambridge, could be spies was just anathema to the establishment. There was also a very strong sense of that the foreign officer, for example, was a family, that they didn't betray each other.
that they would tolerate eccentricities. For example, Burgess turned up at one event with lipstick and makeup and people were slightly shocked and the ambassador said, well, we allow this idiosyncrasy in the Foreign Office.
There was a sense they didn't want to be like the McCarthy witch hunt that was going on in the States. So, you know, people were able to take documents out. They were not searched. People had access to keys to safes. So it was very, very easy. And of course, one of the big consequences of this whole case was that security was tightened up. There was positive vetting was brought in. And there was a realization that everyone had the potential to be a spy. Right.
It seems now very naive that the establishment would have even fought in those kind of ways. That, oh, well, people couldn't possibly be spies. We kind of know their family. It seems rather bizarre looking back. I mean, was there any kind of reasoning for that or was it just naivety? Well, I think it's your point that you made, that these people often recruited by word of mouth. People knew their parents. That was one of the reasons that Philby got into intelligence. People knew about his father.
And there was a great, it was a very closed shop, there was a lot of deference. And there was no proper recruitment policy. It was all done, I mean this is why so many of the spies were able to get into the intelligence services at the beginning of the war. It was done in a nod and a wink. They needed to expand rapidly. These were intelligent people, often with language skills.
And so they were able to penetrate the system very easily. There were security officers brought in as a result of the Cambridge case, but the Admiralty, for example, didn't have a proper security officer until 1961. And there was still this reluctance for people to snitch on each other. Right. As the net sort of closed in and they start being interrogated and
Was there a sense from any of them that they regretted what they had done or were they still pretty much wedded to the communist causes? Well, they all reacted slightly differently. So, Philby, for example, was suspected in 1951 after Burgess and Maclean fled, but he was able to basically talk himself to remain on the books of MI6 until 1963 when he fled to Russia.
But, and he in fact was allowed to flee. He was interviewed. It was an open window. The traffic drowned out the tapes recording him. He was told that, you know, he would be picked up. And so, of course, he fled. Burgess never had any regrets. He did say when he was in Russia that he was a communist, but he was a British communist. That was different to being a Russian communist.
So they kind of, it was a kind of a la carte menu. But amazingly, you know, though he was miserable in Moscow and very lonely and missed his mother and his friends, you can imagine how bleak Moscow wasn't from the 1950s. He never once regretted it. I think he was a Huguenot. He'd made his choice and he was going to stick with it. He made his bed. Philby, when he got to Moscow, was a bit more unhappy. I mean, his wife left and went back to America.
He tried to commit suicide. He was drinking very heavily. And it was only by marrying a young Russian woman that he actually, in a sense, got used to it. And also, he was not treated as a hero of the Soviet Union. He was just Agent Tom. And a bit later on, they realized that they could do more with their spies and began to teach at intelligence academies and be given the Order of the Red Banner. And then life got a bit better for them.
Cairncross, of course, was basically fingered in 1951, but allowed to get off. And they interviewed him. And he went and lived in Italy and Rome and France and America. And he was only really revealed publicly in 1990.
And Blunt, of course, was given immunity in 1963 and only revealed in 1979 when Mrs. Thatcher announced in the House of Commons as a result of Andrew Boyle's book that he'd been given immunity. So they had a pretty easy time when you think of how many spies did go to prison. Yeah, I was going to ask about that because it...
I mean, MI5 and MI6 are kind of – I don't think officially they were even known to exist back then. I think that came much later. It came in the 1990s. We had this ridiculous position where they were not publicly acknowledged. We knew they existed. People wrote books about them and people wrote memoirs.
But they were not avowed. So it is a very old thing and of course there were various cover names used. Minister of Defense was often used for MI5 and the Foreign Office clearly for MI6. Yeah, so were the public fairly unaware this was going on in the 50s and 60s? Was it because obviously these are spies officially in an organization that doesn't exist?
Well, I think there were books coming out. I mean, even, you know, there were wartime adventures that people talked about. So the public did know about them. They were reported in the papers, often very sanitized and fictionalized versions. And the story when it broke in 1951, Burgess Maclean disappearing, the line that was put out by the foreign officer where they were basically two gays who got drunk and probably fallen in the river.
And it was only the French police leaking the story off the flight and the fact that people were looking for them that allowed the story to break. But even then, the white paper that came out to review what happened was called the whitewash paper because it just told so many lies about what had happened.
And so the public didn't really know entirely what was going on. A lot of it was covered up. I mean, a lot of it is still covered up. Many of the papers have still not been released to the National Archives or have been destroyed. And when I wrote my book on Burgess in 2015, that was based on 300 files that were released only then, the investigations into the case, which went back sort of 40 years. Yeah.
So there's much more kind of sealed away in the vaults even now. Yes, I think there's a lot more to come out. I hope there is. I mean, it hasn't been destroyed. We have to remember about 95% of material is destroyed. So, yes, there are lots and lots of interviews still to come out. I think there are probably lots of spies still to be revealed. Maybe there was an Oxford spy ring. You know, maybe there was a spy ring in Birmingham and Imperial we don't know about.
Yeah. And I guess the thing with a spy, you're doing a good job when you're not discovered. In a way, these five by being found, they're kind of, I guess, the ones who screwed up their job in some way, whereas those who were never found are the ones who...
Harold MacMillan famously said, when my gamekeeper shoots a fox, I bury it in the garden. I don't bring it into the front hall. And there was a sense that they didn't want these stories to come out. It was embarrassing in terms of the public, in terms of their relationship with their political masters, in terms of their relationships with intelligence agencies abroad. So often they want to suppress these stories.
And one of the certainly ramifications of the Cambridge spies was that, you know, the State Department were hiding stuff from the FBI and MI6 were not telling MI5 everything. Everyone wanted to keep their little piece quiet.
And you've got to also remember that spying is not like police work. You don't just pick someone up and put them on trial. Often you don't have enough evidence to put them on trial or the evidence you have you don't want to use. And often these people can lead you on to other people. And that was the reason that Cancross and Blunt were given immunity, because in return for basically telling them who the other spies were and helping them round up the network,
or at least be aware of the network and what had been penetrated. That's far more useful than sticking a few guys in prison. So what do you think the overall fallout from their discovery was? Obviously a bit of a big question, but what was the fallout for the intelligence services and for Britain as a whole? Well, I think there was lots of fallout. I think it shook faith in the establishment. The establishment was actually coined as the phrase after the disappearance in 1951. Oh, wow.
And I think people didn't trust the establishment. I think there was also a sense that the establishment couldn't be trusted and that for people who went to Eton could be spies.
So that changed. Clearly a lot of satire, a lot less deference in society. Clearly the whole way they dealt with positive vetting. There were a whole series of security commissions. People looked at cold cases again. There was the relationship also with other agencies abroad. So, for example, the CIA and the State Department were not really cooperating with the British for some time afterwards.
There was the betrayal of atomic secrets, which again clearly was very embarrassing. So, you know, the openness that had been there in terms of sharing intelligence information sort of stopped as everyone just guarded their own secrets.
And it was only when the Americans began to penetrate it themselves, because, of course, the Russians had done exactly the same things with the Ivy League universities, that there was an acceptance that, you know, it wasn't entirely the British fault that there had been this spy ring. Right. It's amazing. We didn't have the establishment as a phrase before this happened.
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When we've been researching stories for The Spy Who, one of the things that keeps cropping up in story after story, particularly during the Cold War period, is The Cambridge Five, whether it's Philby or Burgess or some other member of it. It's a repeating theme and it kind of overshadows everything. So Lennon's story, the reputation of MI5 as in the doghouse with the foreign office, pretty much because it failed to find these people,
Would you agree that much of the story for the security services after the Cambridge Five is about rebuilding trust, MI5 and MI6 having to rebuild trust with government, with foreign countries? I mean, is that really the story for British intelligence after this?
Yes, I think the Leyland case is a good example where they needed to show that they were able to catch spies and they would take action against spies. And that was a message being sent out to the Russians, too. I mean, the balance always here is if you round up all these spies, these are spies that you know about, that you can follow and that you can in some ways control. Do you want to get rid of them all and have to start all over again with all these people turning up as cooks and drivers and trying to work out who the spies are?
But I think there was a political will there, not just an intelligence will, to do something and really make a statement. And that's happened again more recently, for example, after the Salisbury poisoning. A lot of European nations came together and expelled Russian agents. And it was actually damaging to the Russians because it was embarrassing. It showed the level of spying that went on.
And they had to build these networks from scratch again. They got rid of the ones they knew about. But 105 is a lot of people to send back.
And, of course, you've also got to think about the tit-for-tat that people from Moscow were sent back. And, again, is that the price you want to pay? It's quite hard to establish agents in Russia. Do you want to lose them under this tit-for-tat arrangement? Yeah. And in Operation Foot, they kept back some of the names. They kind of told the Soviets, yes.
We also know about these people, but we're not sending them back because we want to keep an eye on them, essentially, and have people we can expel if you start expelling more of our people. Yes, I think one of the ironies is, you know, the spy services know who each other's spies are. Often they go there and they're declared, some of them.
The people who don't know about the spies are the public. And that's why the files remain closed and we're not meant to know. But the Russians would have known, for example, about the damage that the Cambridge Five would have done. MI5 might have worked it out. But the one people who don't know about it is the British public.
And how big an impact did this have on British intelligence relationship with the FBI and CIA? You know, we traditionally think of the UK, US being very close partners in intelligence. And I get the impression the kind of fallout from the Cambridge Five really opened up a rift between the two. Yes, it did open up a rift. I mean, Hoover was always rather anti-British. You know, this confirmed all his prejudices.
I think you've got to also remember that there's cooperation at a whole series of levels and in a whole series of different ways. It's not just intelligence services, but there's liaison within the foreign office, within the political level,
So there's a whole series of different, often personal relationships. And I think some of those didn't change. I mean, everyone saw that it was in their interest to keep talking to each other. So a lot of this, I think, was done for public display to basically, you know, each other sort of got wrapped on the knuckles. But yes, stuff was being held back because it was embarrassing.
And the man who was sent off actually to talk to the Americans about the case from MI5 was sent because he was the, you know, seemed to be a very good persuasive liar. So yeah, it was embarrassing, but I think people realized that they needed to work together and this was perhaps just one of those things. Therefore, the grace of God go I. And so I think cooperation began much more quickly than people have perhaps stated. Right.
And we touched on this a little bit about what is left to be discovered about the Cambridge Five. And it seems like there's still stuff we're yet to be told. Are there particular questions that you're dying to know that
People want to know about yes, I think people want to know you know is it the Cambridge 50 for example Who were the other spies they want to know if there was an ox inspiring? You know a lot of the information that we've got comes from a sort of period of glasnost where the Russian intelligence services in order to make some money and I think so, you know to sound off their own trumpet collaborated with historians and
in the West to publish some of the documents that had been brought by the spies. We wouldn't know what the spies had given if the Russians hadn't said, well, here's what it was.
But that was done on the basis that the historians often didn't speak Russian, that they were working with a member of the Russian Secret Service who produced the documents that they wanted to be seen. So there must be many, many more documents that they didn't want us to see. The only stories they've revealed are the stories that were already broken, like the Cambridge Spies.
So I suspect there are all sorts of other penetrations. And some of those penetrations have been revealed through other defectors more recently that were never known about until recently. So, yeah, there's, I think, a lot more to learn. I mean, they've just, for example, opened up the Czech secret services, and that's revealed a whole series of British politicians, including John Stonehouse, who was spying, Bukovic.
Putin, I think, will never open the files. But if we ever get back to a position of glasnost, then maybe there will be more stuff coming out. But certainly one of the great pluses was when the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of the satellite states who worked very closely with the Russians did open up their archives. And so we know, for example, what the Stasi were up to at the time. And do you find sort of challenges in accessing material when you were doing your book?
Yes. I mean, there's a lot of missing material in the intelligence world. For example, when I was asked looking for material on Burgess in Washington, where he was the second secretary, there's nothing on what he was doing there. There's material on either side of him for other second secretaries. So that's clearly been what we call dry cleaned. A lot of the files are still basically got FOI exemptions. They're held back from the National Archives and they're not being released.
and may never be released. And that's the stuff that we know about. There may be stuff that hasn't even reached the archives yet. And there, for example, is a file that I'm fighting for on the courts at the moment, which is a vetting file from the 1970s, which I think relates to another member of the spy ring who they allowed to continue working in the Foreign Office.
and did nothing about because he was quite an established figure. And his daughter is quite a well-known figure in public life now. So if I win that court case, we may have another member of the Cambridge spy ring. Right. And do you think this reluctance to release some of this, particularly the older material, is just secrecy for secrecy's sake? Or are they
protecting something? I mean, what's your sense? Well, a lot of it is secrecy for secrecy's sake. There's a culture of secrecy. Much easier to keep everything back than to reveal it. Their line is like Tesco, every little bit helps. And so people can piece things together as they get information. But I think, you know, we give an assurance to anyone who spies for us, and this is why my six files are not released, that their identities will never be revealed.
And if you think, for example, about Ireland, you know, the repercussions on agents who may have worked against the IRA, for example, in the 70s. So there are good reasons to keep that quiet. I think there are less good reasons to keep MI5 files closed. And to their credit, they have been opening files over the last 25 years. And as a result, there's been a resurgence of interest in spying, lots of books coming out. And that's good because that is our history and we need to know it.
But it is difficult because they can always say well you just have to trust us You know, there are good reasons why this isn't being released and what can you say? Yes, and see at the moment kind of tensions with Russia and very high again We're kind of almost we're pretty much back in a Cold War type situation and do you think there's any lessons from what happened the Cambridge five that applied today or is that just a
a historical kind of piece that doesn't really echo down the ages. Well, I hope we've learned the lessons that, you know, we have to be vigilant, we have to have good security, that the fact you went to Cambridge isn't a
a reason to actually do proper vetting on someone. But I think also the lesson is that we can never drop our guard against the Russians. If we are in a new Cold War, they have never really stopped sending vast numbers of people to spy on us for our technology to compromise us. And just because that's the way they work, they are a secret state and they respect that. I mean, they trust stuff that they get secretly much more than they get overtly, even though it could be the same stuff.
And so, yeah, I think, you know, we have to accept that we can never really stop being very, very careful about Russian and Chinese activities in this country. Well, that's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you, Andrew Loney, author of Stalin's Englishman, The Life of Guy Burgess. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. This brings us to the end of our season on Oleg Lelen. But do join us for the next season.
The Spy Who Wouldn't Lie, hosted by Indra Varma. On the next episode, we open the file on Noor Anayat Khan, the spy who wouldn't lie. When Germany invades France, Noor and her family are forced to flee to Britain. But Noor decides she can't just sit out the war, so she accepts one of the most dangerous spy missions of World War II, a job that will put her deep into enemy territory. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts.
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