“Once on his way out of a pub he was seen dropping on the floor the file he had to hand over from the Foreign Office.” Ms Lokhova said: “It says Burgess was not taking care of his looks and was constantly under the influence of alcohol. In the first six months of 1945, Burgess handed over 369 top secret files to the Russians but his record was blotted after the Second World War. The Mitrokhin papers paint detailed – and often critical – profiles of the five men, according to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova who has translated parts of the archive into English. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby were a group of disaffected undergraduates at Cambridge University who began spying for the Soviet Union during the Second World War. (Image: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) “There are only two places where you can find KGB intelligence files like this – one is in the KGB archives and the other is here.”įour members of the 'Cambridge Five', graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge, who passed information from British Intelligence to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s. He was absolutely determined that this material should be available for the world to see. He said: “The only reason these papers are here is because of Vasili Mitrokhin’s courage. Professor Christopher Andrew, a fellow at Corpus Christi college, is one of the few to have seen the actual papers when he collaborated on two books with Mitrokhin. The FBI described it as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”.Īppalled by what he saw in the archives, Mitrokhin had decided to expose the KGB’s actions by compiling the papers. The collection was painstakingly compiled by Russian spy Vasili Mitrokhin, who worked as a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence headquarters. Vasili Mitrokhin soon after defecting from the Soviet Union (Image: PA Wire) Uncovering hundreds of Britons spying for Russiaīoth Norwood and the Cambridge spies were caught because of the Mitrokhin archive. It was that arrest that connects Norwood to the Cambridge spies. M15 tried to find out the identity of Hola, but it wasn't successful until the 1990s. In Glading's notebook he noted Norwood's codename 'Hola' several times. The ring had been run by Percy Glading, co-founder of the British Communist Party, who was caught by MI5 passing on naval secrets. She did, however, escape capture several times notably when another Soviet spy ring was discovered at Woolrich Arsenal in 1937. Ironically, she was allegedly highly critical of nuclear weapons, with nuclear disarmament stickers in her window on the day of her capture. Norwood's spying is credited with bringing the Soviet nuclear weapons program ahead by two years. She would then take a photo using a spy camera which she'd pass on to her KGB handler, having returned the documents back to the safe. She worked as a secretary and would sneak into her boss's office and steal research papers from his safe. Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) and Leo Galich (Tom Hughs) in Red Joan (Image: Sunday Mirror)
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