Who Were the Cambridge Five?
The Crown: These Were the Real-Life Spies Who Made Up the Cambridge Five
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Kim Philby, an MI6 operative, was possibly the most successful of the Cambridge Five in terms of the sheer amount of information he was able to pass to the Soviets during his career as a double agent. He was first recruited in 1934 and spent his early years with a cover as a journalist, particularly investigating the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he joined British intelligence and was an expert on clandestine propaganda and sabotage.
Philby was able to get himself appointed as the head of the division of British intelligence that dealt with anticommunist work. Eventually, he, like other members of the Cambridge Five, was posted to Washington DC, where a mistake in code transmissions nearly led to his unmasking. During this period of suspicion, he was able to warn Burgess and get him back to London, where Burgess and MacLean could flee. Philby's close association with Burgess put him under strong suspicions, and he had to resign from intelligence, but he was able to talk his way out of it, and Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan even publicly cleared him in 1955. He came under suspicion again in 1961 and defected to Moscow in 1963, where he lived out the next 25 years in exile, under close watch by the KGB, and without much work.