Spy story

The British double agent who spied for Russia under secret service's noses and helped spark the Cold War

Marshal and Snelgrove. Morecambe and Wise. Burgess and Maclean. For a generation growing up in the 1960s, the names of these infamous Russian double-agents were all as familiar and inseparable as, say, Ant and Dec.

Guy Burgess was one of the two ‘diplomats’ who mysteriously absconded to the Soviet Union in 1951. To be followed in 1963 by the ‘Third Man’, Kim Philby.

And there was a Fourth Man, and a Fifth Man. And certainly many further of Stalin’s Men (and Women) who remained unnumbered and unidentified. It was Moscow who coined the term ‘the Magnificent Five’. It was in its interests to constrain the number.

Yet Burgess remains in many ways the most intriguing, partly because of the many connections he maintained with the British establishment, and the way he hoodwinked them all. Later, everyone attempted to deny their true associations with him.