FAQ

To this day it has never been fully appreciated the extent of damage caused by the Cambridge spies. For over a decade they occupied senior positions in MI6, MI5 and the Foreign Office and with their Washington postings also able to provide information on the CIA and the US atomic weapons programme. Their social connections also allowed them to infiltrate areas of secret operations which they were not officially supposed to be involved in. Although Philby was forced to resign from MI6 after McClean and Burgess' flight he remained in contact with his old friends in government and continued to feed the KGB information whilst working as a journalist and occasional MI6 source. In essence the Cambridge ring compromised every British intelligence, counter-intelligence operation and foreign policy decision for several decades. It also resulted in the death of dozens if not hundreds of people behind the Iron Curtain who were killed after being identified as Western agents.

Philby; after Burgess and McClean's defection he was forced to resign from MI6 and take up work as a journalist in Beirut, still occasionally working for British intelligence and providing information to the KGB. In 1961 he was forced to flee to Moscow after a defector implicated him and would succumb to depression and alcoholism, attempting suicide before dying of heart failure in 1988. Burgess; bitterly resented having to stay in the USSR considering himself to have been tricked into going there, would drink himself to death in 1963. Maclean; would adapt well to life in the USSR and would be joined by his family although all would eventually return to the West. He would eventually die in 1983. Blunt; would receive immunity from prosecution in return for his confession but would subsequently be stripped of his position and honours and die in disgrace in 1983.

Caincross was a fellow Cambridge graduate and Soviet spy, working for MI6 and Bletchley Park codebreaking during World War 2 and the Treasury afterwards. He was an associate of Burgess and Blunt and came under suspicion after a note from him was found in Burgess' flat after his defection. However it is still disputed whether he was the fifth member of the ring or was working wholly independently and was even aware that the others were agents. In return for his confession he was not prosecuted and died of natural causes aged 82.