Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone

by Stewart Purvis, Jeff Hulbert

Overview

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker, with a contacts book that included everyone from statesmen to socialites, high-ranking government officials to the famous actors and literary figures of the day. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously, and often simultaneously, for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Despite this, Burgess was never challenged or arrested by Britain's spy-catchers in a decade and a half of espionage; dirty, scruffy, sexually promiscuous, a 'slob', conspicuously drunk and constantly drawing attention to himself, his superiors were convinced he was far too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool his many friends and acquaintances for so long, ruthlessly exploiting them to penetrate major British institutions without suspicion, all the while working for the KGB. Purvis and Hulbert also detail his final days in Moscow - so often a postscript in his story - as well as the moment the establishment finally turned on him, outmanoeuvring his attempts to return to England after he began to regret his decision to defect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785900136
Publisher:	Biteback Publishing, Ltd.
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	711,344
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

STEWART PURVIS began his career as one of the BBC’s first news trainees, going on to become Editor-in-Chief of Channel 4 News and, ultimately, Chief Executive of ITN. In 2003, he became City University London’s first Professor of Television Journalism and a Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University. He is a broadcaster on media matters, appearing regularly on BBC Radio 4’s Media Show and on Sky News, the BBC News channel and LBC. His career has won him a number of awards, including two BAFTAs. He received a CBE in 2000 for services to broadcasting and in 2009 he was awarded the Royal Television Society Gold Medal for an outstanding contribution to television.
JEFF HULBERT is a media historian who initially specialised in cinema newsreels and television news, but has become increasingly interested in the ways in which the media and political worlds collide. He has managed two publicly funded _ lm and television history projects and is currently an honorary research fellow in the journalism department at City University London.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 'A Normal, Healthy, English Boy' 1

A disrupted education, 1911-30

2 'A Real Rapscallion' 15

A scholarship student goes rogue, 1930-36

3 'Mr Burgess is Away Today' 61

Serving more than one master, 1936-38

4 I Am 'Anxious to Appoint a Mr Guy Burgess' 103

British Intelligence embraces a KGB spy, 1938-41

5 'Everyone Under the Sun' 127

Networking at Westminster, 1941-44

6 'An Important Promotion That Can Be Put to Valuable Use' 175

Properly established in the establishment, 1944-50

7 'Good Reason to Hope he Would Make a Useful Career' 211

Crucial decisions at the Foreign Office and MI5, 1950-51

8 'This Peculiarly British Field of Counter-Espionage' 273

And then there were five spies, or was it six or seven? 1951 onwards

9 'I Had No Idea How Much I Was Loathed' 317

Settling into the USSR, 1951-56

10 'I Would Rather Like to Go Rack to England' 347

Decline and death, 1956-63

11 'Burgess Is, Of Course, Brigadier Brilliant' 393

Towards the truth, 1951-2016

Bibliography

Acknowledgements 425

Endnotes 427

Index 463

Editorial Reviews

'A truly extraordinary tale of the enigma that was Guy Burgess.'
Michael Dobbs, author of House of Cards

'Adds much to a familiar story thanks to newly released files ... [Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert's] revelations leave us all the more astonished that such a smelly, scruffy, lying, gabby, promiscuous, drunken slob could penetrate the heart of the establishment without anyone apparently noticing that he was also a Soviet masterspy.'
The Observer

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