Total Information Abhorrence
The Cambridge Spy Scandal That Haunts Britain
Spyscape
US confidence in British intelligence nosedived during the Cold War after a ring of Cambridge University-educated spies working for the British government smuggled intelligence to the KGB.
The furor erupted when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean - two of the so-called ‘Cambridge Five’ - disappeared in 1951. They had defected and later resurfaced in Moscow. Both were hopeless drunks, unstable and promiscuous characters who’d been appointed to top jobs in London and at the British Embassy in Washington, DC.
The embassy reported back that the international incident had “severely shaken the State Department's confidence in the integrity of officials of the Foreign Office".
The Americans pointed out that drunkenness, recurrent nervous breakdowns, sexual ‘deviations’ and other human frailties were considered security hazards and dismissible offenses, and that Britain should “clean house regardless of whom may be hurt”, according to declassified papers released by Britain’s National Archives.
Snip…
Philby had worked closely with James Jesus Angleton, CIA chief of counterintelligence, and the Brit liaised with the FBI at a time when director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced Soviet spies were everywhere. Philby had also been briefed on Washington’s Venona project, a program to decrypt top-secret messages transmitted by Soviet Union intelligence agencies including the KGB.
Philby is suspected of tipping off Maclean and Burgess, telling them their covers were blown, but remarkably Philby continued to operate for more than a decade before Philby too defected to Moscow in 1963.
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https://spyscape.com/article/the-cambridge-spy-scandal-that-haunts-britain