There are thousands of documents of the british intelligence services that remain classified and that, most likely, will never see the light of day. But others have received authorization to be published decades later, providing some clarity to events from the past that had remained hidden for years in the interest of national security. This is the case of the more than 100 documents of the MI5 –the British secret service– published this Tuesday by the National Archivemost of them related to the ‘Cambridge Five’a group of British spies that provided information for decades to the KGBthe intelligence service of the Soviet Union and whose tentacles reached Buckingham Palace.
The ‘Cambridge Five’ group was made up of five graduates of the University of Cambridge who were captured by Soviet services in the 1930s. Although in many cases they operated independently, the five managed to facilitate classified information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and managed to penetrate the UK’s major national security institutions in the 1950s.
Kim Philby, the “biggest traitor”
One of the most prominent members of the group was Harold ‘Kim’ Philbyconsidered the “greatest traitor” in the recent history of the United Kingdom. Philby worked for years in MI6, until in 1963 he confessed his relationship with the KBG to one of his closest friends and colleague in the British intelligence services, Nicholas Elliott. A confession whose transcript is part of the files declassified this Tuesday.
In that conversation, Philby admits to being behind the disappearance of Constantin Volkova KGB agent who tried to flee to Great Britain and who intended to reveal to the British authorities relevant information about the spies of the Soviet intelligence services infiltrated in the United Kingdom, among them the ‘Cambridge Five’. Volkov and his wife were captured by the KGB before they could hand over all the documentation and They were never heard from again..
Philby became head of the delegation of the MI6 en Washingtonone of the most important positions within the British intelligence agency. But he was also in the crosshairs of his teammates on some occasions. One of the most notable was in 1951, when two of the members of the ‘Cambridge Five’, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, were discovered. The documents revealed by the National Archives include the transcription of the interrogation to which he was subjected Philby by Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, a lawyer who worked for MI6, to clarify his relationship with Burgess and McLean.
Philby submitted to Milmo’s incisive questions for hours but made no confession, preventing him from being prosecuted. Even so, he was expelled from MI6 and in 1956 he settled in Beirut as a journalist for ‘The Economist’ magazine. After confessing his membership in the KGB in 1963, Philby flew to Moscow and spent the rest of his days there.
Ignorance of Elizabeth II
The information declassified this Tuesday also gives details about Anthony Bluntanother member of the ‘Cambridge Five’, who admitted in 1964 to having been a KGB agent for nearly three decades. Blunt, a prominent art historian, had served since 1945 as head of the art collection of the british royal familya position he held until 1972 despite his confession. The British authorities chose to keep him in office fearing that his involvement with the Soviet secret services would come to light and cause an even bigger scandal. Documents from the National Archives reveal that the queen Isabel II only learned about the case in 1973almost a decade after his confession.
Archives related to the ‘Cambridge Five’ will be part of the exhibition ‘MI5: Official Secrets’ which the National Archives plans to open this spring at its headquarters, located in Kew Gardens, London. This will be the first exhibition in which MI5 will collaborate in its more than 100 years of history, in what will be a tour of the evolution of espionage in the United Kingdom and the responses of the secret services to threats to national security.
