Burgess, Guy (1911-1963), was a British journalist and diplomat who spied for the Soviet Union. He became notorious in association with fellow spies Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Anthony Blunt.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born on April 16, 1911, in Devonport, England. He was the son of a naval officer. He was educated at Eton; at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth; and at Trinity College, Cambridge University. At Cambridge in the early 1930’s, he met Maclean, Blunt, and other intellectuals who were drawn to Communism, and he was soon recruited as an agent by Soviet intelligence.
From 1936 to 1939, Burgess worked as a correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He worked for the United Kingdom’s military intelligence department MI6, from 1939 to 1941. In 1944, he gained a post in the Foreign Office, where his fellow spy Maclean had been working since 1934. Burgess’s position in the Foreign Office gave him access to a large amount of secret information, including the terms of the Japanese peace treaty of 1945. His final posting was as second secretary under Kim Philby in the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. in the United States.
Burgess’s personal character was considered by his superiors to be unstable. Because of what his superiors called “serious misconduct” in Washington, he was called back to London in 1951 and ordered to resign. In May 1951, just as a joint British and American counterintelligence investigation was close to unmasking the treachery of Maclean, both he and Burgess were warned of the impending arrest and fled the United Kingdom. It emerged later that the warning had come from Philby, and that Anthony Blunt had contacted Soviet agents to arrange the escape. Nothing was heard of Burgess and Maclean until they reappeared in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, in 1956. Burgess lapsed into alcoholism and died in Moscow on Aug. 30, 1963.
