BURGESS, GUY; AND MACLEAN, DONALD (DUART)

born 1911, Devonport, Devon, Eng. died Aug. 30, 1963, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. born May 25, 1913, London, Eng. died March 11, 1983, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. British diplomats who spied for the Soviet Union in World War II and early in the Cold War period. At the University of Cambridge in the 1930s Burgess and Maclean were part of a group of relatively privileged young men who shared a fashionable disdain for capitalist democracy. Recruited as agents by Soviet intelligence operatives, they began supplying information from their respective posts, Burgess as a BBC correspondent, member of the MI-6 intelligence agency in 193941, and member of the Foreign Office from 1944, and Maclean as a member of the Foreign Office from 1934. Maclean was the more damaging. As first secretary and then head of chancery in the British embassy in Washington, D.C., he gained the post of secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development and was privy to highly classified information. He also supplied the Soviet Union with secret material relating to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As head of the American department at the Foreign Office in 1950, he helped formulate Anglo-American policy for the Korean War. In 1951 Burgess was recalled from his post as second secretary of embassy in Washington and asked to resign because of the growing disorderliness of his life. In May 1951 both men were warned that a counterintelligence investigation by British and American agencies was closing in on Maclean. They fled England and mysteriously vanished. No trace of them appeared until 1956, when they surfaced in Moscow and announced their long-standing allegiance to communism. In 1963 they were joined by Kim Philby (q.v.), another Cambridge and Foreign Office colleague who, it was revealed, had given them the warning in 1951. Not until 1979 was it revealed that the inferred fourth man in the spy ring was Sir Anthony Blunt (see Blunt, Anthony) a respected art historian and member of the queen's household. It had been Blunt, yet another Cambridge colleague, who had contacted Soviet agents to arrange for their escape from England.