20. All in all, this book and this project have opened my eyes in a new way about how government and espionage have played a huge role in the shaping of the world today. I never truly understood why the Cold War was so infamous and intense without any actual battles fought until this project. The tension surrounding the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the espionage of the time contributed to the molding of today's world. After the fall of communist Russia, the Cold War ended in 1991, but even today the ripples of the Cold War are still felt. More and more secrets will be uncovered and people will be able to look into the hearts of some of the most influential regimes and factions of the century. I am most interested in the what the future will yield in the terms of uncovered secrets and factions that can be attributed to many of today's issues and governmental decisions.

19. From reading this book and conducting further research into these historical instances one fact is for certain, the governments that people trust do not tell the people what is true but rather what they want to hear. If it were know in the U.S. or England, during the 1950's and 1960's, that KGB spies were running unchecked through the government then fear would grip the public. Secret and lies became so entangled that one could no longer differentiate between friend or foe. Many members of government around the world were actually double and triple agents. It seemed that their treachery and greed knew no bounds. The scary and shocking fact is that the KGB had ready and willing agents already deeply undercover as early as the beginning of WWII. The Russians virtually out maneuvered both CIA and MI6 in every aspect. Nobody even suspected these men until almost 1965.

18. The severe importance of Iskhak Akhmerov in the case of the Cambridge spies is that he was rumored to be Blunt's KGB contact. Although Blunt is suspected of recruiting all of the other members, including Michael Straight, many believe that Akhmerov was the recruiter of Blunt. Akhmerov also was involved in covert operations in the United States and had high and powerful connections inside the KGB and MI6. He was most likely also in contact with Straight during his time involved in FDR's cabinet. The ever twisting web of secrecy and lies never ceases to become more and more intertwined with history. Although many believe that all of the secrets of the Cold War have been uncovered, I believe that they have only hit the tip of the iceberg. It also seems that the KGB and Russian government knew everything the U.S. and England did even before they did it.

17. In late 1945 or early 1946 Akhmerov returned to the Soviet Union and became deputy chief of the KGB's covert intelligence section (отдел нелегальной разведки). He attained the rank of colonel and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner twice, the Order of the Badge of Honor, and the badge of Honored Chekist.
KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky said that Akhmerov delivered a lecture to KGB personnel in the early 1960s, one that Gordievsky attended. Gordievsky later reported that Akhmerov had described FDR's personal assistant Harry Hopkins as one of the most important and infuential splinter agents of the time. However, these accusations were never proven and investigations were never conducted on Gordievsky's testimony. other Soviet leaders realized Hopkins was feeding the Soviets information to keep them allied with the U.S. Retired KGB Lieutenant General Vitaliy Pavlov said that Gordievsky was a triator that never was in close contact with Akhmerov. Pavlov says that Akhmerov was very secretive about his work and would never have disclosed the names of his contacts in the U.S.

16. Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov was a Soviet spy of Tatar ethnicity who joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919. Akhmerov attended the Communist University of Toilers and the First State University. He graduated from the School of International Relations in 1930. Akhmerov joined the KGB in 1930 and participated in the suppression of anti-Soviet movements in the USSR's Bukhara Republic between 1930 and 1931. Akhmerov spoke Turkish, English and French. His wife, a U.S. citizen who worked for Soviet intelligence, was Helen Lowre. Helen was the niece of the General Secretary Earl Browder. In 1932 Akhmerov transferred to the foreign intelligence of the KGB and served as a covert intelligence officer under diplomatic cover in Turkey. In 1935 he entered the United States with false identity papers and served until 1939. Akhmerov returned in 1942 and served as covert agent in the United States during World War II and operated under cover as a tailor. Akhmerov is known to have used the cover names William Grienke, Michael Green, Michael Adamec, and several others while in the United States.

15. These men all had very influential friends in high places who ranged from upper echelon MI6 agents to Sir Rothschild, whose family is extremely wealthy. Still it is also peculiar that four out of five of the agents defected to Russia between 1956 and 1964. Maclean, Burgess, Philby, and Blunt all defected due to fear of being captured and tortured at the hands of the British government. I find it interesting that with all their connections and money, they still had to turn to the communist country of Russia. Also, all of them were able to live out their lives to a ripe old age and never did any prison time. It is peculiar that six of the most infamous traitors of all time were able to die peacefully and still possessing their enormous fortunes.

14. The way that these men were able to stay hidden in the shadows and undiscovered until 1964. John Cairncross, the fifth man, was not even discovered until 1990. I find it very interesting and intruiging that these men were able to fool the prestigious and world renowned British MI5 and MI6. Michael Straight was also able to fool the United States CIA. Their secret selling ranged from troop positions to full scale engineering plans for nuclear weapons. This is how the Soviets were able to find out about the Manhattan Project during WWII. It is astounding that these men could pull off one of the biggest espionage operations of all time and remain undiscovered for decades after the fact.

13. Cairncross admitted to spying in 1951 after MI5 found papers in Guy Burgess' apartment with a handwritten note from Cairncross. Some believe that he may have supplied information about the Manhattan Project, to assist the Soviet's quest for nuclear capability. The identity of the infamous 'fifth man' in the Cambridge Five remained a mystery outside intelligence circles until 1990, when KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed Cairncross involvment. Cairncross actually worked independently of the other Four and did not share their upper-middle class backgrounds or tastes. Although he knew Anthony Blunt at Cambridge and Guy Burgess in the Foreign Office, he claimed not to have been aware that they or any of the others were also selling secrets to the Russians. Between 1941 and 1945, Cairncross supplied the Soviets with 5,832 documents. In 1944, Cairncross joined MI6, the foreign intelligence service. Yuri Modin, the Russian KGB control in London claims that Cairncross gave him details of nuclear arms to be stationed with NATO in West Germany.

12. John Cairncross was a British intelligence officer during World War II, who passed secrets to the Soviet Union. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. His father was the manager of an ironmongers and his mother a primary school teacher. John Cairncoss was one of a family of eight, many of whom had distinguished careers. All three of his brothers became professors. One was the economist Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross. His niece was the journalist Frances Cairncross. Cairncross grew up in Lesmahagow, a small town on the edge of moorland, near Lanark in the Central Belt of Scotland, and was educated at the Hamilton Academy; the University of Glasgow; the Sorbonne and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German. After graduating, he took the British Civil Service exam and came in first place. In an article appearing in the Glasgow Herald on 29 September 1936 it was noted that John Cairncross had scored first in the Home List and first in the competition for the Foreign Office.

11. The infamous and secretive Cambridge Spy Ring is one of the most studied and examined double agent organization that is known to date. They were single-handedly responsible for over thirty to fifty years of espionage and secret selling during the Cold War. Along with infiltration into the British government, Michael Straight also managed to infiltrate the U.S. government under Franklin Roosevelt. He not only sold MI5 and MI6’s information to the KGB, but also the CIA’s and Secret Services secrets. He and the other members of the Cambridge Five, as they became known as, were responsible for covert operations in Europe, Cuba, and the United States. Although they were successful for many years, the organization toppled when Straight gave them up in order to qualify for a position in the White House staff. Many of them had already been under investigation, but they were all uncovered after Straight’s testimony.

10. Blunt was greatly distressed by Burgess' flight and, on Monday 28 May 1951, confided in his friend Goronwy Rees, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had briefly supplied the NKVD with political information in 1938-9. Rees suggested that Burgess had gone to the Soviet Union because of his violent anti-Americanism and belief that America would involve Britain in a Third World War, and that he was a Soviet agent. Blunt suggested that this was not sufficient reason to denounce Burgess to MI5. He pointed out that Burgess had been a long time friend and to abandon him now would be wrong. In 1963 MI5 learned of Blunt's espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April 1964, and Queen Elizabeth II was informed shortly thereafter. In return for Blunt's full confession, the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret for fifteen years, and granted him full immunity from prosecution. Mrs Thatcher later declared that there would be no intention of prosecuting Long.

9. Anthony Frederick Blunt was a British art historian who was exposed as a Soviet spy late in his life. Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Surveyor of the King's Pictures and London. Known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, he was exposed as a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.
Blunt was born in Bournemouth, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd. Stanley Vaughan Blunt and his wife, Hilda Violet, daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service.He was educated at Marlborough College, where he joined the College's secret 'Society of Amica', in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice, John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He was remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as an intellectual who was too preoccupied with the realm of ideas.

 8. In February 1934, Philby married Alice Friedmann, an Austrian communist whom he had met in Vienna. They subsequently moved to England; however, as Philby assumed the role of a fascist sympathiser, they separated. In 1940, he began living with Aileen Furse in London. Their first three children, Josephine, John, and Dudley Thomas, were born between 1941 and 1943. He and Aileen were married on 25 September 1946, while Aileen was pregnant with their fourth child, Miranda. Aileen suffered from psychiatric problems, which grew more severe during the period of poverty and suspicion following the flight of Burgess and Maclean. Weakened by alcoholism and frequent sickness, she died of influenza in December 1957. In 1956, Philby began an affair with Eleanor Brewer, the wife of New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer. Following Eleanor's divorce, the two married in January 1959. After Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, Eleanor visited him in Moscow; in November 1964, following a visit to America, she returned, intending to settle permanently. However, in her absence, Philby had begun an affair with Donald Maclean's wife, Melinda. He and Eleanor divorced, and she departed Moscow in May 1965.Melinda left Maclean, and briefly lived with Philby in Moscow; however, in 1968 she returned to Maclean. In 1971, Philby married Rufina Ivanova Pukhova, a Russo-Polish woman with whom he lived until his death in 1988.

7. Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence, who worked as a double agent, before defecting to the Soviet Union. He served as both NKVD and KGB operative. In 1963, Philby was revealed to be a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, the other members of which were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviet Union. His activities were moderated only by Joseph Stalin's fears that he was secretly on Britain's side. Philby was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire(OBE) from 1946 to 1965.Born at Ambala in the Punjab, while it was a province of British India, Philby was the son of St. John Philby, a member of the Indian Civil Service and, later, a civil servant in Mesopotamia. His father was a well-known author, orientalist, convert to Islam, and advisor to King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia.

6. Burgess was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Foreign Minister of State, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB regularly, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington, D.C., Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things: the race thing, contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. Assigned to the British embassy in Washington, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. In 1951 Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany Maclean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the Soviet Union very well. Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

5. Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess was a British-born intelligence officer and double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union. He was part of the Cambridge Five spy ring that betrayed Western secrets to the Soviets before and during the Cold War. Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described NATO military strategy.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep School in Hertfordshire and for a period Eton College. Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos and an aegrotat in part two, and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. Whilst at Cambridge, he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elitist debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt. Like Blunt, Burgess was homosexual. In London Burgess resided at Chester Square and later 5, Bentinck Street, for sometime with Anthony Blunt. Kim Philby and Donald Maclean would often visit him there for consultations or socialising. The house belonged to Lord Rothschild.

4. In 1934, Maclean started work at the Foreign Office in London. While there, he was under the operational control of GPU rezident, Anatoli Gorsky. Gorsky, who was appointed in 1939 after the entire London rezidentura was liquidated, used Vladimir Borisovich Barkovsky, a recent graduate of Moscow's Intelligence School as the case officer for Maclean. The writer Cyril Connolly describes Maclean at this time. He was sandy-haired, tall, with great latent physical strength, but fat and rather flabby. Meeting him, one was conscious of both amiability and weakness. He did not seem a political animal but resembled the clever, helpless youth in an Aldous Huxley novel, an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed. He sought refuge on the more impetuous and emancipated fringes of Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Over just a two year period of time, Maclean gave forty-five boxes full of precious documents and government secrets to his KGB contacts.

3. Born in London, Donald Duart Maclean was the son of Sir Donald Maclean and Gwendolen Margaret Devitt. His father was chosen as chairman of the rump of the 23 independent MPs who backed Herbert Asquith in the Liberal Party in the House of Commons while the bulk of the Liberal MPs had followed David Lloyd-George into the Coalition Liberal party in the November 1918 election. As the Labour Party had no leader and Sinn Féin did not attend, he became titular Leader of the Opposition. Maclean's parents had houses in London as well as in the Scottish Borders, where his father represented Peebles and Southern Midlothian, but the family lived mostly in and around London. He grew up in a very political household, in which world affairs were constantly discussed. In 1931 his father entered the Coalition Cabinet as President of the Board of Education. Maclean's education began as a boarder at St Ronan's School, Worthing. At the age of 13, he was sent to Gresham's School in Norfolk, where he remained from 1926 until 1931, when he was 18. At Gresham's, some of his contemporaries were Lord Simon of Glaisdale, James Klugmann Roger Simon, Benjamin Britten and the scientist Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin. Gresham's was then looked on as both liberal and progressive. It had already produced Tom Wintringham (1898–1949) a Marxist military historian, journalist, and author. James Klugmann and Roger Simon both went with Maclean to Cambridge and joined the Communist Party at around the same time.

2. Michael Straight was a very interesting and innovative man. Despite the fact that he was a KGB spy, and heavily involved in the U.S. government, he also ran and wrote for his families magazine, The New Republic. He hired former U.S. Vice President and future Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace as the magazine's editor. Straight left the magazine in 1956 and began writing novels. However, in 1963, in response to an offer of government employment in Washington, DC, he faced a background check and decided to voluntarily inform his family friend and Presidential special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. about his communist connections. The connections he spoke of originated during his time at Cambridge. This led directly to the exposure of Blunt as the recruiter of the Cambridge Five spy ring. In turn, this served as the first step in uncovering the twisted web of the spy ring.

Journal Entries

1. Michael Straight was born in New York City and was the son of Willard Dickerman Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Straight was educated at Lincoln School in New York City followed by studies at the London School of Economics.
While a student at Cambridge University in the mid-1930s, Straight became a Communist Party member and a part of an intellectual secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. Straight worked for the Soviet Union, as part of a spy ring whose members included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and KGB recruiter Anthony Blunt. After returning to the United States in 1937, Straight worked as a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, and was on the payroll of the Department of the Interior. Beginning in 1938, Straight carried on a covert relationship with Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB spy. In 1940, Straight went to work in the Eastern Division of the U.S. State Department. He also served in World War II in the U.S. Air Force flying B-17 bombers.