Britains National Archives on Tuesdayreleased declassified MI5 domestic counterintelligence company files including the confessions of infamous moles referred to as the Cambridge Five who spied for the Soviet Union.The release exposes brand-new information in the cases of the Cambridge spies Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, including their confessions, the government company said.The Soviets recruited Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, in addition to Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, in the 1930s at Cambridge University.
Russia honored Blunt in 2010 with a plaque at the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) head office in Moscow.
Burgess and Maclean werehonored in 2019 with a memorial plaque in the city of Samara, where they lived for a number of years after defecting in 1951.
Philbys partial confession in 1963 exposed that he had actually spied for the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1946.
It included an admission that he outed Soviet intelligence officer Konstantin Volkov, who sought to problem to the U.K.
before he and his wife were drawn from Turkey to Moscow and performed in 1945.
Philby said in the transcripts that the overruling inspiration was the opposite [U.S.S.R.] for him in spite of his sensations of tremendous loyalty to Britains MI6 spy agency, where he served as a high-ranking officer early in the Cold War.Blunt, an art historian and the Surveyor of the Queens Pictures overseeing the official Royal Art Collection, admitted in 1964 that he had been a Soviet agent given that the 1930s.
Blunt was a senior MI5 officer throughout World War II and passed large quantities of secret intelligence to his handlers from the KGB Soviet spy agency.He was questioned numerous times after Maclean and Burgess ran away to the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
Without a confession, he was enabled to keep his position at the heart of the British establishment until the early 1960s.
Queen Elizabeth II was not told that Blunt had actually confessed he was a Soviet spy until 1973, when ministers ended up being concerned that the fact would become public when Blunt died.He was publicly unmasked by previous Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a parliamentary declaration in 1979 and he passed away 4 years later.Cairncross made his confession, including on his first encounters with Maclean, Burgess and Philby, after being faced in 1964.
The formerly secret files are being launched ahead of the opening of an exhibit concentrating on the work of MI5 at the National Archives in West London.AFP contributed reporting.