Cambridge Five
38
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23
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Search complete. 38 mentions across 23 episodes found for "Cambridge Five".
Oct 16, 2026
speaker_2NARRATOR
The Americans and the Soviets had vast intelligence networks trying to discover what the other side was doing, and they were incredibly successful because they recruited people who were inside the governments themselves.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The Cambridge Five were British intelligence officers who were actually Soviet agents, all five of them.
speaker_2NARRATOR
They operated for years, sending secrets to Moscow.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Kim Philby was one of them, a senior MI6 official who was basically working for the Soviet Union the entire time while simultaneously working against the Soviets for British intelligence.
speaker_2NARRATOR
He did not defect until 1963.
speaker_2NARRATOR
When he finally fled to Moscow, the British intelligence service was devastated.
speaker_2NARRATOR
How had they not known? How could one man have compromised so much? Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were also part of the Cambridge Five.
speaker_2NARRATOR
They also defected to the Soviet Union.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Then he began to talk and confessed that he had spied for the Soviet Union.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Blunt was one of a group often called the Cambridge Five, men recruited in the 1930s: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The National Archives says Blunt was recruited by Soviet intelligence in early 1937, although the exact date is unclear, and that MI5 recruited him in 1940.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The archives records that Blunt was given immunity from prosecution in return for confessing, and that he kept his post as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures until 1972.
Thomas777GUEST
Obviously that's like a, a fictional example, but what Clancy was drawing upon was the real ethos of defectors in the Cold War.
Thomas777GUEST
And on the other side, you had guys like the Cambridge Five, who I, I think were pretty disturbed guys.
Thomas777GUEST
But they were true believers.
Thomas777GUEST
That's totally different than these days, like some...
Thomas777GUEST
When I say derivative, I don't mean that in punitive terms, but what I mean is Hobsbawm quite literally identified himself as a, quote, red Tory.
Thomas777GUEST
You know, and we'll get into what that means and the implications of that, but guys like Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, they were cut from the same kind of cloth.
Thomas777GUEST
You know, the...
Thomas777GUEST
The Communist Party of Great Britain, they were very much a fifth column during the Cold War in a way that other similar elements weren't on the continent.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
And the recruitment side is the long game.
CornHOST
The FBI explicitly links the illegal spotting and assessing to the Cambridge Five.
CornHOST
Soviet talent spotters were recruiting Cambridge students in the 1930s, students who would later rise to positions of power.
CornHOST
The contemporary British history piece describes it as cultivation of young radical high flyers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
Herman, this is the part where the discipline question gets interesting because you can see the same service running two completely different operational models.
CornHOST
You can.
CornHOST
The illegals abroad living as Americans for a decade, and the Cambridge Five, which was basically four friends at university who happened to be ideologically available.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
Both Soviet, both under Moscow Center, and they don't look like the same institution at all.
ThomasGUEST
But what I mean is Hobsbawm quite literally identified himself as a, quote, "Red Tory." You know, um, and we'll get into what that means and the implications of that.
ThomasGUEST
But guys like Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, they, they were cut from the same kind of cloth.
ThomasGUEST
You know, the, um, the Communist Party of Great Britain, um, they were very much a fifth column during the Cold War in a way that other similar elements weren't on the continent because they were un-- they, they, they were orthodox Marxist-Leninists.
ThomasGUEST
They unconditionally supported the Soviet Union.
Roland PerryGUEST
But with Yuri, it was a matter of listening to the subthemes that he was giving me.
Roland PerryGUEST
And one of the great clues, which was so astoundingly obvious near the end, he said, "Just as the Three Musketeers were four, the five, uh, Cambridge Five were six." Now, you would have worked it out in two minutes.
Roland PerryGUEST
You think it's too obvious.
Roland PerryGUEST
What's he doing there? Is he teasing me? What's he doing? Of course, Tess Rothschild, if you have two Rothschilds, and in the book you've got there, the update, there's no question in my mind she spied with Victor.
AdrianHOST
They were terrified of ideological infiltration.
AdrianHOST
This was the era when the Cambridge Five spy ring was being exposed.
ClaraHOST
Right.
ClaraHOST
The realization that highly educated, respectable British citizens embedded in the government were actually working for a foreign totalitarian power.
speaker_7HOST
That is the million-dollar question.
AC WilsonHOST
Because Joan's logic and the logic of some of the real life Cambridge Five was that if only one country has the bomb, they'll use it to dominate or destroy the world.
AC WilsonHOST
But if you give the bomb to both sides, you ensure mutually assured destruction, which theoretically prevents either side from ever pulling the trigger.
AC WilsonHOST
She's committing high treason to enforce a global stalemate.
Jay DyerHOST
So I'm not, I'm just trying to say, she's way ahead of the time, ahead of the curve in terms of revelations of, you know, these networks of creeps and degens and PDFs and, uh, you know, blackmail, that kind of stuff, um, coming out in a big way, right? We know that this existed back in, this has always existed, right? Blackmail, it was a big part of the Cold War.
Jay DyerHOST
We talked about that, the KGB compromising, uh, especially the Cambridge Five, all the Skittles dudes.
Jay DyerHOST
That's a huge thing, sure.
Jay DyerHOST
It's always been around.
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