Newly-released records reveal the man investigating the defection of two of the notorious Cambridge spies was unwittingly confiding in members of the same group of Soviet double agents.
The so-called Cambridge spies had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s while they were Cambridge undergraduates. Between them they were responsible for passing thousands of top-secret documents to the Russians.
The personal diaries of Guy Liddell, deputy director general of MI5 at the time, have been released by the National Archives in Kew and describe the moment security services realised Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had fled to the Soviet Union in May 1951.
Dr Stephen Twigge, head of the Modern, Domestic, Diplomatic and Colonial team at The National Archives, said the diaries revealed how many people around Liddell turned out to be Soviet spies: "It took a great deal of time to actually believe that such individuals would be spying for the Soviet Union. One maybe, two, then it came to three and the whole world was collapsing at this point, who could one trust?"
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