The Cambridge Five: A Captivating Guide to the Russian Spies in Britain Who Passed Information to the Soviet Union During World War II

During the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression, when Britain’s financial markets plummeted and the poor and wealthy alike doubted the economic systems in which they participated, the potential of one political ideal shone like no other: Communism. Young intellectuals from the country’s very best schools discussed the premise of labor-value versus wealth-value, and a great many of them became card-carrying members of the Communist Party in Britain. It was exactly the kind of hunting ground the Soviet Union needed to recruit high-level agents to their cause. Over the course of the early 1930s, five students of Cambridge University were handpicked by Soviet agents and instructed to use their status as educated members of the British elite to serve the U.S.S.R. Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and John Cairncross accepted the offer and in doing so changed the course of WWII and the Cold War. Their actions were not discovered until the 1950s, long after the war was finished and the damage—or achievements, depending which side you were on—had already been done.