Sozzled seducer who was Stalin's SUPERSPY

Old Etonian Guy Burgess who, despite his debauched
and flamboyant lifestyle, became one of the most
notable traitors in Britain's Cold War

The terrified lad, just turned 13, crept along the landing upstairs at home one night. He had just been woken by howls of anguish and pain from his parents’ bedroom and went to investigate. He pushed open the door and there his innocent eyes fell on a truly appalling sight.

His mother lay writhing on the bed, trapped underneath the inert body of his father, who had slumped dead on top of her from a heart attack while having sex.
The boy had to prise apart the two bodies, heaving his father’s naked corpse off his embarrassed and distraught mother.

The shock must have been immense. No wonder that Guy Burgess grew up to be such a disturbed personality — loud, aggressive, boorish, a slob of a man who in later life casually betrayed his country and became one of the most notable traitors in Britain’s Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Burgess claimed that this experience at a vulnerable moment in his young life determined the other dominant part of his personality — a devil-may-care promiscuous homosexuality that openly and recklessly defied conventions (and, at the time, the law of the land). Here was the excuse for his deviant ways.

The trouble is that the incident was almost certainly made up; a total fantasy.

Yes, his father Malcolm, a 43-year-old retired naval officer, died suddenly at home in Hampshire in 1924. But he was not overweight, while his wife Evelyn was a fit young woman who would have had no trouble extricating herself from such a position unaided — if that really was how he died.

Guy’s brother — 11 at the time — had no knowledge of the supposed body-heaving incident. Nor did Burgess include it in the stories he told his KGB debriefers after his dramatic defection to Moscow in 1951 alongside fellow spy Donald Maclean, where he lived out the rest of his life in a sad and pointless exile, yearning for home and England, the land he had betrayed.

Here, in fact, was a typical Burgess story related dramatically to friends with the relish of a practised liar.

It was just one of the many fantasies that marked his extraordinary life. As his own brother put it: ‘With Guy, you never knew what was true and what was invented.’  (more...)

Sozzled seducer who was Stalin's SUPERSPY: Debauched and indiscreet, Old Etonian Guy Burgess was a very unlikely KGB spy. But as a major biography reveals, that's what made him deadly

Further installments:

The most promiscuous man who ever lived: New biography of Guy Burgess reveals Cambridge spy would sleep with anyone from 17 to 75 - but his real passion was for treachery

The rude doodle of CIA chief's wife that nearly blew the Cambridge spy ring's cover: The arrogance of Guy Burgess exposed in new biography

The Cambridge spy who defected to party in the Kremlin: New biography reveals Guy Burgess swigged vodka with the KGB after his vanishing act sparked a global manhunt

The lonely exile who drank himself to death: New biography reveals Cambridge spy spent his final days stuck in a drab Moscow flat, pining for Britain

Further investigation of how depravity serves spycraft:

Kincora was used for ‘political leverage’ – Richard Kerr

Online Child Abuse and Sex as an Undercover intelligence Technique