Cambridge Five

A case that broke slowly, over decades. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were drawn to communism at Cambridge and became Soviet agents. Their damage ran across the early Cold War: Maclean passed on US nuclear secrets, and Philby helped wreck an Allied operation against communist Albania. Tipped off by Philby, Maclean and Burgess escaped across the Iron Curtain in 1951, and Philby later fled to Moscow rather than cooperate further. Blunt was quietly given immunity and named in Parliament by Margaret Thatcher only in 1979. Cairncross was exposed as the fifth man afterwards and never prosecuted.