“I was handing over top secret stuff to the Russians on a weekly basis after that. Looking back on this time, I think he made it easy for me since he was always disappearing up north to his Glasgow constituency. Greenock, I think. Somewhere ghastly like that. I went with him on more than one occasion and felt like a foreigner since I could understand nothing at all of what was said to me. I’m not for a minute suggesting Hector McNeil knew what I was up to. But frankly, my work couldn’t have been easier. People always imagine that spies live lives of derring-do and intrigue. It wasn’t like that at all. No guns, no invisible ink, no disguises. I just lifted the files out of poor old Hector’s filing cabinet, or the yellow boxes that arrived from MI6, took them home in the car, and a chap from the KGB spent all night in my bathroom photographing them; I then placed them back in poor old McNeil’s filing cabinet the following morning. I even had my own key so that I didn’t have to bother him when I needed access to his papers. Once, I accompanied McNeil to the United Nations in New York and I pinched some papers from his ministerial box and had them photographed during his liquid lunch hour. These were mostly cabinet papers, government policy documents—Britain’s position on this, Britain’s position on that, and, rather horribly, which major Russian cities we might bomb if we decided on a first strike against the Soviet Union. The point is that nobody got hurt by what I was doing. Nobody.

“The last thing I want to say is this, and it’s important. What I did really didn’t require much nerve or ingenuity; nor was I required to take any great risks. In the beginning I was nervous, but after a while it became routine. Frankly, if someone such as I could get away with spying on His Majesty’s Government for almost fifteen years, then anyone could. And in my considered opinion Britain is not well served by its security and intelligence services. Not well served at all. It’s small wonder that the FBI doesn’t trust MI6 and MI5. Which is hardly surprising as MI5 and MI6 don’t trust each other one inch. They’re great rivals. Not only that but our security services are riddled with so-called traitors and . . .”

—

Burgess stopped speaking at this point as someone else said something, possibly in Russian, and a few seconds later the tape ended. I turned off the machine and perched on the edge of the refectory table to await the old man’s considered verdict.

“He’s got a bloody nerve,” said Somerset Maugham. “It’s largely thanks to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean that the Americans don’t trust us anymore.”