Despite this, Burgess was never challenged or arrested by Britain’s spy-catchers in a decade and a half of espionage; dirty, scruffy, sexually promiscuous, a ‘slob’, conspicuously drunk and constantly drawing attention to himself, his superiors were convinced he was far too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow.

Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert‘s new book Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone reveals just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool his many friends and acquaintances for so long, ruthlessly exploiting them to penetrate major British institutions without suspicion, all the while working for the KGB.

Purvis and Hulbert also detail his final days in Moscow – so often a postscript in his story – as well as the moment the establishment finally turned on him, outmanoeuvring his attempts to return to England after he began to regret his decision to defect.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This an informal dinner event. We start with drinks from 7pm, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. Menu is £25 per person excluding drinks.

The event will be hosted by Pranvera Smith and Ed Vulliamy, senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer.

In April 1953, George Blake returned to Britain as a national hero, one of a small group of British diplomats who returned alive from three hard years as prisoner of the North Koreans. When the new Queen was crowned a couple of months later, he was among the select few invited to celebrate the day in No 2 Carlton Gardens, a discreet building overlooking the Mall from where the men who ran Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service were watching the royal procession. Little did they know that during his time as a prisoner he had become a Communist and decided to work for the KGB.

George Blake worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union until he was discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR.

All traitors are complicated, but no one more so than Blake. In The Righteous Traitor, director George Carey speaks to Blake’s close acquaintances, historians and other former spies to chronicle his curious history. A close friend of his, Louis Wesserling, describes Blake: “He was a gambler…He spied to fill a void. It gave him a sense of enormous importance”. According to Tim Weiner, the famous historian of the CIA, “the revelation of Blake’s treachery did more damage to relations between Britain and America than all the Cambridge Five put together.”

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 90′
Year: 2015

Anonymous, a group of hackers, activists and technologists, came to the fore in 2008 when they attacked the church of Scientology. Since then their coordinated collective action has come up against global corporations and supported the Arab revolutionaries, but how much do we know about who they are and what motivates them?

Six years ago Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist, set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption.

Coleman will be joining us in conversation with Ben Hammersley, presenter of the new BBC World News series Cybercrime with Ben Hammersley, to share her story of becoming an Anonymous confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece. She will be talking about the motivations of the group, the meaning of digital activism and the many facets of culture in the Internet age.

Gabriella Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she researches, writes about, and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism. She is the author of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking and most recently Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.

“Good breeding and good manners are no guarantee of loyalty.” On Friday 11 October 2013, the Frontline Club screened Philby – The Spy Who Went Into the Cold. Kim Philby acted as a Soviet double-agent while serving as chief British intelligence officer in the United States, and while heading MI6’s anti-Soviet section. The BBC Storyville preview delved into Kim Philby’s conflicted past.

Moderator Nick Fraser (L) and director George Carey (R) Photo by: George Symonds

Before the lights went down, moderator Nick Fraser introduced director George Carey:

“While I’m a mild connoisseur of, as one might be, the deviant behaviour of the British upper classes, he is a true obsessive [laughter from the audience]. If there were a Mastermind of errors and stupidities committed by the British upper classes, George would score 40 points [more laughter].”

“I’m not sure I would have written that script myself,” Carey was quick to qualify:

“I came to Philby with a slightly more open-minded view [even more laughter]. I hope you all enjoy the film.”

As the lights went up, Fraser engaged the Q&A:

“The very charming but overweight KGB man says he was a romantic who believed in Karl Marx, . . . but when you went to his lair, there was P.G. Woodhouse there, not Karl Marx. What evidence did you ever uncover that he wasn’t just trapped by the decisions in his early life, but actually continued to believe in all the plumbery of Marx and Lenin?”

“I think the two can both be true. He was certainly trapped,” said Carey.

“I think he missed lots of things about England, and I think he felt the Communism that he thought he was fighting for and had done those things for had not really delivered. . . . What puzzled me more than if he’d kept the faith or if it was a burnt out faith, was how on earth he’d got away with it. And it seemed to me he’d got away with it because everyone in that world was like him, like us. They were a gang as it were, and it was too easy.”

Many of the interviewees from the film were present in the audience. “A hopeless cause” was how one attendee described the idea of pursuing the Freedom of Information Act to find out exactly what Philby had done:

“It’s a hopeless cause to the extent that the secret service has never – and will never – disclose documents under any kind of legislation or statute as exists today, because they are in the business of keeping secrets. . . . And they have promised individuals today, yesterday and tomorrow that identities of people who have given information and cooperated will never be disclosed. So quite simply, it’s bad for business to make those kinds of disclosures.”

Fraser put it to Carey:

“You still didn’t quite explain to me in the film, though I love the film deeply, how it was he believed in all this shit for all this time. Because intelligent people like Arthur Koestler or Orwell could have set him right very early on, George.”

“Well,” responded Carey:

“Like many communists themselves, I’m sure he became disillusioned. The point is that was the side you reckoned you belonged to. You’d signed up for it. He’d committed himself to it.”

In reference to a comment on Philby being a product of his time Carey expanded:

“How on earth Philby thought his way through the Soviet–Nazi pact, given that the impetus of his spying was anti-fascist, goodness knows. But the general view amongst KGB I talked to, who kind of went through the same thing themselves was, ‘Oh well, our leader knows best,’ and ‘In the end it’s just expediency,’ ‘In the end it’s the way to defeat themselves,’ but I agree it’s a very difficult question to answer.”

“It was a kind of cast,” opined Fraser, “of upper-middle class intellectuals from places like Winchester, Eton et cetera:”

“Surely now, they would be more likely to be making a ton of money in the City with financial instruments. And the ideologies now – wholly unfashionable.”

In terms of the human cost of espionage, the film was unequivocal:

“Spies may have good causes, but few things they ever do is good.”

Upcoming documentaries on BBC Storyville can be found here.

On a stormy night in January 1963, Kim Philby, a charming Englishman with a tendency to stutter, failed to meet his wife at a dinner party in Beirut and instead defected to the Soviet Union. It was the end of a unique career, which at one time had seen this long term double agent rise to become head of the anti-Soviet section of MI6.

Veteran director George Carey captures the extraordinary story of what happened to Philby, from the moment he first came under suspicion in 1951, to his death in Russia just before the end of communism. Several people who knew him well – in London, Beirut and Moscow – talk frankly about his character, and the weaknesses in the British establishment that made his double life possible.

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 70′
Year: 2013

This screening is in partnership with BBC Storyville, the BBC’s international feature documentary strand.

Leaving aside various ineffectual plots, fundraising and propaganda efforts, the so-called Doctors’ Plot was at least the fourth serious attempt at inflicting mass civilian casualties by the supporters of Osama bin Laden. There are historical, social and political reasons why this should be the case as is demonstrated by the four main bombing conspiracies.

The 7/7 bombers and those convicted in the Operation Crevice inquiry for conspiring to bomb the Bluewater Shopping Centre were primarily made up of young British-born Muslims whose families had emigrated to Britain many years ago from Kashmir in northern Pakistan. The importance of Kashmir to this group of al-Qaeda sympathisers – many of them associated with the now-banned al-Muhajiroun organisation – was underlined by the arrest of Dhiren Bharot in 2004 – now serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Bharot first travelled to Kashmir in the mid-1990s and wrote a book – The Army of Madihah in Kashmir – recalling his own experiences fighting the Indian Army. “Initally he fought in Indian-occupied Kashmir against the Hindu oppressors for a while, before returning. One of the few not martyred from his group…”, the blurb on the book’s cover reads.

Bharot’s book found an eager audience amongst aspiring young jihadis in Britain. Others were to follow in his footsteps, including Mohammed Siddique Khan, leader of the 7/7 bombers, Omar Khyam of the Crevice plotters and Mohammed Junaid Babar, who was a member of al-Muhajiroun in New York, but connected to the Crevice plotters.

With more than 400,000 people travelling from Britain to Pakistan every year it has been relatively easy for fired-up young zealots to visit Kashmir or the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, get military training and return to await a call. The 21/7 bombers came from an entirely different background. All four men convicted in July arrived in Britain from the Horn of Africa as child refugees.

In Britain they were radicalised by the other major pole of attraction for young Muslims – the Finsbury Park mosque and its now imprisoned leader, Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. Unlike those of Pakistani origin, this cell had more of a background in petty crime and street gangs. Much of their youth had been spent clubbing and taking drugs. Formally uneducated, they lived primarily on state handouts and spent much of their time at the Finsbury Park mosque.

Their leader, Mukhtar Ibrahim, who was initially radicalised while serving a prison sentence, travelled to Pakistan in 2004 and is alleged to have spent time with Mohammed Siddique Khan at a  training camp where both men learned to make the hydrogen peroxide bombs they eventually used in London. The judge at his trial said he had little doubt that the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks were coordinated, probably by senior al-Qaeda figure Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi who is now in Guantanamo.

The Doctors’ Plot appears to have involved yet another kind of group. All the members of this group were recent arrivals in the UK, of Indian and Arab background. Highly-educated professonals, it is less likely that any of them have spent time in jihadi training camps in Pakistan.

Their chosen method of attack was crude and ineffective. We can see from these bare facts that al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan and its main franchise in Iraq have had a close relationship with the attacks in Britain. They give the lie to the old saw from Omar Bakri Mohammed, the leader of al-Muhaijroun, who used to argue, before he fled to Lebanon, that Muslims in Britain lived under a ‘Covenant of Security’ that guaranteed no attacks in exchange for the right to propagandise their beliefs.
 
The four attacks also demonstrate that al-Qaeda will adapt its methods to suit particular conditions, using different social groups and varying its techniques. The real question now is not so much whether it can continue to find willing recruits to carry out further atrocities in Britain – in the short term the answer is yes – but where are we on the curve? Are we likely to see a growing number of attacks or will they begin to diminish? Looked at purely from the standpoint of effectiveness, most of the attacks in Britain have been dismal failures. Only the 7/7 bombers managed to carry out their missions as planned.

The rest have resulted in capture and long prison sentences. More than 20 would-be ‘martyrs’ are now in prison serving life sentences where they are unlikely to provide inspiration to a new generation. What is remarkable about all four conspiracies is that significant moments in all the plots were captured on surveillance cameras. This is unprecedented. Compare this situation to the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland where surveillance footage of IRA volunteers in action is almost unknown. Like it or not, Britain’s thousands of security cameras now mean that anonymity for bombers is almost impossible.

And while the Security Service, MI5, has rightly been criticised for its failure to stop several of these attacks, it is also true that very few of the conspirators were completely unknown to them. This demonstrates that the watchers are looking in the right places.