title: My 5 Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller
author:  Yuri Modin 
description: The so-called Cambridge Five-Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross-comprised what may have been the most notorious spy ring in history. In his richly informative memoir, Modin describes the personal relations among the quintet-and subtly speculates about their homosexual interaction. Modin, who is retired and lives in Moscow, was their KGB desk officer from 1944 to 1955, and arranged the 1951 defections of Maclean and Burgess. He is surprisingly lavish in his praise of Cairncross, who is generally regarded as the least significant of the five, revealing that he was the first to inform Moscow of the Anglo-American atomic bomb project and provided crucial information about the vulnerability of the Germans' main battle tank. Modin also details his friendships with Burgess and Philby (who defected in 1963) during their Russian exile; Maclean, however, avoided all socializing. Of the two who remained in Britain and were never prosecuted, Cairncross now lives in the south of France and Blunt died in 1983. Burgess died in 1965, Maclean in 1983, Philby in 1988. Photos not seen by PW. 25,000 first printing; author tour. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: My Five Cambridge Friends
  
  YURI MODIN
  
  Copyright O 1994 by Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., Paris
  English language translation copyright @ 1994 by Anthony Roberts
  Introduction O 1994 by David Leitch
  All rights reserved
  Printed in the United States of America
  English translation originally published in Great Britain by Headline
  Book Publishing, a divisiou of Hodder Headline PLC, 1994
  Fint American edition, 1994
  Library of Congress catalog card number: 94-24L73
  
  Contents
  Introduction by David I*itch
  I London: February 1948
  2 JoiningtheKGB
  3 ThePickoftheLitter
  4 MenoftheShadows
  5 Encountersinlondon
  6 RunningScared
  7 T\e End Game
  8 Three SovietCitizens
  Index
  1
  t7
  n
  43
  103
  135
  t67
  191
  243
  275
  
  lntroduction
  by David Leitch
  One of the unexpected bonuses of the final years of the twentieth
  century is the forbidden, almost voyeuristic thrill of seeing inside the
  battlelines of the 'Other Side', until so recently our most implacable
  enemy. We can penetrate his old fortifications and even browse
  in