MI5 suspected Auden of aiding Cambridge spies' escape
The poet WH Auden repeatedly evaded British intelligence's attempts to find out whether he was involved in the dramatic disappearance of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, according to secret files made public today.
The suspicion was triggered by reports from a Reuters journalist that Burgess had tried to call his friend Auden the day before he left England. Investigators thought Burgess may have been planning to flee to Auden's holiday villa on the island of Ischia off Italy, near Naples.
But MI5 files released in the National Archives show that Auden evaded the security services' attempts to make him explain the incident, and ignored a request for an interview.
MI5's investigation into Britain's biggest breach of national security pitched its straitlaced agents back into the hedonistic, homosexual and often drunken left-wing 1930s literary world...
In Britain MI5's efforts to reconstruct Burgess's social network led to Anthony Blunt, who named the poet Christopher Isherwood and three others.
Read entire article at Guardian
The suspicion was triggered by reports from a Reuters journalist that Burgess had tried to call his friend Auden the day before he left England. Investigators thought Burgess may have been planning to flee to Auden's holiday villa on the island of Ischia off Italy, near Naples.
But MI5 files released in the National Archives show that Auden evaded the security services' attempts to make him explain the incident, and ignored a request for an interview.
MI5's investigation into Britain's biggest breach of national security pitched its straitlaced agents back into the hedonistic, homosexual and often drunken left-wing 1930s literary world...
In Britain MI5's efforts to reconstruct Burgess's social network led to Anthony Blunt, who named the poet Christopher Isherwood and three others.