who could exploit the mysterious laws of sex in this country.” Work-
ing in the Foreign Office in the years after World War II, he pro-
vided his case officers with thousands of classified documents. In
1950 he was transferred to the British embassy in Washington, where
he lived with Kim Philby. In Washington, he became more and more
of a diplomatic scandal.
Facing exposure in 1951, Burgess left his post as a junior diplomat
in Washington, returned to London, and warned Donald Maclean
that the British and American governments had evidence of his
treachery. He then defected with Maclean to Moscow. Burgess was
resettled in the Soviet Union and nationalized as a Soviet citizen. De-
spite his desire to return to Britain, he died in exilein Moscow.
Burgess has often been treated as a joke by a later generation of in-
telligence historians. He was, however, a good and ruthless spy. On
one occasion he asked his Soviet case officer’s permission to murder
another British agent he believed was preparing to turn him in.BYSTROLETOV, DMITRY ALEKSANDROVICH (1901–1975).
One of the most successful Soviet illegals, Bystroletov operated in
Western Europe for more than a decade, recruiting agents in Ger-
many, France, Italy, and Great Britain under a false flag. He operated
at various times as a Czech, Greek, and British citizen; his British
passport identified him as Lord Robert Greenville. Among his great-
est successes was the running of agents in the German and French
military and the British Foreign Office, which had access to their
countries’ diplomatic ciphers. For several years, Bystroletov ran
Ernest Oldham, a British code clerk, who provided Moscow with
British diplomatic ciphers. Bystroletov, a very handsome man, also
seduced a French code clerk in Prague and obtained copies of French
diplomatic codes.
Bystroletov, like many of the “great illegals,” fell victim to
Moscow’s paranoia in the late 1930s. In 1937 he was recalled to
Moscow and arrested as a German spy. He was tortured into making
a false confession, convicted, and sentenced to a forced labor camp.
Bystroletov survived the purges, but several members of his family
were executed or committed suicide. In 1954 he was released, reha-
bilitated, and allowed to write a classified account of his activity as
an illegal.BYSTROLETOV, DMITRY ALEKSANDROVICH (1901–1975)•3906-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 39