Stella Rimington & The Cambridge Spies

**** 4 Extra marks 75 years since British diplomats turned KGB spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to the Soviet Union on May 25th 1951

The latest edition of this occasional series, in which a major public figure is given a chance to venture into the BBC's vast archives, to explore a time or a person who has had a big impact on them.

In this edition, the former Director General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, uses the BBC Archives to re-examine the impact on her life of the 'Cambridge spies' and the sense of paranoia, unease and self-doubt that this spread through elements of the British Establishment.

Using the archive, Rimington revisits the moment when, as a sixteen year old in 1951, her father was shocked to read about the disappearance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean - just the first instance of how the Cambridge spies' treachery has overshadowed her life.

She listens to rare recordings of Maclean himself, of friends of Burgess reminiscing about him, and of key moments in the unfolding of the story, such as the day when Mrs Thatcher revealed 'Fourth Man' Anthony Blunt's identity - a moment she remembers not as traumatic but cathartic.

Stella explores how their treachery continued to reverberate throughout her time in the security service, from her senior colleague Peter Wright's apparent paranoia, to her interrogations in the 1970s of the 'Fifth Man', John Cairncross, who only spoke publicly after he was outed in 1990. And she talks to Cairncross' niece about the impact the Cambridge spies' treachery has had on her life.

She explores the rich archive of dramas based on Burgess' life to anatomise how he has come to be remembered - in performances by the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Alan Bates, Rupert Everett and Tom Hollander. Has he become rather sentimentalised in the British imagination?

And she digs deeper, to find out more about Burgess' time working as a producer at the BBC itself, and asks whether any of his programmes survive in the BBC archive.

Producer: Phil Tinline

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2008.