A traditional cache and part of a series exploring the members of the Cold War, Cambridge Spy ring. If found, carefully look for a code which will be used for a bonus cache. Please conceal the cache well after finding and if you have trouble doing so let me know by a separate message and I will go out and fix it.
Kim Philby was a British Intelligence officer born on the 1st January 1912 in what was then British India. He was privately educated at Westminister School and subsequently attended Trinity College, Cambridge. As the name suggests all of the members of the group of spies were alumni of the prestigious Cambridge University. After leaving University Philby worked as a journalist and spent time covering the struggle between the communist and fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1940 he was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, and by the end of the war had risen through its ranks to a senior position. Later he served as British Ambassador in Washington and was a fixed member of the western intelligence establishment. In 1951, two spies run by the Soviets, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, had been unmasked and had fled to Russia. Suspicion also turned to Philby who resigned from MI6 but he was later exonerated by the then Foreign Secretary, Harold MacMillan. He eventually returned to a career in journalism and worked as a correspondent in the Middle East. All the while, despite Macmillan's assertions, the suspicions had been correct. He had been a spy for Moscow. He was one of the KGB's most senior assets in the Cold War and when eventually he was compromised by information supplied by a Russian defector, he vanished from Beirut, where he was living, and defected to Moscow.
Life in the Russian capital was not what he had hoped for and his belief that he had been working with the rank of Colonel in the KGB was ill founded. He was tightly watched, his movements controlled and it was ten years before the KGB gave him a minor role, training aspects of their recruits. Having divorced his previous wife Eleanor and after a fling with his fellow spy, Maclean's, wife, he married once more. This time to Rufona Pukhova in 1971. Philby died in 1988. The Soviets, now assured he could never defect back to the west, relaxed at last, gave him a hero's funeral and awarded him The Order of Lenin.
The Cambridge spy ring has been the inspiration for many Cold War based espionage stories and remains one of the most interesting and difficult periods in British Intelligence history. The spy ring consisted of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and the fifth man. Most believe the fifth man to be John Cairncross although there has always been a measure of doubt around this.
The geocache represents the dead drops used by spies of the time. In well concealed places they allowed intelligence documents or microfilms to be spirited back to Moscow without having to take the risk of a meeting with an actual handler. This dead drop utilises a rural area conveniently accessible in minutes but hidden form prying eyes. Sometimes the location would have a mark on an object nearby so it could be easily identified by those briefed on its existence. Intelligence deposited in it could later be collected by another agent and taken out of the country without risking a compromise for the important spy, who would be difficult to replace.