James is a party functionary who devotes himself entirely to the party. He is a quiet and thoughtful man. Modest, conscientious, industrious and serious. Everybody who knows him likes him and respects him. He exercises great influence over people. As a person he is honest and beyond reproach. Responsive and attentive to comrades. Ready to bring any offer for the sake of the party. A good organizer. Very careful with money. Never takes anything for himself. Outwardly shy and reserved. Strict in respect of women. Pays no attention to his appearance. He can do much for us if we are recommended to him by Harry Pollitt or Tores. He is known to the British police as an active communist. He is used to legal work and therefore incautious. But if his attention is drawn to this he will act as required.

We have already recruited Cairncross. We shall call him MOLIERE. We have been able to manage things in such a way that neither MADCHEN (Burgess) nor TONY(Blunt) was endangered. For this Klugmann was used who came over from Paris twice. MOLIERE went to Paris once. He gave Klugmann his agreement to work, but knows, of course, only half of what we want from him. So far his only contact is Klugmann. We shall take him over from him by the end of May.

At one time he (Donald Maclean) was a party member but since he joined the diplomatic service two years ago he has broken off all relations with the party and even avoids old comrades as if he were ashamed of the fact that he has gone over to the bourgeoisie. It would not be without risk to approach him and tell him that the party counts on him...

He (Guy Burgess) is the most clever and capable of them all. He has distanced himself from us, because his family relations have enabled him to move in high society: ministers, lords, bankers. He is friends with such people as Victor Rothschild. Without wanting to he still thinks on Marxist lines. It would be worthwhile to capture him because if he became an enemy he would be a dangerous enemy.

We made direct contact. MOLIERE (Cairncross) was very glad that he could make contact with us and not feel himself cut off from the party... He knows from his Cambridge days that WEISE (Donald Maclean) also was a Party member and he says that although WEISE had become a complete snob, he nevertheless maintains a "healthy line" in his work which shows that he has retained Marxist principles in his subconscious. What is more, he is of the opinion that WEISE has the best brains in the Foreign Office.

I have met him once. Before I met him his convictions were of a politically deeply pessimistic nature since he was politically completely cut off and very dissatisfied with his work. Hatred for his social environment which behaved very untactfully towards him. He drew the following conclusions for himself: they won't keep him for long and that soon he will have to start looking for another profession. He was very happy that we had established contact with him and was ready to start working for us at once... He (Cairncross) is no doubt very intelligent, proud and ideologically on our side. His opposition towards his environment clearly has its origin in his convictions. This feeling of opposition puts him outside the ranks of his environment.

In August - September 1938, LISZT (Cairncross) worked in the special "crisis" group of the Foreign Office and had free access to documents on Munich. When he heard about his transfer to the Treasury, he took these documents with him and passed them at once on to us. In September 1938, LISZT saw in the Foreign Office a report from a British agent in the USSR on the unpreparedness of the USSR to render military assistance to Czechoslovakia. Among those in the Foreign Office who advocated an agreement with Hitler were (a) the Ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, and (b) the Ambassador in Paris, Phipps.

Klugmann had been at school with Maclean at Gresham's in Norfolk, and took him under his wing when Maclean arrived at Cambridge, carefully nurturing his less intelligent protégé's political opinions. Klugmann came from a prosperous Jewish family in Hampstead. Unlike the others, Klugmann's Communism was never a secret. By 1933, when he took a first-class degree in French and German, he was Cambridge University's best-known Communist and was building the Party carefully under the watchful eye of YCL leader Dave Springhall.

Klugmann willingly sacrificed his excellent chance of a Cambridge fellowship by his uncompromising allegiance. Years later he explained: "My commitment to the cause was for life, and it was an exhilarating moment to be alive and young. We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand." He visited a mining village in South Wales and wrote that the Soviet Union would never tolerate "empty houses furnished with bits of wood and orange boxes, children without shoes, rickets everywhere, small shopkeepers ruined because their customers couldn't afford to buy, tuberculosis and emigration." An outstanding academic, he both felt and thought his way to Communism. It was - or it seemed to be - a time of simple choices. There was good and there was evil. "No later generation" writes Healey "has enjoyed the same political certainty." Today people tend to focus their idealism on single issues: "It seems easier to save the whale than to save the world." Anthony Blunt, after being named as a spy in 1979, said that when he came back after a sabbatical in 1934 to complete his degree, "all my friends and almost all the intelligent, bright undergraduates had suddenly become Marxists."

It was Klugmann who provided the Cambridge link with King Street, and Dave Springhall who guided Klugmann. Springhall visited the University regularly, took the membership lists, and discussed in detail the character and potential of all new recruits. In the late 1930s Klugmann helped organize aid for Spain. Denis Healey remembers a summer holiday in France, when he passed Klugmann a mysterious package on his way through Paris. Thus Springhall and Klugmann helped nurture the spy network which was to cause the British government so much embarrassment years later; but MI5 was looking for subversive activities elsewhere.