The Success of the Five

As soon as the story broke, Burgess and Maclean fled in May 1951. The foreign office didn't really want to look into it too closely because it was seen to be snitching on your mates. My own belief is that Burgess and MacLean were allowed to flee. There was very little effort to follow them. Nothing was announced for at least a week afterwards publicly but even there was a gap of several days before the French police were alerted. We know that Filby was in effect given the chance of immunity but without any proper surveillance, he just nipped on to a freighter and went off from Beirut to Moscow. I suspect that a number of other people were given immunity that we