Guy Liddell

Guy Maynard Liddell, CB, CBE, MC (8 November 1892 – 3 December 1958) was a British intelligence officer.

Biography

Early life and career Liddell was born on 8 November 1892 at 64 Victoria Street, London, the son of Capt. Augustus Frederick Liddell RA, a retired Royal Artillery officer, and his wife Emily Shinner, who died when Liddell was eight years old. He was the younger brother of Capt. Cecil Frederick Joseph Liddell, who served as Head of MI5's Irish section from 1939, and David Edward Liddell; and was a second cousin of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the child friend of Lewis Carroll who was the basis for the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.

He was a talented cellist in his youth and was studying in Germany for a career as a professional musician when World War I began. He joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a private, a unit his brothers David Liddell MC and Cecil served with. During the conflict, he was commissioned and served with the Royal Field Artillery and was awarded the Military Cross.

His unhappy marriage to Hon. Calypso Baring was dissolved in 1943 after she left him and joined her half-brother Lorillard Suffern Tailer in America. He subsequently fought a long legal battle for custody of their children.

Later career Liddell was expected to succeed Director General of MI5, David Petrie, but was passed over when Home Secretary Herbert Morrison was informed by Ellen Wilkinson of rumours that he might be a double agent and was instead appointed Deputy-Director-General under Percy Sillitoe. These rumours were accentuated when his close friend Guy Burgess defected. He was also a known associate of other members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean. In 1953 following an MI5 internal investigation he took early retirement and went to work as a security adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority. He died of heart failure aged 66 in 1958 at his home, 18 Richmond Court, Sloane Street, London, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery. In 1979, Goronwy Rees confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and named Liddell as the Fifth Man. Papers released since have all but completely cleared him of the charge, naming John Cairncross as the fifth man, with the general academic consensus being that Liddell was naïve in his friendships with some of his colleagues. In the words of Rupert Allason, 'his unwise friendships and his preference for homosexual company, posthumously wrecked his reputation as a shrewd intelligence professional.' However, there are dissenting views. John Costello in Mask of Treachery contends that Liddell was recruited by the Soviets, and claimed Liddell "...was the most successful mole of all."

Wartime diaries Liddell kept an almost daily diary containing details of his work at MI5 throughout World War II, dictated to, typed up and indexed by his secretary, Margot Huggins. Military historian Rupert Allason, writing under the nom de plume of Nigel West, has edited Liddell's wartime diaries for publication in two volumes.

In popular culture Liddell was portrayed by Angus Wright in the 2003 BBC Television drama Cambridge Spies.