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A battered leather briefcase left behind by Guy Burgess when he fled to Moscow in 1951 is among 20 objects from MI5’s archives to go on display for the first time from Saturday. A joint exhibition with the National Archives tells the story of the first decades of the Security Service through objects and documents. MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum says the exhibition shows “commitment to being open wherever we can”. MI5 has sent 6,000 paper records to the Archives since 1997 but chooses what it will release, unlike most parts of government.
The exhibition includes a blackened, withered lemon, 110 years old, which formed part of the evidence against Kurt Muller, caught spying for Germany in 1915. He had used lemon juice to add secret messages to letters written to Holland. When arrested, Muller had the lemon in his pocket. He was tried, secretly found guilty and executed at the Tower of London in June 1915.
A fake Nazi medal, made for one of MI5’s most successful wartime agents. Eric Roberts, known as Jack King, had posed as a Gestapo agent, to find and work with Nazi sympathisers in Britain. He identified nearly 500 people, and gave the Nazi “War Merit Cross” to two of them, who thought they were being rewarded for their wartime service to the German Reich.
One of the most striking exhibits is a fake Nazi medal, made for one of MI5’s most successful wartime agents. One of the two briefcases left by Guy Burgess at his London club, when he fled to Moscow in 1951 with fellow spy Donald Maclean. It is marked with his initials.
MI5 files released to the National Archives date back decades and there are few exhibits from the more modern era. One is part of a mortar from 1991, when the Provisional IRA attacked Number 10 Downing Street. A Cabinet meeting was taking place as a bomb exploded outside. No one was hurt.
The security service had been discussing a possible exhibition for several years. Mark Dunton, National Archives historian and curator of MI5: Official Secret, said: “We were aware how interested the public are in the whole world of espionage. We suggested [the exhibition] first but MI5 thought about it and they thought ‘wow yes this would be a good thing’.”
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