In May 1951 two upper-crust British diplomats vanished, leaving only an abandoned car on a Southampton dock and triggering a global panic. This episode examines Guy Burgess, the Eton-educated diplomat whose ultimate disguise was his own elite class privilege, weaponizing the blind trust of the British establishment.

Radicalized at Cambridge amid the Depression and the rise of fascism, Burgess was recruited by Soviet intelligence, then publicly renounced communism to build a right-wing cover. Through the BBC and the Foreign Office he gained extraordinary access, hiding his treason behind chaotic, aggressively ordinary eccentricity.

• An eye test failure diverted him from a naval career, sending him to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge
• He joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship to construct a convincing establishme ...