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Morgan Goronwy Rees (29 November 1909 – 12 December 1979) was a Wales journalist, academic and writer.
In 1953, Rees became principal of the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth. In 1956, a series of articles appeared in The People that described their anonymous author as a "Most intimate friend, a man in a high academic position". Guy Burgess appeared in them as a corrupt man, spy, blackmailer, homosexual, and drunk. The Daily Telegraph then revealed Rees was author. The university held an inquiry into the matter. Despite student support, university staff did not support him. Rees resigned before the inquiry ended, thus also ending his academic career. The inquiry's report was very critical of Rees. Moreover, "It turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Donald Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself."
Rees sat on the Wolfenden report and played an influential role in getting gay men's testimony heard.Shopland, Norena 'A most intimate friend' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales, Seren Books, 2017 He spent the last years of his life in Aberystwyth. He wrote a column (signed "R") on current political affairs for Encounter. He also wrote two autobiographies, A Bundle of Sensations (1960) and A Chapter of Accidents (1972).
Rees appears under the name "Eddie" in Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel The Death of the Heart (Victoria Glendinning Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer).
Michael Williams portrays Rees in the 1985 television movie Blunt: The Fourth Man. Blunt: the fourth man, DVD video listing at WorldCat. O'Connor J,J. TV weekend; 'blunt - the fourth man,' on A& E: review. New York Times. Dec 04 1987.
Rees died of cancer on 12 December 1979 at Charing Cross Hospital in London.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact led him to take a strong Anti-communism stance, which he put into writing by 1948:
"A spectre is haunting Europe." The words are more true today than they were when two hopeful young men wrote them almost exactly one hundred years ago. Today the spectre has ceased to be a bogy. It is a solid, established fact, ruling some 250,000,000 people and preparing, with admirable thoroughness, advanced positions from which it can reach out to extend its rule over Western Europe.In her memoir, Rees's daughter Jenny Rees wrote that her father was fascinated by the Alger Hiss–Chambers case, which marked a sharp divide intellectually between him and Burgess:
'Hiss was certainly guilty; he was precisely the sort of person who was capable of carrying out the systematic program of espionage which Whittaker Chambers, so improbably as it seemed, had accused him; and only a communist could be capable of such a feat...' But according to Guy, it was Hiss, not Chambers, who deserved the admiration.
Rees seemed acutely conscious of the parallels between Hiss's case and that of the Cambridge Five (specifically Burgess) when he wrote, "I have no intention to be the British Whittaker Chambers". (Others have made the comparison. ) He reviewed Chambers's 1952 memoir Witness favorably for The Spectator. At the end of his life he admitted spying for the USSR for a short time, and accused MI5 man Guy Liddell of also being a spy. His son Thomas has said that his father did not admit to being a communist spy, even when he was dying in hospital in 1979. Rees told Andrew Boyle, author of The Climate of Treason, his reflections on his conversations with Burgess at All Souls College. He said he had ridiculed Burgess's claim to be a spy. He also told Boyle that Anthony Blunt was the man to follow. Boyle's revelations in the Daily Mail led Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to announce to the House of Commons in 1979 that the security services had long known that Blunt was a spy, due to Rees's warnings to the security services the weekend that Burgess and Maclean fled to Russia. Blunt had still been knighted.
In 1999, Vasili Mitrokhin, former KGB member, published the Mitrokhin archives, which included a file on Rees, documenting his recruitment by Burgess at Oxford during the mid-1930s and two code names, "Fleet" and "Gross". The file also says that he supplied no information to the Soviets and abandoned his communist affiliation at the outbreak of World War II.
In her memoir, Jenny Rees writes that while she was visiting Moscow, Oleg Tsarev told her:
"Rees did not cooperate. Nothing happened actually." ... My father was supposed to provide political hearsay but he did not co-operate, and after the Soviet-German pact nothing more was heard from him.
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