The Oxbridge Legacy

The Oxbridge Legacy is a post event exposé in 1997 of the relationship between the KGB and Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt , Kim Philby and John Cairncross known as The Cambridge Five who were brought together before the second world war. It transpires that they were the sacrificial lambs of their Soviet spymasters and were allowed to get caught to lead western intelligence agencies away from the existence of a much more important group formed at Oxford University at the same time. The novel plots the deciphering of one time pad morse code transmissions from the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s to Moscow central using modern computer techniques after the discovery of a complete set of one time pads in Russia dating from that era. The members of the Oxford Spy Ring are identified and the damage or otherwise that they caused is plotted, they could possibly have prevented world war three. The novel is also a metaphor for the equal, corrosive corruption of Russian politics and excess capitalism in the West.