Master Soviet Spy Sir Anthony Blunt's Memoirs Released

The personal memoirs of Sir Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and ringleader of the notorious Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring, are only now being published twenty-five years after his death. Yet even today, Blunt remains an enigma.

The publishing and release of Sir Anthony Blunt's memoirs in late July, twenty-five years after his death (per his request), reveal little in the way of new information about one of the most damaging Soviet spies in British history, and even less in the way of remorse for treason that cost many agents and would-be defectors their cover, if not their lives. Mr. Blunt was publicly unmasked in 1979 as a traitor and the Fourth Man in the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and stripped of his knighthood. In 1964, fifteen years earlier, Mr. Blunt had confessed to British Intelligence of his decades as a deep cover spy for the Soviet Union, having been recruited in 1934 by the NKVD. The British tabloids wasted no time in late July hailing the arrival of Mr. Blunt's long-awaited memoirs. The Times Online chimed in with "Anthony Blunt: Betraying My Country? It Was All a Big Mistake." The Daily Mail hinted at scandal: "Last Secrets of the Queen Mother's Favourite Traitor: Memoirs of Society Spy Anthony Blunt Could Still Rock Royals." They're all like that. To understand the harsh British reaction to Blunt's memoirs, a bit of history is in order so you may fully see the damage Mr. Blunt did to the British throughout his career in government. Fewer spies have wreaked more havoc with a nation's secrets. In 1932, the 25-year-old Anthony Blunt was a Modern Languages Fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge. Blunt became a close friend of Guy Burgess, a future member of the Cambridge Five spy ring who would later defect to the Soviet Union in 1951. Mr. Blunt also became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society at Cambridge University known for its Marxist leanings and rampant homosexuality. Mr. Blunt traveled to the Soviet Union in 1933, already a committed Communist a year before his recruitment by the NKVD. Also recruited from the Apostles Society were Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Kim Philby and John Cairncross. Of the Cambridge Five, as they have come to be known, only Kim Philby wasn't a homosexual. It is rumored that Blunt recruited those four Apostles for Stalin. It is also rumored that Blunt used others' homosexuality to blackmail even more hapless souls into the service of Mother Russia. Being homosexual was quite a different matter back in the staid 1930s. At the outbreak of World War II Blunt signed up with the British Army, was recruited by MI5 and became privy to top secret ULTRA decoding of German Enigma cipher machines, information he quickly passed onto Stalin. By war's end in 1945, he had reached the rank of major. Ironically, Major Blunt was assigned the task of going to Germany to recover incriminating letters sent to Adolf Hitler by the pro-Nazi King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry two-time American divorcee Wallis Simpson. By 1951, Guy Burgess was First Secretary at the British Embassy in D.C., Donald MacLean was the Foreign Service Officer in charge of American Affairs in London, Kim Philby was working as British Intelligence liaison to the CIA, FBI and newly created NSA, John Cairncross was smuggling atomic weapons program secrets to Stalin, and Blunt continued climbing the ladder at MI5. In short, in 1951 the Cambridge Five were passing nearly every secret in the British government to the Soviet Union, and many of America's as well. Most of both nation's spies were known to Stalin. In Philby's case, one Russian defector with damning information on British spies was set up and snatched from Istanbul by SMERSH. In May 1951 Burgess and MacLean, both under clouds of suspicion for espionage, fled to the Soviet Union. Philby and Blunt, both close friends of Burgess and MacLean, were interrogated relentlessly by British Intelligence. Philby especially, given his intimate knowledge of investigations linked to both Burgess and MacLean through VENONA, an NSA program by which Soviet codes were broken and many spies were tracked down, including atomic spies Klaus Fuchs and Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for their roles in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Blunt revealed nothing, and was even knighted for his work in MI5 a year later in 1952. Philby, already knighted in 1946, was suspected of being the "Third Man" in the Burgess-MacLean defections who had tipped off both men and was treated far more harshly than Blunt. Though giving nothing away, Philby was asked to resign from SIS but refused. Philby had already been ousted from his American liaison job by the CIA's counterintelligence expert James Jesus Angleton and then-CIA Director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who told the British that Philby had to go or US-UK intel sharing was finished. Amazingly, Philby not only kept his job in SIS, he was even cleared with full honors by then-Foreign Secretary Harold MacMillan in 1955, in this ill-timed statement before the House of Commons:

"While in government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously, and I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called 'Third Man', if indeed there was one."

In the years that followed, Philby would go on to do even more damage in the Foreign Service, all the details of which would go straight to the Soviet Premier's desk. Philby would eventually defect to Moscow in January 1963, penning the book My Silent War, receiving the highest honors of the Soviet Union, and even managing to seduce Donald MacLean's Russian wife. Philby died in Moscow in 1988 at the age of 76. Blunt, perhaps sensing the inevitable, moved out of MI5 and into academia, even into Buckingham Palace itself where Blunt, a noted art historian as well as a Soviet spy, would go on to become the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as well as Professor of Art History at the University of London and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Blunt also published a number of scholarly works on art during that time.

Archival photo

An undated photo of Anthony Blunt with Queen Elizabeth II.

image:55416:2::0

In one book on the Cambridge Apostles I've read some years back, it was reported that in the early 1960s Blunt propositioned a British soldier in a pub restroom about sixty miles north of London. Blunt was kept from leaving as the police were called, upon whose arrival Blunt presented impeccable ID and disputed the matter. Blunt's higher-ups were notified, and the whole scandal was swept under the rug. Blunt didn't lose a single position, not even at Buckingham Palace. In 1964, however, Blunt's luck ran out. Arthur Martin, an investigator for MI5 who had conducted much of the interrogation of Blunt following the Burgess-MacLean defections in 1951, came back at Blunt with a statement in hand from an American, Michael Straight, who attended Trinity College the same time as Blunt and was friends with all of the Cambridge Five. Straight told Martin that Blunt had tried to recruit him for the Soviets while attending Trinity. Confronted by Martin, Blunt finally confessed to all that he had hidden during interrogations following the Burgess-MacLean defections, as well as naming John Cairncross and three other low-level spies he had recruited. Remarkably, Blunt not only held on to all his key art world positions, the British government refused to even bring Blunt to trial. Even more remarkable, Arthur Martin was suspended from MI5 for pursuing the case and hinting that a higher-up Soviet mole was still in place in British Intelligence. Though Blunt's decades-long history as a Soviet spy was merely rumored or hinted at for years, it took until 1979 for Margaret Thatcher to finally unveil Sir Anthony Blunt, then 72 years old, as the master Soviet spy and traitor higher-ups in British Intel had known of for years. From 1979 until his death in 1983, Blunt penned the memoirs now released to the public after twenty-five years, as well as more scholarly works on art. At the time of his public unmasking by Mrs. Thatcher, Blunt publicly expressed remorse and even mentioned he was considering suicide. Small consolation for the damage he, and the other members of the Cambridge spy ring, had done to MI5 in particular and British Intel in general that is incalculable even today. From the onset of World War II to the Burgess-Maclean defections in 1951 and beyond, every major British intelligence secret, including the names of agents, prospective defectors, even atomic secrets (and a number of closely guarded American national security secrets as well) were passed from the hands of Mr. Blunt and his Soviet recruits straight into the Kremlin. So if you should sit down and cozy up for a night of light reading with Sir Anthony's memoirs, at least you now know The Rest Of The Story. And what a story it was. Still is today, judging from the splashing of Blunt's name all over the British tabloids in response to his memoirs. On that note, here's the top customer review from C. Coffman at amazon.com regarding Sir Anthony's memoirs, "Anthony Blunt: His Lives":

What is the purpose of this account of the life of Anthony Blunt, the great traitor?

This biography is a long emollient salve applied to Blunt's traitorous and murderous life. Its strengths are all associated with its depiction of the milieu in which he moved so effortlessly, the upper class institutions of England which he betrayed.

You can find a lot more reviews just like that in the British tabloids. Even twenty-five years after his death, Anthony Blunt is not going quietly into the night as he so often did for Stalin. Yet even after all this time, and all that has been written on him, the real question of Blunt's life remains unanswered: Why did he do it? Historically speaking, not even the stauchest idealist should have had any illusions about Uncle Joe after the Moscow Show Trials, his postwar devouring of Eastern Europe, and threatening the stability of weaker war-devastated nations like Germany and Japan. Or even as far back as the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, and the Katyn Forest massacre of 20,000 Polish officers perpetrated by the Red Army on Stalin's orders. Blunt was in British Intelligence. He must have known something, yet revealed nothing on that subject in his 'tell-all' memoirs. It seems Mr. Blunt took that information to the grave, and remains as enigmatic as ever.