Too Secret Too Long, page 46
It is known that Blunt was able to warn the K.G.B that Communist Party headquarters in London had been bugged by MI5 and that Party matters were being monitored. He had done this within a week of the installation of the microphones and gave the Russians details of the secret techniques being used. The K.G.B. again foolishly warned the Party and a frantic search was made of the building in King Street, Covent Garden, to find the microphones, not all of which were discovered. When the MI5 men listening to the microphones overheard the search there was an immediate inquiry to discover the source of the leak and Blunt was among those questioned. He lied convincingly.
It might be asked why, if Hollis was a spy, the Communist Party had not already been informed because it was his department, Section F, that had been responsible for the operation. The answer could be that if Hollis was an active spy he was an agent of the G.R.U. which, in the early 1940s, was more experienced than the K.G.B. and too sophisticated to prejudice a spy’s position simply to assist a local Communist Party.
I have mentioned how Philby kept the K.G.B. up to date on the ‘order of battle’ of MI6 by giving his controller internal telephone directories and other information about changes of personnel and duties. Blunt did the same with respect to MI5 and, as Gouzenko’s evidence indicated, the G.R.U. was receiving similar information from another source.
For much of his time in MI5 Blunt was in charge of a sub-section concerned with penetrating the embassies of neutral countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal and even, where possible, examining their diplomatic pouches, to which MI5 had access during the war. His chief outside agent in this work was Guy Burgess who joined MI5 as a supernumerary in 1940.[17] As Blunt and Burgess were known to be old friends, their regular meetings in Blunt’s room at the Courtauld Institute and elsewhere aroused no suspicions. Twice a week Blunt took out an attaché case of selected secret documents ostensibly as homework. Burgess added his own reports and the case was handed over to a K.G.B. officer at some pre-arranged point. They were photographed at the Soviet Embassy and returned to Blunt in time to be taken back to MI5 the following morning. They contributed so much that a later K.G.B. defector, Vladimir Petrov, was eventually to reveal that they created a considerable problem for K.G.B. headquarters in processing the material.[18] The Russians also became concerned that Blunt might be caught carrying documents which he was not entitled to remove from the office, especially after a frightening experience when he was stopped by a policeman who demanded to see inside his case in the black-out. ‘Henry’ therefore provided the two spies with cameras so that they could photograph the documents in miniature and hand over the films. They did this for a time but became so short of sleep that they handed back the cameras and reverted to the old system. They were never caught.
Blunt also knew about many American operations because of the close contact between MI5 and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in London from 1942 onwards and there is no doubt that he could have prejudiced some of them by informing the Russians.
Early in 1944 it was decided to set up a cover and deception unit under General Eisenhower at S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) to support the coming Normandy landings. Under its new head, Lieutenant-Colonel Noel Wild, who had been switched from the Middle East where he had been engaged in similar work, the unit was divided into two sections – Operations and Intelligence. The latter involved close liaison with MI5 so a link was formed with the appointment to the unit of Anthony Blunt, who moved to Norfolk House, the headquarters of the D-Day deception planners. Looking back with hindsight Wild finds it fantastic that after being rejected from an intelligence course on security grounds, Blunt should have been attached to the invasion organization where he was to see the most secret documents and attend the most secret meetings.[19] Who recommended him? Wild asks with some justification but with no official answer.
Blunt gave the Russians all the details of ‘Fortitude’, the operation to deceive the Germans into believing that the main Allied invasion would be in the Pas de Calais area. As he then had to have access to the Ultra intelligence produced by the breakers of the German codes at Bletchley Park he was a further source of leakage to the Russians about that most secret operation, along with Philby, Long, and Cairncross. According to Professor Michael Howard, who has examined a lot of Blunt’s work on ‘Fortitude’, he functioned efficiently but this was, of course, as much in the Soviet Union’s interests as in Britain’s, the U.S.S.R. by that time being in the war.[20]
Soviet supporters and apologists for wartime Soviet spies continue to try to excuse the treachery of traitors like Blunt, Philby, Maclean and, possibly, Hollis, by claiming that they were only funnelling secrets to a hard-pressed ally. As already mentioned, the truth is that this was accidental because they had been recruited long before the Soviet Union was an ally and were passing secret information while that country was bound to Nazi Germany by a non-aggression pact. Stalin’s desire to placate Hitler was then so great that he not only supplied Germany with food, leather for jackboots and petrol for tanks and bombers but also ensured that help was given to the German secret service, the Abwehr.[21] There can be little doubt that the traitors would have continued to assist the Soviet Union had that country managed to remain a pro-German neutral, as Stalin had hoped.
Colonel Wild suspects that information about Allied moves in France may have been fed back to the Germans by the K.G.B. in order to delay the British-American advance while Soviet troops moved westwards in the hope of securing more territory to communize or, at least, to bargain with at the peace conferences.[22]
When Blunt was asked, later, about his treachery while the U.S.S.R. was assisting Hitler all he could offer was a lame comment that he and Burgess had ‘felt better about things’ once the Soviet Union had been forced into the war.
On 1 April 1945 Blunt succeeded Sir Kenneth Clark in the unpaid post of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, which gave him responsibility for all the Royal collections of paintings.[23] As this date shows, he remained an active Soviet spy while in service to the Palace, for he did not leave MI5 for seven more months. According to close friends of Blunt he told them that he quickly became on good terms with Queen Mary, who was interested in old paintings and other antiques. He also professed to be on friendly terms with Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI. During his long term of office as Surveyor he is said to have acquired great merit by discovering some Holbein drawings and other priceless pictures hung in obscure places and not previously recognized as important.[24]
Some time in 1945, or possibly in 1946, Blunt carried out a secret mission to Germany on behalf of the Royal Family.[25] MI5 had been asked to provide a totally trustworthy and discreet officer for the purpose and Blunt was selected since he spoke and read German and already had a connection with the Palace. Nobody else was told the precise nature of the task and Blunt, who died in 1983, kept the secret, though he may have revealed it in papers not yet made public. It has been suggested that the purpose was to seize family letters written by Queen Victoria which were the property of the Hesse family held in a castle near Frankfurt. My inquiries, however, show that this correspondence was of small importance and hardly warranted a special mission.
Another explanation suggested to me concerns an alleged move by some of Queen Victoria’s German relatives, including the Emperor, to induce her to abdicate in the interests of all concerned. Following Prince Albert’s death the Queen became very unpopular and, while perhaps it was not realistic, there was talk of revolution. Fearing a ‘domino effect’ on their own positions should the Queen be deposed, the German Emperor and ruling Princes are alleged to have prepared a round robin urging her to abdicate in favour of her son. It is said that while the missive was never sent, it was housed in some German archives and that Blunt was sent to extract it.[26]
Blunt’s former colleagues in MI5 suspect that his mission was concerned with more recent history – the retrieval of captured German documents recording the Duke of Windsor’s dubious connections with prominent Nazis. It is known that when the Duke was staying in Austria immediately after his abdication his lengthy telephone calls to his brother, King George VI had been tapped by German Intelligence. In October 1937 the Duke had spent two weeks in Germany visiting various cities to see the Nazis’ economic achievements and meeting von Ribbentrop, Goering, Hess and Hitler, the Duke being fluent in German.[27] While many documents of the former German Foreign Office have been made available, any recording the Duke’s conversations with Hitler and other leaders are said to have disappeared. The interest of MI5 and the Palace would have been more likely to reside, however, in the official German records of the Duke’s clandestine conversations with German diplomats, intelligence chiefs and others in Madrid and Lisbon, to which he fled in June 1940, following the fall of France.[28] These records have been described as ‘tainted’, but they were secret reports to the Berlin Foreign Office never intended for publication and are likely to be accurate. They show that the Nazi leadership made a determined effort to induce the Duke to side with them in their bid to secure a separate peace with Britain and that he flirted with the idea. There is evidence that in the process he met two notorious Nazi secret police chiefs – Walter Schellenberg and Reinhard Heydrich, and, possibly, Rudolf Hess.[29]
Many of the German records have become available for study and are listed in Peter Allen’s The Crown and the Swastika but some, which may have been highly embarrassing to Whitehall and to the Palace had they fallen into Soviet hands, have not been released if, in fact, they still exist. Documents are available under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act which include letters from the Foreign Office to American authorities requesting them to return or destroy their microfilmed copies of German papers relating to the Windsors’ stay in Spain and Portugal during June and July 1940. The documents, about which the Foreign Office was expressing urgency shortly after the end of the war, had been discovered in Marburg Castle, in the American zone of Germany.[30] The castle had been used as a storehouse for captured German papers, said to have comprised about 400 tons, and it is possible that Blunt visited it.
Some of Blunt’s friends have claimed that the material that he recovered filled two or three packing cases. An official source has suggested to me that the bulk was taken up by valuable books which he also retrieved.[31]
While the object of Blunt’s visit remains something of a mystery, the Royal Family seems to have been grateful for his services. In 1947 he was rewarded with the Palace decoration of Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and appears to have remained in fair odour in Royal circles even after his private exposure as a spy in 1964, though his personal contacts with the Queen were rare.
Soon after Blunt’s Royal appointment he told his Soviet controller, then Boris Krotov, that he wanted to leave MI5 to devote all his time to art work. His request was referred to Moscow and, to his surprise, it was granted. When Blunt was interrogated after his eventual confession he admitted that the K.G.B. could have forced him to remain to continue his espionage under threat of exposure. He said that he would not have been too dismayed if this had happened because, in view of the modest intellectual competition from his colleagues, he had every prospect of becoming Director-General and could have continued with his art interests. He agreed with his interrogators that the K.G.B.’s permission to leave might well imply that they could spare him because they had at least one other productive source inside MI5. The K.G.B. Centre may also have thought that there might be some value in having an agent closely connected with the Royal Household where, at least, he might hear gossip of interest to the all-embracing analysts in Moscow.
Blunt ceased to work full time for MI5 in November 1945, at which point he remarked to a colleague, Colonel T. A. Robertson, ‘Well it’s given me great pleasure to pass on the names of every MI5 officer to the Russians.’[32] Robertson, who knew that Blunt made no secret of being a communist, passed the information to those who should have reacted to it but nothing was entered on Blunt’s file. Hollis was still in charge of the anti-communist and anti-Soviet section and was close to Robertson, who was godfather to his son.
While handing over various projects to successors Blunt was in and out of the MI5 office for a further six months and, according to former colleagues, did further services on request for MI5 after that date.
Meanwhile Leo Long had moved from MI14 in London to the Control Commission for Germany, later becoming deputy head of British Intelligence there, with a rank equivalent to major-general. In 1946 Blunt saw him on a visit to Germany and asked him if he would like to be recommended for a full-time senior post inside MI5 in London, almost certainly having first discussed the project with his K.G.B. controller. Long was then only thirty and the post would have taken him to retirement, giving him thirty years inside the secret agency which was going to be mainly concerned with countering Soviet spies operating in Britain. Long agreed and Blunt, who was still under no suspicion, proposed him for entry to MI5. Long was interviewed by the MI5 Selection Board but was turned down by a narrow margin as not being of high enough calibre, though one very senior MI5 officer supported his application.[33]
This information, which I believe to have been withheld from Mrs Thatcher when she made her Parliamentary statement on Blunt and Long, throws a different light on both traitors. Blunt did not go to see Long at MI5’s request but on the instructions of his K.G.B. controller. Clearly the K.G.B. wanted Long inside MI5 and he must have known that if he succeeded in gaining entry he would be required to go on spying whether he wanted to or not, for the K.G.B. could always have threatened him with exposure. Further, the odds are that as Blunt had served as Long’s controller and cut-out, passing on his information to the Russians, he would have been required to continue in that capacity, with his Palace position providing superb cover. Blunt, too, would have had no option but to do the Russians’ bidding. His confident belief that he could intrude Long into MI5 as a replacement helps to explain why the K.G.B. permitted him to leave MI5.
Long has claimed publicly that after he lost contact with Blunt in 1946 he ceased spying but it seems inevitable that Blunt would have given the name of such an excellent and willing source to the Russians and it is most unlikely that they would have left him alone. In fact, Long told a different story to the MI5 officers who were eventually to interrogate him. He said that the defection of Burgess and Maclean was a factor in inducing him to get out of his Soviet entanglement and that did not happen until 1951. He also told his questioners that his marriage, also in 1951, was another factor. What is, perhaps, significant, is that his contract with the Control Commission expired in 1952 and he then ceased to have access to any information of value to the Russians.
Professor Sidney Hook has recently recalled that when he was in Germany in 1948 and in early 1950 he was told, several times, that many men and women in East Germany who had been informing the West about what was happening in their area had been arrested and had disappeared.[34] It would seem more than likely that they could have been traced from material supplied by Long, whose department was responsible for processing it.
Meanwhile, in 1947 Blunt had been promoted to be Director of the Courtauld Institute, which took up more of his time, but he remained in close touch with many of his MI5 friends, especially Guy Liddell and Burgess, and including Hollis, occasionally dining at the latter’s home in Campden Hill Square, as he had during the war.[35] He met Burgess frequently, mainly at the Reform Club, to which they both belonged, as did Hollis. He also performed conspiratorial services for Burgess, one of which he was to describe in detail during his subsequent confessions to his MI5 interrogators. A wad of banknotes and a message had been left for Burgess in a hiding place under a tree on a common in the East End of London and, as Burgess was indisposed, Blunt collected them for him. Those who find it impossible to believe that Hollis could leave his office in Curzon Street to impart secrets furtively to some Soviet officer in Hyde Park might find it helpful to picture the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and Professor of the History of Art leaving the Courtauld Institute or Buckingham Palace and travelling, by a circuitous route, to grope around some tree in the darkness on a muddy common. Such are the exigencies of dedicated service to the Soviet Union.
While the K.G.B. Centre had been correct in its appreciation that Blunt would come under suspicion following Burgess’s defection, Blunt himself had been accurate in his prediction that MI5 would treat him so gently that he would be able to handle the situation. Again, the circumstances in MI5 were such that any fiction writer would reject them as too incredible.
When trying to recruit his friend Goronwy Rees, an academic who served in wartime military intelligence, Burgess had revealed that he was a Soviet agent and intimated that Blunt was another.[36] Rees kept the secret until Burgess’s defection when he asked to be put in touch with MI5. When Blunt heard of this he tried hard to talk Rees out of making any statement but failed. Guy Liddell, then Deputy Director of MI5, invited Rees to lunch to hear his information and who should he bring with him but Blunt! Both Liddell and Blunt attempted to persuade Rees against making any formal statement about Burgess, indicating that it would be unwelcome. Liddell even threatened Rees, pointing out that his failure to report Burgess sooner could make him suspect. Nevertheless, Rees insisted on a formal interview with Liddell and White, then Director of Counter-Espionage, and both were clearly displeased. Writing twenty years later, Rees indicated that he suspected the presence of other Soviet agents inside MI5 who would cover up for anybody, like Burgess and Maclean, who might be unmasked: ‘it seemed highly probable that if Guy [Burgess] and Maclean had been recruited as spies, so had others… but who? I had the uneasy feeling that the likeliest place to look was in the ranks of the security services themselves.’[37]
