Anthony Blunt
Anthony Frederick Blunt, styled Sir Anthony Blunt from 1956 until November 1979, was a leading British art historian and a Soviet spy.
Blunt was a professor of the history of art at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best account of the subject.
He was the "fourth man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of Cambridge-educated spies who worked for the Soviets between the 1930s and the 1950s. The height of Blunt's espionage activity was during the Second World War, when he passed to the Soviets intelligence about Wehrmacht plans that the British government had decided to withhold. In 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union. His confession was revealed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. His knighthood was cancelled immediately and he died a little over three years later.
Early life
Anthony Blunt was born on 26 September 1907 in Bournemouth, Hampshire. He was the third and youngest son of a Church of England priest, the Revd Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt, and his wife, Hilda Violet, daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service. His siblings included the writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt. A grandfather was Frederick Blunt, bishop of Hull.Blunt's father was assigned to Paris with the British Embassy chapel and moved his family to the French capital for several years during Anthony's childhood. Blunt became fluent in French and experienced the artistic culture available to him in Paris, stimulating an interest which formed the basis for his later career.
Blunt was educated at St Peter's School, Seaford and Marlborough College, a boys' public school in Wiltshire. At Marlborough he joined the college's secret "Society of Amici", in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice, John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He was remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as "an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas". Bowle thought Blunt had "too much ink in his veins and belonged to a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism".
In 1928, Blunt founded a political magazine, Venture, whose contributors were left-wing writers.
University of Cambridge
Blunt won a scholarship in mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge. At that time, scholars at the University of Cambridge were allowed to skip Part I of the Tripos examinations and complete Part II in two years. However, they could not earn a degree in less than three years, hence Blunt spent four years at Trinity and switched to Modern Languages with a concentration in French and Italian. He graduated in 1930 with a First Class Honours degree. Following graduation, Blunt taught French at Cambridge and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1932. His graduate research was in French art history, and he travelled frequently to continental Europe in connection with his studies.Like Guy Burgess, Blunt was homosexual, at a time when homosexual sex was a criminal offence in the United Kingdom. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles, a clandestine Cambridge discussion group of twelve undergraduates, mostly from Trinity and King's Colleges who considered themselves to be the brightest minds; many were also homosexual as well as Marxist sympathisers. Through the Apostles, Blunt met the future poet Julian Bell and took him as a lover. Among other members were Victor Rothschild and the American Michael Whitney Straight, the latter also later suspected of being part of the Cambridge spy ring. Rothschild later worked for MI5 and gave Blunt £100 to purchase the painting Eliezer and Rebecca by Nicolas Poussin. The painting was sold by Blunt's executors in 1985 for £100,000 and is now in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum.
Recruitment to Soviet espionage
There are numerous theories of how Blunt was recruited by the Soviet Union. As a Cambridge don, Blunt visited the Soviet Union in 1933 and was possibly recruited in 1934. At a press conference decades later, Blunt claimed that Burgess recruited him as a spy after both had left Cambridge. The historian Geoff Andrews writes that Blunt was "recruited between 1935 and 1936", while his biographer Miranda Carter says that it was in January 1937 that Burgess introduced Blunt to his Soviet recruiter, Arnold Deutsch. Shortly after meeting Deutsch, writes Carter, Blunt became a Soviet "talent spotter" and was given the NKVD codename "Tony". Blunt may have identified Burgess, Straight, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross – all undergraduates at Trinity College a few years younger than he – as potential spies for the Soviets.Joining MI5
With the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet forces, Blunt joined the British Army in 1939. During the Phoney War he served in France in the Intelligence Corps. When the Wehrmacht drove British forces back to Dunkirk in May 1940, Blunt was part of the Dunkirk evacuation. During that same year he was recruited to MI5, the Security Service. Before the war, MI5 employed mostly former members of the Indian Imperial Police.In MI5, Blunt began passing the results of Ultra intelligence to the Soviets, as well as details of German spy rings operating in the Soviet Union. Ultra was primarily working on the Kriegsmarine naval codes, which helped win the Battle of the Atlantic. As the war progressed, Wehrmacht codes were also broken. Sensitive receivers could pick up transmissions, relating to German war plans, from Berlin. There was a great risk that, if the Germans discovered their codes had been compromised, they would change the settings of the Enigma wheels, blinding the code breakers.
The entirety of Ultra was known by only four people, only one of whom routinely worked at Bletchley Park. Dissemination of Ultra information did not follow the usual intelligence protocol but maintained its own communications channels. Military intelligence officers gave intercepts to Ultra liaisons, who in turn forwarded the intercepts to Bletchley Park. Information from decoded messages was then passed back to military commanders through the same channels. Thus, each link in the communications chain knew only one particular job and not the overall Ultra details. Nobody outside Bletchley Park knew the source.
John Cairncross was posted from MI6 to work at Bletchley Park. Blunt admitted to recruiting Cairncross and may well have been the cut-out between him and Soviet contacts. Although the Soviet Union was now an ally, the Russians were not trusted. Some information concerned German preparations and detailed plans for the Battle of Kursk, the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front. Malcolm Muggeridge, a wartime British agent, recalls meeting Philby and Rothschild in Paris in 1955. He reported that Rothschild argued that much more Ultra material should have been given to Stalin; for once, Philby reportedly dropped his reserve and agreed.
During the war, Blunt attained the rank of major. He was later accused of betraying Operation Market Garden to benefit both the Nazis and the Russians. This defeat was usually attributed to the Dutch traitor Christiaan Lindemans. In The Traitor of Arnhem, premiered by The Times, there is talk of another traitor, a certain "Josephine", who the author believed to be a cover name for Blunt. The aim of the Soviets, and therefore of Blunt, would have been to prevent Allied forces from arriving in Berlin before the Russians. After the war, Blunt's espionage activity diminished, but he retained contact with Soviet agents and continued to pass them gossip from former MI5 colleagues and documents from Burgess. This continued until the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951.
Trips on behalf of the royal family
In April 1945, Blunt, who had worked part-time at the Royal Library, was offered and accepted the job of Surveyor of the King's Pictures. His predecessor, Kenneth Clark, had resigned earlier that year. The Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, who had become friends with Blunt during the two years he worked in the Royal Collection, recommended him for the job. Morshead had been impressed with Blunt's "diligence, his habitual reticence, and his perfect manners". Blunt often visited Morshead's home in Windsor. His student Oliver Millar, who would become his successor as Surveyor, said, "I think Anthony was happier there than many other places." Carter writes: "The royal family liked him: he was polite, effective and, above all, discreet."In August 1945, during the final days of the Second World War, King George VI asked Blunt to accompany Morshead on a trip to Friedrichshof Castle near Frankfurt to retrieve almost 4,000 letters written by Queen Victoria to her daughter, Empress Victoria, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The account of the trip in the Royal Archives states that the letters, as well as other documents, "were exposed to risks owing to unsettled conditions after the war". According to Morshead, Blunt was needed because he knew German, which would make it easier to identify the desired material. There was a signed agreement made at the time, since the royal family did not own the documents. The letters rescued by Morshead and Blunt were deposited in the Royal Archives and were returned in 1951.
Carter mentions that other versions of the story, which claim that the trip was to retrieve letters from the Duke of Windsor to Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, the owner of Friedrichshof Castle, in which the Duke knowingly revealed Allied secrets to Hitler, have some credibility, given the Duke's known Nazi sympathies. Variants of this version have been published by several authors. Carter allows that, while George VI may have also asked Blunt and Morshead to be on the alert for any documents relating to the Duke, "it seems unlikely that they found any". Much later, Queen Victoria's letters were edited and published in five volumes by Roger Fulford, and it was revealed they contained numerous "embarrassing and 'improper' comments about the awfulness of German politics and culture". Hugh Trevor-Roper remembered discussing the trip with Blunt at MI5 in the autumn of 1945, recalling : "Blunt's task had been to secure the Vicky correspondence before the Americans found it and published it."
Blunt made three more trips to other locations over the following eighteen months, mainly "to recover royal treasures to which the Crown did not have an automatic right". On one trip he returned with a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript and the diamond crown of Queen Charlotte. The King had good reason to worry about the safety of the objects he had sent Blunt to retrieve: the senior American officers at Friedrichshof Castle, Kathleen Nash and Jack Durant, were later arrested for looting and put on trial.