Spycatcher (37 page)

"The Queen," he said, "has been fully informed about Sir Anthony, and is quite content for him to be dealt with in any way which gets at the truth."

There was only one caveat.

"From time to time," said Adeane, "you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace -a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security."

Adeane carefully ushered me to the door. I could not help reflecting on the difference between his delicate touch and the hysterical way MI5 had handled Blunt, terrified that he might defect, or that somehow the scandal might leak. Although I spent hundreds of hours with Blunt, I never did learn the secret of his mission to Germany. But then, the Palace had had several centuries to learn the difficult art of scandal burying. MI5 have only been in the business since 1909!

When I took over Blunt I stopped all meetings with him while I considered a new policy. Confrontation was clearly never going to work, firstly because Hollis was vehemently opposed to anything which might provoke a defection, or a public statement from Blunt, and secondly because Blunt himself knew that our hand was essentially a weak one, that we were still groping in the dark and interrogating him from a position of ignorance rather than strength. I decided that we had to adopt a subtle approach, in an attempt to play on his character. I could tell that Blunt wanted to be thought helpful, even where it was clear that he was not. Moreover, he disliked intensely being caught in a lie. We had to extract the intelligence from him by a slow process of cumulative pressure, advancing on small fronts, rather than on any large one. To do that we needed a far more profound knowledge of the 1930s than MI5 at the time possessed.

I decided, too, that we had to move the interviews onto his patch. He always came to Maurice Oldfield's flat in a confrontational mood, defensive, on edge, sharpened up, and aware that he was being recorded. I felt moving to his place would lessen the tension, and enable us to develop something of a relationship.

Every month or so for the next six years Blunt and I met in his study at the Courtauld Institute. Blunt's study was a large room decorated in magnificent baroque style, with gold-leaf cornicework painted by his students at the Courtauld. On every wall hung exquisite paintings, including a Poussin above the fireplace, bought in Paris in the 1930s with 80 pounds lent to him by Victor Rothschild. (He was supposed to have left this painting to Victor's oldest daughter, Emma, but he failed to do this. The picture was valued at 500,000 pounds for his estate and went to the nation.) It was the perfect setting to discuss treachery. For every meeting we sat in the same place: around the fireplace, underneath the Poussin. Sometimes we took tea, with finely cut sandwiches; more often we drank, he gin and I Scotch; always we talked, about the 1930s, about the KGB, about espionage and friendship, love and betrayal. They remain for me among the most vivid encounters of my life.

Blunt was one of the most elegant, charming, and cultivated men I have met. He could speak five languages, and the range and depth of his knowledge was profoundly impressive. It was not limited solely to the arts; in fact, as he was proud of telling me, his first degree at Cambridge was in mathematics, and he retained a lifelong fascination with the philosophy of science.

The most striking thing about Blunt was the contradiction between his evident strength of character and his curious vulnerability. It was this contradiction which caused people of both sexes to fall in love with him. He was obviously homosexual, but in fact, as I learned from him, he had had at least two love affairs with women, who remained close to him throughout his life. Blunt was capable of slipping from art historian and scholar one minute, to intelligence bureaucrat the next, to spy, to waspish homosexual, to languid establishmentarian. But the roles took their toll on him as a man. I realized soon after we began meeting that Blunt, far from being liberated by the immunity offer, continued to carry a heavy burden. It was not a burden of guilt, for he felt none. He felt pain for deceiving Tess Rothschild, and other close friends like Dick White and Guy Liddell (he was in tears at Guy's funeral), but it was the pain of what had to be done, rather than the pain of what might have been avoided. His burden was the weight of obligation placed on him by those friends, accomplices, and lovers whose secrets he knew, and which he felt himself bound to keep.

As soon as we began our meetings at the Courtauld I could see Blunt relax. He remained canny, however, and since he knew all about SF, I soon noticed that the telephone was placed discreetly at the far end of the hall. On the first afternoon we met there I noticed it as he went out to fetch some tea.

"Bring the tea cozy to put on the telephone," I shouted. He laughed.

"Oh no, Peter, you'll never be able to hear us down there with that thing."

At first I took notes in a small notebook, but it became difficult to take everything down, so I had to plan a way of obtaining clandestine coverage of the meetings. Eventually the premises next to the Courtauld were modernized, and I arranged for a probe microphone to be inserted through the wall into Blunt's study. It was a ticklish job. The measurements needed to be perfect to ensure that the probe emerged at the right spot on Blunt's side of the fireplace close to where we sat. A2 arranged for an artist friend of Blunt's to telephone him at a prearranged time when I was visiting him. and while he was out in the hall talking, I produced my tape measure and made all the necessary measurements for the microphone, which was successfully installed and working beautifully until the end. For all I know, it is probably still there now.

For our first sessions I relaxed things. I tried not to press him too hard, content simply to run through the old memories. He talked of how he had joined the Soviet cause, recruited by the then youthful, brilliant Guy Burgess. Guy was still a painful subject for Blunt; he had just died in Moscow, alone, his once virile body broken by years of abuse.

"You probably find this impossible to believe," he told me as he poured the tea, "but anyone who knew Guy well, really well, will tell you that he was a great patriot."

"Oh, I can believe that," I said. "He only wanted Britain to be Communist! Did you hear from him, before he died?"

Blunt sipped his tea nervously, the cup and saucer shaking slightly in his hand. Then he went to his desk and fetched me a letter.

"This was the last one," he said. "You didn't miss it; it was hand delivered..." He left the room.

It was a pathetic letter, rambling and full of flaccid sentimental observations. Burgess talked of Moscow life, and tried to make it sound

as if it was still as good as ever. Now and again he referred to the old days, and the Reform Club, and people they both knew. At the end he talked of his feelings for Blunt, and the love they shared thirty years before. He knew he was dying, but was whistling to the end. Blunt came back into the room after I finished reading the letter. He was upset, more I suspect because he knew I could see that Burgess still meant something to him. I had won a crucial first victory. He had lifted the veil for the first time, and allowed me a glimpse into the secret world which bound the Ring of Five together.

Blunt joined the Russian Intelligence Service in the heyday of the period now known in Western counterintelligence circles as "the time of the great illegals." After the ARCOS raid in London in 1928, where MI5 smashed a large part of the Russian espionage apparatus in a police raid, the Russians concluded that their legal residences, the embassies, consulates, and the like, were unsafe as centers for agent running. From then onward their agents were controlled by the "great illegals," men like Theodore Maly, Deutsch, "Otto," Richard Sorge, Alexander Rado, "Sonia," Leopold Trepper, the Kecks, the Poretskys, and Krivitsky. They were often not Russians at all, although they held Russian citizenship. They were Trotskyist Communists who believed in international Communism and the Comintern, They worked undercover, often at great personal risk, and traveled throughout the world in search of potential recruits. They were the best recruiters and controllers the Russian Intelligence Service ever had. They all knew each other, and between them they recruited and built high-grade spy rings like the "Ring of Five" in Britain, Sorge's rings in China and Japan, the Rote Drei in Switzerland, and the Rote Kapelle in German-occupied Europe - the finest espionage rings history has ever known, and which contributed enormously to Russian survival and success in World War II.

Unlike Philby and Burgess, Blunt never met "Theo," their first controller, a former Hungarian priest named Theodore Maly. Maly understood the idealism of people like Philby and Burgess, and their desire for political action. He became a captivating tutor in international politics, and his students worshipped him. In 1936-37 Maly was replaced by "Otto," and it was he who orchestrated Blunt's recruitment by Burgess. Like Theo, ''Otto" was a middle-class East European, probably Czech, who was able to make the Soviet cause appealing not simply for political reasons but because he shared with his young recruits the same cultured European background. Blunt admitted to me on many occasions that he doubted he would ever have joined had the approach come from a Russian.

For some reason, we were never able to identify "Otto." Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross all claimed they never knew his real name, although Philby in his confession told Nicholas Elliott that while in Washington he recognized "Otto" from a photograph in the FBI files as a Comintern agent named Arnold Deutsch. But when we checked we found that no picture of Deutsch existed in FBI files during Philby's time in Washington. Moreover, Deutsch had fair curly hair. I used to bring Blunt volume after volume of the MI5 Russian intelligence officer files in the hope that he might recognize him. Blunt treated the books as if they were catalogues from the National Gallery. He would study them carefully through his half-moon spectacles, pausing to admire a particularly striking face, or an elegantly captured figure on a street corner. But we never identified "Otto" or discovered the reason why the Ring were so desperate to conceal his identity so many years later. In 1938 Stalin purged all his great illegals. They were Trotskyists and non-Russians and he was convinced they were plotting against him, along with elements in the Red Army. One by one they were recalled to Moscow and murdered. Most went willingly, fully aware of the fate that awaited them, perhaps hoping that they could persuade the demented tyrant of the great services they had rendered him in the West.

Some, like Krivitsky, decided to defect, although even he was almost certainly eventually murdered by a Russian assassin in Washington in 1941.

For over a year after "Otto's" departure, the Ring remained in limbo, out of touch and apparently abandoned. Then Guy Burgess and Kim Philby reestablished contact with the Russians through Philby's first wife, Litzi Friedman, a longtime European Comintern agent. According to Blunt, the Ring was run through a complex chain of couriers: from Litzi Friedman messages passed to her close friend and fellow Comintern agent, Edith Tudor Hart, and thence to Bob Stewart, the CPGB official responsible for liaison with the Russian Embassy, and thence on to Moscow. Until Blunt confessed we were entirely unaware of this chain, and it had enormous implications. Each member of the chain almost certainly knew the identities of the Ring, claimed Blunt, and it had always puzzled him that the Ring was not detected at this point by MI5. We had always assumed the Ring had been kept entirely separate from the CPGB apparatus, which was thoroughly penetrated in the 1930s by agents run by Maxwell Knight. But now it appeared that we had missed the greatest CPGB secret of all. In 1938 MI5 were basking in the success of the Woolwich Arsenal case, where evidence from Maxwell Knight's best agent, Joan Gray (Miss X), secured the conviction of senior CPGB officials for espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal Munitions Factory. Had we run the case on longer, we might well have captured the most damaging spies in British history before they began.

At the end of 1940, the Russians finally reestablished contact with the Ring, and from this period onward they were directed into the intelligence world. Their controller during this period was "Henry," a Russian intelligence officer named Anatoli Gromov, or Gorski, who was working under diplomatic cover. Gromov ran all the spies in the Ring, almost certainly the eight whose cryptonyms appear in the VENONA traffic, until he left for Washington in 1944 to run Donald Maclean, who was posted to the British Embassy. Those who were left in London were taken over by Boris Krotov, the KGB officer whose VENONA messages revealed the existence of the eight spies. Blunt said he had a great respect for the professionalism of his KGB controllers, but they never really stimulated him in the way that "Otto" had. Gromov and Krotov were technocrats of the modern Russian intelligence machine, whereas to Blunt, the talented European controllers of the 1930s were artists.

"Was that why you left MI5?" I asked.

"Oh, that partly," he said. "I was tempted to stay. But they didn't need me. Kim would serve them well. He was rising to the top, I knew that. And I needed my art. After all, if they had wanted me, they could so easily have blackmailed me to stay."

The onset of the Cold War and the spread of McCarthyism reinforced Blunt's conviction that he had made the right choice in the 1930s, and he continued to be totally loyal to those who remained in the game. In 1951 he opted to stay and brazen it out, rather than defect with Burgess and Maclean. He was pressured to defect at this time by Modin ("Peter"). He told me a life of exile in Moscow would have been intolerable for him. He had visited Russia in the 1930s. It was a fine and admirable tragic country, but the place which appealed to him most was the Hermitage, Leningrad's magnificent gallery.

After 1951 Blunt was left alone with Philby. He was much less close to him than to Burgess. Philby was a strong, dominant personality, yet he needed Blunt desperately. Blunt still had the ear of his former friends in MI5, and was able to glean scraps for Philby of how the case against him was developing. They used to meet to discuss their chances of survival. Philby seemed bereft without his career in MI6, and had little understanding of the importance of art and scholarship to Blunt, even while the net closed on them both.