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The memoirs of Anthony Blunt, 'Fourth Man' of the Cambridge spy ring and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures
Anthony Blunt
Brilliant gay spy (and traitor) tells (almost) all
The memoirs of Anthony Blunt, the MI5 officer who was in fact a spy for the KGB and the "fourth man" of the infamous Cambridge spy ring which included Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean have finally been released by the British Library. They were donated anonymously in 1984, the year after Blunt's death, on the condition that they would not be released for 25 years.
Guy Burgess (gay), Donald Maclean (bisexual) and Kim Philby (straight) all defected to the Soviet Union when the game was up, but Blunt was granted immunity from prosecution when unmasked by MI5 in 1964, a decision widely assumed to have something to do with his being Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, a position he held from 1945 to 1972 (he joined the KGB in 1935 and MI5 in 1940).
During his interrogations by MI5 from 1964 to 1972, Blunt revealed little of what he did for the USSR, and his 30,000-word memoir adds little, apart from his confession that his decision to spy for them was "the biggest mistake of my life" and that his loyalties remained with his fellow traitors rather than the country he betrayed. He says that it was Burgess who recruited him: "I might have joined the Communist Party, but Guy, who was an extraordinarily persuasive person, convinced me that I could do more good by joining him in his work. What I did not realise at the time is that I was so naive politically that I was not justified in committing myself to any political action of this kind."
Blunt states that after the war he had hoped to leave his past behind, but it wasn't that easy. "I was disillusioned about Marxism as well as about Russia. What I personally hoped to do was to hear no more of my Russian friends, to return to my normal academic life. Of course, it was not as simple as that, because there remained the fact that I knew of the continuing activities of Guy, Donald and Kim."
On being offered the chance to defect in 1951, after Burgess and Maclean fled, Blunt says: "I realised quite clearly that I would take any risk in this country, rather than go to Russia." He was sure that MI5 would never go public about his treachery and went back to his work as an art historian, "not only relieved but confident".
His only period of serious unease seems to have been when Margaret Thatcher exposed him in the House of Commons in 1979, when he "very seriously" considered suicide. "Many people will say that it would have been the 'honourable' way out...I came to the conclusion that it would on the contrary be a cowardly solution."
Blunt's position as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures while still an unmasked KGB spy was the subject of Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, and his An Englishman Abroad concerned Guy Burgess's life in Moscow after his defection.
