It began in the heady days of Cambridge in the 1930s when enthusiasm for the Communist cause had an “almost religious quality” and ended with him contemplating suicide in the face of public disgrace.
Anthony Blunt – surveyor of the queen’s pictures and Russian agent – was the so-called “Fourth Man” in the infamous Cambridge spy ring, probably the most effective in the history of modern espionage.
A quarter of a century after his death his own account of his extraordinary life, was finally made public yesterday in a 30,000-word manuscript lodged in the British Library in London.
The document, written after he was publicly exposed in 1979, was given to the library anonymously in 1984 – shortly after Blunt’s death – on condition that it should remain closed for 25 years.
While it stays largely silent about his spying activities it nevertheless offers his own version of how he came to be recruited and eventually unmasked as an agent for the NKVD – forerunner of the KGB.
In it, Blunt describes his decision to spy for Russia, urged on by his friend and fellow agent Guy Burgess, as “the biggest mistake of my life”. Although Blunt, like Burgess, was homosexual, he reiterates in the manuscript his public insistence that there was “nothing sexual” in their relationship.
He was, however, caught up in Burgess’s enthusiasm for left-wing politics which had gained an “almost a religious quality” in the university.
In late 1935 or 1936, Blunt said that his friend made clear he had been recruited by Stalin’s Comintern with orders to “go underground”, giving up his Communist Party membership and taking a job in government service or the BBC. He urged Blunt to follow him.
While the memoir contains a wealth of fascinating detail, it is also devoid of any startling new revelations, not least the details of his own espionage activities, passing secret documents to the Russians while serving as an MI5 officer during the second World War. Above all he is at pains not to incriminate anyone not already implicated in the world of the Cambridge spies – failing to name any of his Russian contacts. – (PA)