Blunt, Anthony

(1907–1983)

   A Soviet agent who recruited agents for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, Blunt survived exposure for more than a decade and was never prosecuted for his treachery. A brilliant art historian, he had become Queen Elizabeth’s principal advisor on art.

   Arnold Deutsch, a Soviet illegal operating in Western Europe, recruited Blunt in the early 1930s as a talent scout and gave him the code name “Tony.” In the late 1930s, Blunt helped recruit Michael Straight, John Carincross, and Leo Long for Soviet intelligence. During World War II, Blunt worked for the British Security Service (MI5) and provided Moscow with information on British strategic planning and counterintelligence operations. According to the Soviet intelligence service archives, Blunt met weekly with a Soviet case officer during the war and provided 1,771 documents between 1941 and 1945. Especially important to Moscow were reports of German order of battle intelligence based on Ultra intelligence. After the war, Blunt maintained an unofficial relationship with old friends in British intelligence and continued to provide Moscow with reports on developments inside MI5. Perhaps his most important report concerned London’s efforts to use the same tactics to penetrate the new East German service that it had used against the Abwehr.

   Blunt was uncovered when Michael Straight, an American citizen Blunt had recruited, confessed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1964. Blunt quickly made a deal with MI5 to make a full confession and provide an account of his intelligence activities in return for immunity. Blunt’s interviews were miracles of obfuscation; in over hundreds of hours of questioning, he never fully admitted his role as a Soviet agent. Blunt was publicly outed by Anthony Boyle, who named Blunt as the “Fourth Man” (after Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Kim Philby) in The Climate of Treason in 1979. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed the information in Parliament in November 1979, setting off a media firestorm. Blunt was immediately stripped of his knighthood and lived in semidisgrace until his death in 1983.