He needed a ‘head-hunter’, and Blunt would do the job. As a teacher, he already had a reputation of bringing bright students over ‘to the left’. As John Hilton had already observed, Anthony had a talent of being ‘the nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons’.
He was not associated too closely with the cause, but was sensitive to the ideas of the left. Burgess also had enough intuition to realise that Blunt would make a very good spy and was well-adapted to the principles of leading a double life, compartmentalising his daily life and being also of a shy disposition. He repressed his feelings and was wary of emotional intimacy. A part of him always needed to keep secrets. Ultimately, Blunt was happy to play this game, which consisted of living several separate lives.
In 1937, Blunt terminated his collaboration with the NKVD, although this break was beyond his control. In Moscow, Stalin, who appeared to be hell bent on a killing spree, continued his purges within the Communist Party, the Red Army and in particular, the secret services. The ‘Little Father’ of the people had no sympathy for cosmopolitan intellectuals who populated the underground networks, especially as many of them were often Jews. Stalin essentially accused them of being international communists, when it was he himself who was in the process of prioritising socialism in one country, in this case, the USSR. Hardcore Bolsheviks were also among the ranks of the Secret Service and Comintern, another reason that the Kremlin leader conducted these unprecedented purges. In so doing, he disrupted the intelligence networks. The NKVD no longer had a contact in London for example, and all those who had been recruited by Deutsch were left to fend for themselves without a leader.
Blunt now devoted himself entirely to his work and his career. He left Cambridge, increased his journalistic activities and became a professor at the Cortauld Institute, where he would later become the deputy Director.
He resumed his relationship with the Soviets in 1939 or 1940. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Moscow once more had a man in London, Anatoly Gorsky. His presence was all the more important as the ‘Cambridge Five' were now providing information for Soviet intelligence. Despite his eccentricities, Burgess had managed to be hired at the Foreign Office and worked in a department that dealt with sabotage and psychological warfare, while Maclean had become a diplomat. Philby also worked for the intelligence services and was particularly involved in counterintelligence at MI6. Finally, Cairncross worked for a minister who presided over a number of secret committees. As for Blunt, he was unexpectedly recruited by MI5, to work in counterintelligence-espionage. He was assigned to Service B, which as well as being top-secret, also held the most crucial information.
How was he recruited? It was his Cambridge friends who nominated him, those close to him who knew of his affinity to communism and who were well aware of his sexual orientation, even though officers at MI5 were reputedly rather homophobic. And why bring an art teacher into the intelligence services? It seems obvious that Blunt did not arrive there by chance and that his recruitment hid some other ulterior motive.
In any case, Moscow and the NKVD welcomed such a windfall. Their Cambridge proteges were now formidably well-positioned and able to provide them with firsthand information. However, those high up in the NKVD were suspicious as a result of the extraordinary harvest collected by the Cambridge spies. The Stalinist paranoia was setting in and they began to wonder if they were being infiltrated by the British intelligence services. Thus for a time, the information provided by the Cambridge moles was not exploited to the extent that it should have been. This was not the first time that the Russians had neglected to take vital information into account. The same had happened when Richard Sorge, an agent stationed in Tokyo, had warned the Kremlin in vain that the Nazis were going to invade the USSR.
Throughout the war Blunt sent vast amounts of information to Moscow. He was certainly in a very strategic position, dealing with the surveillance of foreign diplomatic services, some of which had been infiltrated by the Nazis. It was then his role to take action against them. He also knew about Ultra telegrams, which were German telegrams encoded by the famous Enigma machine. Thanks to Blunt, the Soviets learned that the British had cracked the German code.This information was important as even allies kept secrets from each other.
However, to give Blunt credit, he did believe that he was going completely against his country. He considered that by sharing information with an ally during a war, he was not acting as a traitor. Yet once that war ended, the Cold War would begin and after the Normandy invasion, Blunt told his superior that he no longer wished to work for the Soviets. But how would this happen? When you enter into the intelligence services you cannot simply just leave. Blunt had a radical answer: make sure you no longer had any information to supply!
He gradually withdrew from MI5 and wanted to renew his beloved study of art. While still working part-time for the British services, he returned to the Courtauld Institute. In April 1945 he was appointed curator of the Royal Collection; a position he held until 1972. A few months later, Blunt finally left the British Secret Service. He was no longer of any value to Moscow, as his new position meant that he could not provide any worthwhile information. However, he had not broken free entirely, and on occasion performed small
