Blunt, protected by his judicial immunity, would spend the rest of his life in the greatest secrecy and in quiet dignity. Prime Minister Thatcher protected the Queen by saying that if Blunt had continued to perform his duties for Elizabeth II, it was so that the Soviets would not find out that one of their spies had been unmasked.
Often the truth is more complicated. Looking through the Soviet archives that had been briefly opened under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, we discover that Arnold Deutsch recruited at least seventeen agents at Cambridge and elsewhere, but many are missing. Everything therefore seems to say that many of these spies have not yet been identified. This can lead to the hypothesis that by revealing the spectacular treachery of the ‘Cambridge Five', does this not raise a smokescreen in order to protect these traitors? Hence the role of the Blunt case. There was enough here to write a real soap-opera - a big boon for the tabloid newspapers. All the ingredients were there: the social class of the main character, who represented the typical class snob with his intellectualism and his proximity to the royal family, not to mention his homosexuality. In the meantime, looking for the other moles was dispensed with - another reason to assume that a higher authority was acting on their behalf and was thus manipulating public opinion and intelligence services.
George Steiner
8
A quick review of the narrative is sufficient to show that it is full of gaps, unanswered questions and improbabilities, to the point of being virtually useless. Suppose that there was some form of disorder in recruitment in 1940. Nevertheless, how is it possible that at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, MI5 neglected all that Blunt had exposed about his feelings in the columns of the ‘Spectator’ and in his 1937 trial? Who buried the dossier handed to MI5 in 1939 by Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet general on the run, in which Blunt was not identified? This inevitably infers that some form of protection was being given in very high places.That’s a double life placed under a magic spell from the start. How was it possible to allow Blunt, who had shared an apartment with Burgess, to slip between the cracks during the fracas of l95l?The confession of 1964 and the promise of immunity is just not plausible.
[Later, Steiner concludes]
Once again it leads one to think that there was a guardian or guardian angel hovering over him in high places. An Oxford philosopher, a man of experience and flawless insight, a member of that blessed circle that is the beautiful world of the British bureaucrat, told me quite frankly that the Blunt story, as it has been told to the public, is in many ways an invention. It was designed and disclosed precisely to lay a smokescreen behind which other prominent characters in the drama could scatter and reach safety.
Chapter 2
Alger Hiss: Nixon’s bete noire
This was the American version of the ‘Dreyfuss Affair'. So much so that even today, people in the USA are torn between those who support Hiss and those against him.
Alger Hiss, a WASP,9 was a brilliant American government official and the perfect representative of the patrician society of America's East Coast. In 1948 he was accused of being a Soviet spy, an accusation that initially seemed not only unlikely, but quite frankly ridiculous. But this was the Cold War and a period in which anti-communist feelings ran very high, aided of course by McCarthyism. What is more, the man who would lead the charge against Hiss was a newly elected young senator, with long teeth. The senator knew that the case presented the chance of a lifetime and offered an unexpected opportunity to be at the forefront of politics. The senator's name was Richard Nixon, and we all know what he would later go on to become.
Nixon later acknowledged that he had no doubt that the Alger Hiss case would help to shape his destiny. In his memoires he wrote that:
The Hiss case proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the existence of communist subversion directed by the Soviets, at the highest echelons of the US government. Yet many of those who defended Hiss simply refused to believe the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Some turned their anger and spite against me, as if I was somehow responsible for what Hiss had done. My role in the matter certainly started me on the path to the vice-presidency, but it also transformed from a young, relatively popular government official, who enjoyed a limited but good press, into a one of the most controversial figures in Washington, who was bitterly opposed by liberal journalists as well as the most respected and influential thinkers of the time.
Despite this challenge, the young Senator Nixon became Eisenhower’s vice-president only four years after the start of the Hiss case. He undoubtedly benefited from this episode of the Cold War, which was acted out in America like a serial thriller. Still, even sixty years later, Alger Hiss’ guilt still remains uncertain.
In order to properly understand the subject, it needs to be placed in historical context. In a famous speech made in 1946, Winston Churchill spoke for the first time about the ‘iron curtain' that Stalin had built in Europe and that the gap between the former allies was continuing to widen. The so-called ‘witch hunts' began in the USA, the significance and severity of which must not be exaggerated. There was no excuse for this form of stalking and McCarthyism, but these were troubled times. In eastern Europe, Stalin was leading a far more terrifying witch hunt, where people were either deported or even executed. However, many people at the time just closed their eyes and pretended not to see. The American's witch hunt
