ANTHONY BLUNT HAD no further access to secret documents after he left MI5 in 1945 to become director of the Courtauld Institute and surveyor of the King’s pictures. He did, however, remain in close touch with Guy Liddell, the deputy director of MI5, who, having no knowledge of his treachery, shared interesting MI5 gossip with him.

Blunt assured his interrogators that he had not given the Russians any information that may have come his way. His main controller, ‘Henry’, had left London in 1944 to follow Donald Maclean to Washington so that he could mastermind his espionage effort in the British embassy and in the US Atomic Energy Commission there. Working under the name of Anatoli Gromov and posing as a first secretary in the Soviet embassy in Washington, ‘Henry’ controlled other KGB agents, including Elizabeth Bentley, an American who later defected to the FBI. Blunt insisted that ‘Henry’s’ successor, since identified as a KGB officer called Boris Krotov, left him alone after he departed from MI5.

Krotov, however, continued to run Burgess, with whom Blunt remained on the closest terms, though denying any homosexual relationship with him. So it is virtually certain that Blunt told Burgess anything concerning MI5 that he might have gathered and that it was duly reported to Krotov.

When he was exposed, Blunt denied publicly that he had done any spying after 1945, but much depends on the definition of that activity. Spies cannot function effectively in a foreign land without home-grown assistants to do routine work like finding safe houses, organising dead drops, serving as paymasters and so on. Such assistants are every bit as treacherous as the active spies, and under repeated cross-examination Blunt eventually admitted to MI5 that he had continued to serve in this capacity.

He described, for instance, how he had emptied a dead-letter box under a tree on a common in the East End of London where Burgess had left information and where he found a pile of money left for Burgess by the KGB. He recalled how, when Burgess came back from Washington in 1951, having organised his return to Britain ‘in disgrace’ so that he could convince Maclean that the net around him was almost closed, he met Guy off the Queen Mary at his request. Blunt agreed that Burgess’s decision to travel by sea rather than by air suggested that at that stage there was no sense of urgency and that he and Philby must have known that Maclean was in no danger of immediate detention for interrogation.

Burgess then told him of the purpose of his return. Sitting at his secret service desk in the British embassy in Washington, Philby had been informed by secret telegram that Maclean was, with near certainty, the prime suspect concerning dangerous leakages of secret diplomatic information from that very embassy between 1944 and 1948. By that time, in 1951, Maclean was back in the Foreign Office in London, working as head of the American desk, but Philby had to be told because he was Britain’s chief liaison man with the FBI and the CIA, which had a major interest in the case as the leakages involved messages between Churchill and President Truman.

Though Burgess was personally out of touch with any Soviet controller in London because he had been based in Washington, he knew exactly how to re-establish contact in order to secure final instructions for Maclean’s flight to Russia if, as seemed certain, this became necessary.

The Russian intelligence officer in London who took command of the situation was Yuri Modin, a Soviet embassy official who for a time had controlled the Ring of Five under the codename ‘Peter’. Modin was a highly experienced KGB man whom I have already mentioned as having organised the defection of Philby from Beirut in 1963.

Blunt described how he had remained in close touch with Burgess during the crucial days before the sensational defection and how the surveyor of the King’s pictures and professor of the history of art, as Blunt had become, had been given an arrangement for meeting Modin in case that proved to be necessary for his own safety.

According to Andrew Boyle in his book The Climate of Treason, Blunt played an essential role in the escape of Maclean – and of Burgess who fled with him – by warning them of the precise date on which MI5 planned to interrogate Maclean and break him. Blunt has publicly denied this and, according to my sources, he was then telling the truth. Blunt had no access to such extremely secret information, which would be tightly held, even by the imprudent Guy Liddell.

It is generally believed that the final warning, with the precise date fixed for the interrogation, also came from Philby, who heard of it in Washington and managed to get a message through to Burgess in London by telephone or by coded cable. In Mrs Thatcher’s statement to Parliament about the Blunt affair in 1979, she said, ‘It was Philby who warned Burgess to tell Maclean that he was about to be interrogated. Previously, in My Silent War, Philby had told a story of how he had got a panic message through to Burgess in the form of a letter warning him that, if he ‘did not act at once’, he would have to send the car he had left behind in Washington to the scrap heap. This could well be KGB disinformation inserted into the book to support the fiction that Philby had been the source of the final warning. Clearly, it would have been simpler and more certain for the Soviet officer in London, Modin, who was in close touch with Burgess, to have given him any information originating from Philby in Washington. As will be seen, a letter would have been far too slow and uncertain.

There seems to be no firm evidence in the security services’ records, or anywhere else, that Philby was ever told the precise date set for Maclean’s interrogation. He certainly did not pass it on to the CIA or the FBI, where officers complained of being kept in the dark, and he would have been wise to have done so to appear to be about his proper business. As I have indicated, there was an alternative source nearer at hand – the Soviet penetration agent inside MI5, who could have warned his Soviet controller in London, who, in turn, could have told Burgess through Modin.

This is also the independent view of George Carver, a former senior officer of the CIA, as given to myself and to Dr Christopher Andrew, of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who is conducting research into certain aspects of the British intelligence services. Referring to the events of 25 May 1951, Mr Carver points out that at roughly 10 a.m., British time, possibly a little earlier, there was a meeting at which Herbert Morrison, then Foreign Secretary, signed a paper authorising MI5 to pick up Maclean for interrogation by Arthur Martin, the case officer. The evidence is strong that between 10 and 11 a.m. Burgess received a telephone call or a visit that changed his whole pattern of activity. He had risen in his usually leisurely style, as witnessed by his flat mate Jack Hewitt, and was drinking his tea when Hewitt left for work shortly after 9 a.m. Shortly before 10 a.m., he was making normal social calls connected with a holiday he was hoping to take in Europe with another homosexual friend. It would seem certain that he would have read his morning mail by that time, so the information that alerted him had not come by letter. He started rushing around, securing a large sum in cash, buying a suitcase and clothes, and renting a car. That evening, he and Maclean left for France, hurriedly cancelling engagements that they had clearly expected to keep in the following week. Carver contends that the timing does not allow for a cable about the coming interrogation to have been sent to Philby in Washington from the Foreign Office in London and for Philby to have then telephoned Burgess with the news, especially in view of the five-hour time difference between London and Washington. It would have been 6 a.m. in Washington when Burgess received his warning, and it is extremely unlikely that, if a message had been sent by the Foreign Office to Philby’s office, he could have received it so early.

Carver also believes that it is most unlikely that, if any notification of Maclean’s impending interrogation was to be sent to Philby to pass on to the FBI and the CIA, it would have been dispatched before Morrison signed the necessary paper. Morrison might have decided to delay the issue, for there was an argument between MI5 and the Foreign Office on the timing of the interrogation, and the Americans would then have been misinformed. Carver maintained, ‘There just isn’t time for a cable to go to Washington and action to be taken in the hour that elapsed between Morrison signing his name and Burgess getting the alert.’

It seems to Carver, as it seems to me and to certain MI5 officers, that someone in the small circle in London who knew of the interrogation decision warned Burgess either directly or through the medium of a Soviet intelligence officer.

The MI5 representative at the meeting with Morrison, whoever he was, could have been back at MI5 headquarters with the news within fifteen minutes. The headquarters in Curzon Street was only a few minutes’ walk from Burgess’s flat, where a note could have been delivered or a personal call made, the telephone being an unlikely and unsafe means. Of those in MI5 headquarters who had to be told of the outcome of the meeting, Hollis was certainly one.

A dramatic description, redolent of a spy thriller, of just how Burgess had imparted the final news to Maclean was given to MI5 by Blunt. Burgess was facing dismissal from the Foreign Office for his more than usually outrageous behaviour in Washington, which he had contrived in part to engineer his expulsion to London. Nevertheless, though officially on leave, he reported to the Foreign Office in Whitehall from time to time and breezed into Maclean’s office. Well-versed from experience in the tricks of the counter-intelligence trade, he either guessed that the office had been bugged or had been told so. Without saying a word, he placed a written message in front of Maclean warning him of his peril and giving the time and place of a rendezvous. Maclean read it without even an expletive.

On his way out, Burgess noticed that two men were waiting in the corridor and one of them was foolish enough to attempt to follow him. He realised that the man must be an MI5 watcher, and this was the first observable evidence that Maclean was under close surveillance, information that Burgess then passed on to his Foreign Office friend at the earliest opportunity.

Stories that the MI5 watchers were so inexpert that Maclean spotted them early and that their car even bumped into Maclean’s taxi are untrue. They were manufactured by the KGB to denigrate MI5, being put on record in the book on Guy Burgess that Tom Driberg wrote after visiting the former spy in Moscow with KGB approval. The watchers are usually superbly efficient, as witness the fact that, while the security authorities have often been required to enter accommodation surreptitiously, they have never been caught in the act.

During his interrogation by MI5, Blunt resolved the mystery of why Burgess had defected, too, when it had been intended that only Maclean should go. When Philby learned that MI5 was almost convinced that the spy known in KGB radio traffic as ‘Homer’ was Maclean, he immediately alerted his Soviet controller in Washington, with whom he was in regular contact through meetings or dead drops. The KGB in London was duly warned, but it faced a problem in contacting Maclean. It knew, or could surmise, that Maclean would be under close surveillance with the precise purpose of catching him in contact with a Soviet intelligence officer, for that would be evidence enough to warrant his immediate interrogation. The KGB might have been advised by its MI5 source that Maclean was not under surveillance while at his home in Surrey, but it could never be sure that such a restriction would not be lifted as the case moved toward its climax. Some intermediary with a reasonable excuse for contacting Maclean was therefore necessary, and of those who knew of Maclean’s treachery, Burgess was best fitted because he had access to him in the Foreign Office. The decision that Burgess should be used was not taken by Philby but by the KGB officers concerned, who then told Philby what to do.

There was also an intractable problem for which Burgess’s services were regarded as essential, as eventually they proved to be. Knowing the state of Maclean’s mind after two years of being aware that his cryptonym had been deciphered in the KGB traffic and that his eventual exposure was likely, there was grave doubt concerning his reaction to being ordered to defect. His wife, on whom he felt dependent, was close to confinement. He had never been inside Russia, and the prospect of going there, friendless and unable to speak the language, could hardly be appealing. He also knew what had happened to ‘Otto’, ‘Theo’ and other loyal Soviet spies who had been called to Moscow in a hurry. They had been executed on Stalin’s orders, and in 1951 Stalin was still in control.

The need for someone to explain at length to Maclean the absolute necessity for his defection was essential – in the interests of the Soviet cause as well as in his own. Burgess, the old friend who had recruited him, was the obvious choice. It has been said that Maclean and Burgess were never close friends, and it was true that in the later years they had not seen much of each other because they had been in different countries. But one of Burgess’s former acquaintances, Eric Kessler, testified to MI5 that Burgess once told him, ‘I have such a friend in Donald Maclean that if I were ever in great difficulties, financial, for instance, he would go out of his way, forget his family even, to help me.’

Blunt told MI5 that he believed that rather than defect Maclean could well have decided to be a martyr, bragging about his own exploits to show his contempt for the establishment. While he would probably have tried to protect his friends, Blunt had little doubt that he could easily have been driven to confess all. This, Blunt believed, was also the view of Burgess and of Philby.

It has been suggested that the KGB behaved unprofessionally in sending Burgess to warn Maclean because it effectively ended Philby’s career as a spy. But, in fact, the Soviet fears proved to be amply justified. Maclean was most reluctant to defect when Burgess talked to him. Acting on instructions, Burgess underlined the danger to all that they had striven for if Maclean insisted on remaining to face interrogation. It is thought likely that Burgess was told to hint at the dangers of some violent action by the KGB if Maclean refused to obey orders and risked the destruction of an espionage and subversion apparatus built up over so many years.

Maclean’s reaction was to blame Burgess for his terrible situation. ‘You got me into this mess. Guy, you damn well get me out of it.’ Eventually, he agreed to go to Moscow only if Burgess would accompany him and remain there with him, at least until his wife was able to join him.

This prospect had as much appeal for Burgess as it had for Maclean. Burgess discussed it with Modin, who referred it back to the Centre, where the consequences were all too clear. The defection of Burgess would inevitably focus suspicion on both Philby and Blunt.

Some writers have even suggested that Philby, who was still in place and likely to be of continuing high value to the KGB, was deliberately sacrificed because, for reasons still unknown, it was essential to get Maclean away. It is much more likely that Philby was put at risk only because there was no alternative short of assassinating Maclean. Had Maclean broken under interrogation, he would have blown Philby, the other members of the Ring of Five and possibly the suspected high-level ‘mole’ in MI5, had he known his identity.

When Modin learned the date of the proposed interrogation, the Centre realised that the escape plan had to be put into effect without delay, and to get Maclean away it was prepared to sacrifice both Burgess and Philby. Burgess himself could be spared because he was about to be fired from the Foreign Office and had no hope of reappointment to MI5 after his scandalous behaviour in Washington. Philby was still most valuable and had every prospect of becoming more so, but, as he was considered to be highly professional, there was every chance that he might bluff his way through any inquiry into his involvement in the defections.

Following Burgess’s reports on his meetings with Maclean, the KGB realised that it would have been a mistake for Maclean to have undertaken the defection journey on his own even had he been willing to do so. He would have been far more likely to have been picked up drunk in Paris by the French police than to have ended up safely behind the Iron Curtain. This was therefore an additional reason why Burgess should be ordered by Modin to accompany him. If the two old friends were seen travelling to the continent for the weekend by some mutual acquaintance, it should occasion no suspicion, while it could be dangerous for Maclean alone to be seen in the company of some Russian courier, who might be recognised as such.

It is possible that the KGB fooled Burgess into believing that, as soon as he had seen Maclean safely onto some aeroplane or boat bound for Soviet bloc territory, he could return home. That would account for the details of his departure that strongly suggested that he believed he would be returning within a day or two. In the result, he was required to travel all the way to Moscow and to remain there. The KGB was wise to do this in the view of MI5 officers who studied the many facets of the case. Burgess had not only been drinking to wild excess but had also been taking drugs, and his general behaviour was thought to be symptomatic of such a deterioration that he, too, might easily crack under interrogation.

There can be little doubt that Burgess remained behind the Iron Curtain with extreme reluctance. His loathing of Russia as a place to live and his longing for London may well have accounted for his eventual fallout with Maclean in Moscow, as reported by a friend, the late John Mossman. It was Maclean’s fault that he was there. Had Maclean been man enough to flee on his own, he and Philby might have remained unsuspected for many more years.

Burgess’s yearning for the home country he betrayed so systematically expressed itself pathetically. A former friend, the late Whitney Straight, elder brother of Michael Straight, who looked him up while visiting Moscow, reported, ‘Burgess was wearing his Old Etonian tie and I found him very patriotic. Whatever he has done, I think he has retained his fundamental interest in England and he loves the old country.’

As Blunt recalled when questioned about Burgess, the renegade Old Etonian had led such a lush life that MI5 should have queried the source of his income. For years he had run what amounted to a private dining club at the Dorchester Hotel, with influential politicians, diplomats and businessmen attending and talking freely as they enjoyed the good food and wine for which the Russians paid. Despite Burgess’s scruffiness and reputation for deliberately shocking conduct, there were many distinguished people who could not resist his company, including several who must have known that he was a Russian spy because he had tried to recruit them. When his treachery became apparent by his defection, they still kept his secret until interrogated themselves after the unmasking of Anthony Blunt.

Recourse to old MI5 records during the debriefing of Blunt recalled that suspicion had been slightly aroused when Burgess had arranged a meeting between Lord Inverchapel (formerly Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr) and Anatoli Gorski, the Soviet spymaster who was later found to have controlled Blunt and others under the codename ‘Henry’. Inverchapel, who was then on leave in London, was the British ambassador in Moscow and on such close terms with Stalin that the Russian dictator allowed him to take his Russian valet with him when he left the Soviet Union. The meeting had been arranged by Burgess at the request of another man who turned out to be a KGB agent, an Austrian journalist working under the name Peter Smollett but whose real name was Peter Smolka.

Blunt confirmed, as had long been suspected, that Smollett, who worked in the Russian department of the Ministry of Information during the war, was a professional KGB agent. MI5 had been disinclined to question Inverchapel, who could easily have fabricated an excuse for meeting a Russian ‘diplomat’ in line of duty while on leave. They expected that he would put in a report about the meeting to the Foreign Office, but he never did so. Burgess, when questioned, had shrugged off the conversation as being of no consequence, and MI5 never discovered what had transpired. Many doubts have since been raised about Inverchapel, who had once worked in China, where he had been associated with the KGB recruiter Agnes Smedley.

Mr Gordon W. Creighton, who was first secretary under Inverchapel in Chungking, has told me how Guenther Stein, a member of the Soviet spy ring run by Richard Sorge, had secured British nationality and journalistic cover jobs through Inverchapel’s influence.

Immediately after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, Blunt received an urgent message to meet Modin, which he duly did in London. Modin warned him that, because of his known friendship with Burgess and their professional relationship in MI5, he was bound to come under deep suspicion himself. In the inevitable interrogation, likely to be hostile, it was felt in Moscow that he also might talk too freely and give leads to other British-born agents still active for the Soviets. Modin told him that the KGB Centre had decided that the safest way out of the situation was for Blunt to defect as well. It was a clear order, and Modin stressed that he had the escape arrangements all prepared and that there was little time for argument.

Nevertheless, Blunt insisted that he did need time to think, particularly in view of his royal appointment. Sitting in the comfortable splendour of the beautifully appointed director’s flat in the Courtauld Institute, surrounded by his valuable art collection – including the big Poussin oil painting that he had picked up for £80 in Paris and, currently worth a fortune, was tastefully framed above his mantelpiece – he decided that he could not bear to leave the country he had consistently betrayed for the grimness of a meagre apartment in Moscow.

To Modin’s surprise, Blunt told him that he intended to remain because he was confident that he could handle the situation. He was sure that MI5 had never entertained serious suspicion of him before and therefore could have no hard evidence against him. As for being able to lie his way through any interrogation, however harsh, he reminded Modin that he had applied the KGB advice successfully before – admit nothing, deny everything, but keep on talking to discover how much your interrogators know.

Furthermore, Blunt argued, whatever MI5 might eventually discover, the government would not sanction any prosecution against a personal servant of the monarch. Presumably, when balancing the pros and cons of the defection, the KGB Centre had taken into account the extra damage to Anglo–American relations through the additional publicity that the involvement of a royally appointed knight would occasion. So Modin must have been concerned for his own position following his failure to induce Blunt to obey orders. His success in getting Maclean and Burgess away must have stood him in sufficiently good stead for him to have been given responsibility twelve years later for the Philby defection.

Soon after it was established that Maclean and Burgess had been spirited out by the Russians, the security authorities became confident that they knew the identities of the three KGB spies referred to in the Moscow–London radio traffic as ‘Hicks’, ‘Stanley’ and ‘Johnson’. They knew that Burgess was ‘Hicks’ and felt sure that ‘Stanley’ was Philby. Believing that ‘Johnson’ was Blunt, they subjected him to the interrogation that Modin and the Centre had feared.

When Mrs Thatcher made her statement on Blunt to Parliament in 1979, she said that he had originally been questioned after a witness had belatedly reported that he had heard Burgess remark, back in 1937, that he was a secret Comintern agent. That was true, but the prime reason for Blunt’s quick interrogation after the disappearance of Burgess was their previous association inside MI5.

Much has been made of the fact that Blunt was interrogated eleven times between 1951 and 1964, when he eventually confessed. Those grillings, carried out by Helenus Milmo, the barrister, and Jim Skardon, who had broken Fuchs, were tough, but, as Blunt has confirmed, most of the interrogation sessions were ‘comfortable conversations’ simply because the interrogators had no hard information with which to confront him. They were relying on admissions he might make, and, as Blunt had predicted so confidently to Yuri Modin, he was able to handle the situation by consistent lying.

Most of the sessions were held in the months following the double defection, and just how comfortable they were can be judged from the following extraordinary episode. As one of the first moves in the investigation of Burgess’s disappearance, MI5 needed to search his flat in New Bond Street. Blunt was found to have a set of keys to it, so he opened it up, entered it with a team of MI5 men and offered to help in the search. Though he was under suspicion himself, his help was accepted.

In the untidy three-room flat, there were stacks of letters from friends, some of them homosexuals, who were furious when they were eventually interviewed by the security authorities. Most of the letters were in shoeboxes, which Burgess also used for storing the hundreds of bank notes he received at intervals from his Russian controller.

None of the letters read by the MI5 men over the ensuing days produced any definite lead about the escape, but there had, in fact, been one letter in the flat containing a vital clue to the Ring of Five, and after his confession thirteen years later Blunt revealed with some amusement how he had managed to remove it.

Burgess was a great reader, and the flat was full of books, each of which had to be shaken for possible hidden documents. Only one document was found, and it chanced to be in the section of the shelves being searched by Blunt. It was a letter to Burgess from Philby, and it told him that, if ever he were in desperate straits, there was a certain woman living in London to whom he could go for help, as this woman knew about Philby’s secret life. It was, in fact, Flora Solomon, whose evidence finally enabled the security authorities to induce Philby to admit that he was a spy, in 1963. Had they seen the letter then, in 1951, they would certainly have interviewed Mrs Solomon and she might have given them the evidence they needed. Unfortunately for MI5 but in line with the usual luck of the Ring of Five, Blunt realised the importance of the letter when he glanced at it and put it, unnoticed, in his pocket.

When eventually recounting this story to MI5, Blunt showed no remorse at having enabled Philby to escape. Apart from the fact that in 1951 he was still an ardent communist, prepared to help the KGB, if asked, he feared that the lead in the letter might loop back on himself. Furthermore, he retained great admiration for Philby: ‘Ah, Kim was a real professional. Kim never faltered; never had doubts.’

Blunt also described how he and Philby used to meet frequently after the 1951 crisis, when Philby had been forced to resign from the secret service because of deep suspicion against him in the CIA and in MI5, and how they would discuss their chances of continuing to survive exposure.

He revealed that he had paid a visit to the Middle East in 1961 and had seen Philby in Beirut, meeting him in the British embassy, where he should have been persona non grata. Philby was then working as a journalist for The Observer and The Economist, but, as nobody in the secret service thought he was anything but loyal, he had been taken back on the payroll as an agent-runner. Blunt had gone around to Philby’s flat in Beirut where his host had said, ‘I have been asked by our friends to make contact with you, Anthony, but I told them that you are not in a position to do anything useful.’ Blunt said that he had answered, ‘That is so, Kim.’

This admission is proof enough that, though Blunt claims that he greatly regrets what he did to his country, he had firm evidence that Philby was still an active KGB agent in 1961 and kept quiet about it.

When exposing Blunt in Parliament, Mrs Thatcher revealed that on one occasion between 1951 and 1956 Blunt helped Philby to recontact Russian intelligence. Blunt’s detailed account of this episode is even more like spy fiction, though unquestionably true.

In 1954, Blunt was delivering a public lecture on the history of art and, when it ended, a group of enthusiasts clustered around him to ask questions. Among the upturned faces, he was astonished to see that of his old controller ‘Peter’ – Yuri Modin, the man who organised the defection of Burgess and Maclean and instructed him to go, too. Modin handed him a picture postcard of a painting and asked his opinion. Written in a semicircle, in what Blunt recognised as Guy Burgess’s handwriting, was the message ‘Meet me at 8 o’clock tomorrow night, Angel, Caledonian Road.’

This instruction referred to a standard rendezvous of the past, but when Blunt attended it, there was no Burgess, only Modin, who asked him to set up a clandestine meeting with Philby. Presumably, Modin had induced Burgess to write the message in Moscow in the belief that Blunt would be unable to resist going to meet him, while he might decline a straightforward contact with Russian intelligence.

Blunt accomplished Modin’s modest request by writing to Philby, who was then in England, and he believes that this was the occasion to which Philby referred in his book, My Silent War, in the passage describing how ‘through the most ingenious of routes’ he had received a message from his Soviet friends ‘conjuring him to be of good cheer’.

Blunt may be mistaken and the ‘route’ may have been very different, as I shall describe in a later chapter. Nevertheless, a backtrack of MI5 showed that Modin had returned specially to Britain by surreptitious means because he was not supposed to be in the country for any official purpose.

Recently I have been able to establish why the KGB resumed contact with Philby after severing it in 1951. Peter Smolka, who by that time was running a toy factory in Austria, was an old friend of Philby, having shared a journalistic enterprise with him before the war. The KGB feared that Philby might have been ‘turned’ by British intelligence after his dismissal from the secret service so Smolka, whose loyalty to the Russians was never in doubt, was closely questioned about him for several days. He convinced the KGB that Philby would never work against the Soviet Union. Philby was therefore reactivated for future use.