60 • BLUNT, ANTHONY
illegalArnold Deutsch. With help from his brother, a territorial of-
ficer, Blunt succeeded in acquiring a commission in theIntelligence
Corpsand was sent to France with a Field Security Section. After
the evacuation from Dunkirk, he was invited to join MI5 byLord
Rothschild, and he made himself indispensable to the director of
counterespionage,Guy Liddell.
During the five years Blunt worked inside the Security Service, he
systematically betrayed every secret that passed over his desk and
looted the famedRegistryfor any information that might be useful
to the Soviets. He compromised MI5’s technical coverage of the
Communist Party of Great Britain headquarters, warned the
NKVD thatTom Dribergwas an MI5 source, and revealed the iden-
tity of aSecret Intelligence Servicespy inside the Kremlin run by
Harold Gibson. In addition, Blunt copied hundreds of classified doc-
uments and obtained a list of MI5 agents in embassies and legations
in London.
During his period in MI5, Blunt went overseas only twice, in 1945.
Once was on a mission to the Duke of Brunswick’s castle to rescue
pictures for Buckingham Palace, the other to Rome to investigate the
leakage of information from the prewar British embassy. After the
war, Blunt returned to the Courtauld Institute as director and was ap-
pointed surveyor of the queen’s pictures. He was knighted in 1953
even though he came under suspicion following thedefectionof his
friends Burgess andDonald Macleanin May 1951. Blunt was finally
confronted in April 1964 and, in exchange for a formal immunity
from prosecution, confirmed the unsubstantiated allegation made by
his former loverMichael Straightthat he had been a Sovietmole.In
his confession, Blunt also implicated a former military intelligence
officer,Leo Long, and an Admiralty scientist, Dr.Alister Watson.
News of Blunt’s treachery was revealed in November 1979 by Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, outraged at his immunity, stripped
him of his knighthood. Blunt’s principal interrogator,Peter Wright,
always believed that Blunt had remained loyal to the Soviets and as-
serted in his autobiography,SpyCatcher, that Blunt had not jeopard-
ized anyone who had not already fallen under suspicion. Blunt died
in March 1983, having made a very few public statements about his
covert career.