intelligence service archives, Blunt met weekly with a Soviet case of-
ficer during the war and provided 1,771 documents between 1941 and- Especially important to Moscow were reports of German order
of battle intelligence based onUltraintelligence. After the war, Blunt
maintained an unofficial relationship with old friends in British intel-
ligence and continued to provide Moscow with reports on develop-
ments inside MI5. Perhaps his most important report concerned Lon-
don’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 confes-
sion 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 Treasonin 1979. British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed the information in Par-
liament in November 1979, setting off a media firestorm. Blunt was
immediately stripped of his knighthood and lived in semidisgrace un-
til his death in 1983.
BOBKOV, FILIP DENISOVICH (1925– ). An experienced intelli-
gence officer whose career in the KGB spanned five decades,
Bobkov directed KGB activities against dissidentsfor more than 15
years. During World War II, he served in Smersh, and he entered
the security service in 1946. In the late 1960s he took a prominent
role in the Fifth Directorate (Counterintelligencewithin the Intelli-
gentsia). Under his direction, the KGB penetrated underground reli-
gious and nationalist organizations. Bobkov oversaw the persecution
and eventual exileof Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He also worked to coordinate active measuresagainst Soviet and
East European dissidents. Bobkov was described by one KGB col-
league as the agency’s main ideological watchdog.
Bobkov, whose career was closely mentored by KGB chief Yuri
Andropov, rose to deputy chair of the service in 1982. During
Mikhail Gorbachev’s period of leadership, Bobkov refocused the34 •BOBKOV, FILIP DENISOVICH (1925– )06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 34