Tinker, Tailor, Curator, Spy

Knighted art historian is exposed as a Soviet agent

For 15 years he had kept his guilty secret, with the help of successive British governments and possibly even Queen Elizabeth II. But early this month a new book by Journalist Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason, claimed that there had been a "fourth man" in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby spy ring of the 1940s and early 1950s. Boyle, who apparently drew heavily on sources formerly in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, even hinted broadly at his name, prompting questions from Labor members in Parliament. Last week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replied with a written statement that essentially admitted it was all true. There had been a fourth spy, and he had confessed to British intelligence in 1964. He was Sir Anthony Blunt, an art historian who was knighted by the Queen in 1956 and had served as curator and adviser for the royal family's art collection for 33 years until his retirement in 1978.

The story began in the 1930s, when Blunt, now 72, was a Cambridge don. Recruited by Soviet intelligence, he served as a "talent spotter" who recommended Britons for spy work. Among them were Undergraduates Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who later passed secrets to the U.S.S.R. while working in the British embassy in Washington after World War II. Blunt, a Marxist, joined British intelligence in 1940 and, said Thatcher, became an active spy himself. He supplied information to the Soviets until 1945, when he became royal art curator.

Burgess, who dined with British Cabinet ministers, concentrated on political intelligence; Maclean was an expert on the U.S. and British atomic-bomb programs. What secrets Blunt gave to the Soviets is unknown. He had no access to classified information after 1945, but he stayed in touch with Soviet intelligence.

In 1951 Burgess and Maclean, who had been recalled to London, fled to Moscow. Twelve years later, the British government identified H.A.R. ("Kim") Philby, a diplomat-turned-journalist and fellow spy, as the "third man," who had tipped the two that they were about to be caught. Philby had by then followed Burgess and Maclean to Moscow. But Boyle claims that it was Blunt who was the tipster, phoning Burgess on May 25, 1951, a Friday, to warn him that British authorities would begin interrogating Maclean the following Monday.

Why did Blunt confess in 1964? Boyle says he did it voluntarily, out of fear that he would be exposed. Then, says Boyle, the government voluntarily promised him immunity from prosecution--a clear implication that the British Establishment was covering up for one of its own.

Thatcher's version is different. According to her, British intelligence questioned Blunt eleven times between 1951 and 1964. In the initial investigation of Burgess and Maclean, said Thatcher, an unnamed source told the spy catchers that Maclean had said he was a "Comintern agent" as early as 1937 and that Blunt was one of his contacts. But the investigators could find no concrete evidence of treason, and finally decided that only an offer of immunity could induce Blunt to talk. The offer was made, Thatcher said. Blunt confessed and "subsequently provided useful information about Russian intelligence activities." The Queen's private secretary was informed that Blunt had been a Soviet spy, but Blunt was neither exposed nor required to resign as curator. Thatcher's explanation: the position was unpaid, "it carried with it no access to classified information and no risk to security, and the security authorities thought it desirable not to put at risk his cooperation."

But before Thatcher made that public statement, an official of the Cabinet Office discreetly warned Blunt of the impending disclosures and the erstwhile curator immediately vanished from his London flat. "The situation is quite scandalous," declared Labor M.P. James Wellbeloved. The Prime Minister's spokesman replied that the warning was a "common courtesy" and denied that Blunt was a fugitive from justice. Though the Queen stripped him of his knighthood last week, he apparently will incur no other punishment. Reflecting widespread public indignation over the incident, the Guardian charged that the cover-up by successive governments was "a totally abject recital of official self-protection and dishonesty."

The cover-up seems to have gone amazingly far. Lord Home, Tory Prime Minister in 1964, insisted he had never been told about Blunt's confession, prompting some Laborites to ask whether the intelligence services had kept the official government in the dark. If so it presumably was not a problem only for Tories; certainly top security officers in the Labor governments of Harold Wilson knew about Blunt. Another question was whether the Queen herself had ever been informed--and why Buckingham Palace had not been warned much earlier than 1964, since Blunt had been under suspicion as early as 1951, five years before he was knighted.

The final question was voiced by the Daily Express: "How many more spies are there?" Boyle claims there was a "fifth man" and hints that he was Physicist Wilfrid Basil Mann, who was an attache in the British embassy in Washington from 1948 to 1951 and is now a senior physicist at the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Md. Boyle says the fifth man passed atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, but was trapped by then CIA Agent James Jesus Angleton and turned into a double agent. Angleton will not talk, and Mann told the London Daily Telegraph, "The whole thing is completely false."

Boyle told a press conference last week that Burgess and Maclean had as many as 25 accomplices, of whom "half a dozen are walking free. One or two still are in influential positions, but I think they have long ago been neutralized." Laborites are pressing for a full-scale parliamentary debate this week on the Blunt affair and the whole subject of espionage; if it is held, Mrs. Thatcher will have many more questions to answer.

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