The Spy with a Clear Conscience

Recollections of a Soviet agent stir up a political scandal

Watching and listening to the frail old aesthete on television, former Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan told the House of Commons last week, was like hearing "the rustle of dead leaves underfoot. I could hear those accents of someone from the 1930s."

That someone from the '30s was Anthony Blunt, 72, the Queen's former art curator and an unmasked Soviet spy, who had emerged from hiding to tell his side of a story that has blossomed into Britain's most dramatic spy scandal in years. Escorted by his lawyer, Blunt appeared at the offices of the London Times for a press conference with four carefully selected journalists that was filmed in part by the BBC and ITV. Offered a fortifying Scotch and a sumptuous lunch (smoked trout, veal, cheese, fruit salad and wine) by the Times, Blunt candidly admitted that he had been a "talent spotter" for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge University during the 1930s, and that he had provided secret information to Moscow while he worked for M15, the British counterintelligence agency, during World War II. Blunt said that he had been converted to Marxism at Cambridge by his close friend Guy Burgess. "I was persuaded that I could best serve the cause of antifascism by joining him in his work for the Russians." It seemed to him at the time, Blunt explained, that the Communist Party and the Soviet Union "constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism, since the Western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude toward Germany."

Blunt insisted that he had stopped spying for the Soviets in 1945, shortly before he was named surveyor of the King's pictures. Six years later, however, he got in touch with a Soviet contact "on behalf of Burgess, a few days before his friend and Donald Maclean escaped to Moscow, just as British agents were closing in on them. But the man who actually tipped them off, Blunt insisted, was the so-called third man in the spy network, H.A.R. ("Kim") Philby. At week's end, Blunt confirmed that, at a later date, he had also contacted the Soviets on Philby's behalf. The former Sir Anthony (he was stripped two weeks ago of the knighthood awarded him in 1956) suggested that other spies who may have been in his group might still be at large.

Blunt had confessed his role in the spy ring to British counterintelligence agents in 1964; he clearly believed that the immunity from prosecution that he was given at the time in exchange for his further cooperation expiated his guilt. "I feel that I have acted according to my conscience," he said imperturbably. The most he would admit was that "my original action in the 1930s was totally wrong."

Blunt's self-serving recollections raised numerous questions: How was it possible this confessed spy had been allowed to remain as a trusted adviser to the Queen, even though his expertise was in artistic rather than political matters? Did Her Majesty know of his espionage activities and, if not, why not? Sir Alec Douglas-Home, now Lord Home, who had been Tory Prime Minister when Blunt confessed, allowed that he had not been informed or even consulted when the security service decided to grant Blunt immunity from prosecution. His Attorney General had approved the deal and informed the Home Secretary, but the Prime Minister had been bypassed. That admission raised the question of how closely supervised are the intelligence agencies by high-level government ministers. Pointing up the issue of class, Labor M.P.s charged that the soft treatment accorded Blunt was evidence that Britain's "old boy" network was ever ready to protect one of its own from public wrath (see ESSAY). As Scottish M.P. William Hamilton angrily put it, the upper-class establishment had been so determined to protect its members that it had allowed "an ex-public school boy, a homosexual and a traitor for 20 years" to operate within the gates of the palace. "I have never felt so sick, angry and frustrated."

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to answer some of these questions during an extraordinary debate in the House. She said Britain's intelligence chiefs had not wished to tip off Blunt's former employers in Moscow that he had been caught by removing him from his royal curatorship. The security service had told the Queen's private secretary that Blunt was thought to be a Soviet agent; the secretary, however, was also advised that the Queen should not seek to remove him. Beyond that, Thatcher said, "the immunity was offered to Blunt to get information on Soviet penetration Into the public services. Neither at the timee nor since has there been any evidence on which he could be prosecuted. I am advised that a confession obtained as a result of an inducement would not be admissible as evidence in any prosecution." As for the intelligence services, Thatcher said that henceforth the Prime Minister would have to be informed of any decision involving immunity from prosecution in national-security cases.

Thatcher's position was upheld by two of her predecessors as Prime Minister in what Callaghan called "a calm and rational debate." Speaking from the corner Commons seat once occupied by Winston Churchill during the '30s, Edward Heath strongly denied that there had been any "coverup" and insisted that Blunt's disclosures about other Soviet spies had provided "a great deal of valuable information." Callaghan agreed with Heath, but allowed, with hindsight, that "the advice at the time about Blunt being allowed to stay in a palace post was wrong." And Callaghan added the icy comment: "I am bound to say that I think there has been a tendency to treat Mr. Blunt with kid gloves. Would Mr. Blunt have had the same treatment if he had been a humble corporal in the Royal Air Force?"

The feeling was clearly shared by British newspapers excluded from the cozy press conference arranged by the Times for Blunt. Huffed the Daily Express: "Professor Blunt would not have been offered so much as a stale kipper at the Express office, he is such a phony old humbug." Maureen Bingham, who spent 30 months in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act, charged, "It is one law for the rich and one law for the poor."

It will be harder to cover up similar scandals in the future: last week, as a result of the Blunt debate, the House scuttled a proposed Protection of Official Information Act, whose stringent security regulations would have made the expo sure of the art historian as a spy all but impossible.

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