Summary: Anthony Blunt - His Lives
Comment: In 1979, aged 72, eminent British art historian, Anthony Blunt, was exposed as a former spy for Russia. Many books recount Blunt's espionage, but British journalist Miranda Carter has written a complete biography. Fans of Bloomsbury will find new insights, and the author devotes half the book to Blunt's art career. Her exhaustive research into WWII espionage has produced a definitive and often amusing story.
Immediately after being unmasked, Blunt became a social outcast. Tabloids described him as "the spy with no shame." Besides passing secrets, he was accused of being a sexual pervert, a plagiarizer, a dishonest appraiser, and someone who bought valuable paintings on the cheap from unsuspecting friends. Consulted about a libel suit, his lawyer explained that Blunt's spying had defamed his name so badly that no further defamation was possible.
As an undergraduate in Cambridge, he was a member in good standing of the fashionable Bloomsbury Group, still going strong in the 1920s. Recognition for his art criticism came early. No one looked on him as a political activist. Bloomsbury faded with the depression and rise of fascism; many members turned to communism, but Blunt wasn't among them. He must have been attracted, however, because his art criticism took on a distinctly Marxist tone for a few years. His attraction must have been more intense because of what followed. Joining the Intelligence Service after the outbreak of war, he passed thousands of documents to the Russians. Flooded with material by enthusiastic English spies, Russian officials were deeply skeptical. In any case, there was far too much, so many documents were filed and ignored. The paranoid Stalin was avid to learn of British plots against Russia. That none turned up merely increased his suspicion, but eventually the Soviets realized their good fortune. Spying seemed a sideline for Blunt. Art was his true love, and he wrote several important books during the war. After leaving the government, Blunt's spying stopped, and he became a renown art historian. However, many in British counterintelligence had their suspicions. When Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951, suspicions grew stronger, but no one in high places had a taste for another embarassing spy scandal, so it was decided to let matters lie.
A man of modest historical importance, Blunt lived a complex life in fascinating times, and this book does him justice.
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Summary: Credibility
Comment: Wright and Blunt and bits of gossip. Carter read it as "Clarissa Churchill, the daughter of Winston Churchill". Wright wrote it as "His funniest story concerned Guy Burgess and Churchill's niece Clarissa". So how reliable is the rest of it? Will her next work delve into just what all those others were up to? How about Eddie Playfair? Dull? He was joking of course! But Miranda interviewed these guys - has she yet told all she found out?
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Summary: The Most Famous Quintet
Comment: The individuals who comprised The Cambridge Five have been extensively documented as individuals as well as a group. Miranda Carter's book is worthwhile for it not only brings truly new information to this man's duplicity; she also spends a great deal of time on the man himself. This is a thorough autobiography and not just a spy novel barely elevated to the non-fiction category. Some readers may find the book too long on the man and too brief on his activities as a spy. Anthony Blunt was a traitor, but to limit his long life to that one word is to greatly minimize who this man was. The wide-ranging life he lead together with the positions of influence he held outside of intelligence agencies, makes him an even more fascinating character. None of his actions diminish or justify his perfidious conduct; they do make him much more than a one-dimensional traitor to his country.
Most of the spies that are exposed today have often become extremely wealthy for betraying their country. When Blunt was first recruited it was during a time when the Oxford Union Society within the college carried the debate with the motion, "that this house declines to fight for King or Country". In October of 1933 the Labor Party on, "no issue but the pacifist one", according to Stanley Baldwin replaced the Conservatives. And Europe in general was not interested much less enthusiastic about a second world war less than a generation after the first finally ended. Persons notable not only for their fame but also for their gullibility marketed Communism with success including their tours and subsequent spreading of nonsense regarding Potemkin Villages. These folks were believers; they were not making a living. They were supporting something they actually believed in at one time as opposed to those who are on the hunt for their various pieces of silver.
What Miranda Carter meticulously documents is Blunt's life as a nearly unbroken series of either unconventional or anti-establishment choices. There is also a great deal of evidence that as competent an art historian as he may have been, it also appears participating in art fraud was yet another of this man's defects. I found her documentation of his almost ascetic living conditions interesting as well.
There may be something that I am missing but I was amazed with the leniency England treated men like Blunt. In 1964 he admitted to his activities for which he was granted complete immunity. It was not until Margaret Thatcher revealed this deal in 1979 out of either personal anger or thought for political gain was he finally exposed. As the defections of his more notorious comrades had already taken place and England had been greatly embarrassed, it seems odd that fear of further embarrassment would cause them to make a deal with this criminal long after he was a meaningful asset to the Former USSR. Miranda Carter also documents the periods when none of the Cambridge Recruits were believed to be genuine by Moscow, and how vast amounts of information they delivered was never even read.
I have read a number of books on this topic and would recommend this book for anyone who is interested. I expect there will be more books if and when additional documents are found/released, but until then this is the best work I have read on Blunt.
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Summary: A Human Enigma
Comment: From the first time (probably thousands of years ago) a monarch or military leader identified an "information gap" concerning an enemy, there has been a need for what is generally referred to now as "intelligence." I have just read Steven Fink's new book, Sticky Fingers, in which he suggests how to respond to the global risk of economic espionage. Much of his book focuses on what is now known as the "Avery Dennison/Four Pillars Spy Case." In recent years, we have learned about spies and counterspies such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Philip Hanssen. Many of us remain interested in others such as those known as "the Cambridge Spies" of whom Anthony Blunt was one. (The others were Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald MacLean, and Kim Philby.) Even today, it is impossible to determine the nature and extent of all the damage they did to the British and American intelligence communities during and then following World War II . This is both a biography of Blunt (1907-1983) and an analysis of the society in which he was raised, educated, and then employed. He eventually became a highly regarded art historian while continuing his activities as a double agent. Blunt began to provide highly classified documents to the Russians in 1941; was discovered and then granted immunity (in 1964) in exchange for what was believed to be full disclosure of his activities and associates; and then was publicly denounced by Prime Minister Thatcher in 1979.
Given the information available to her at the time she wrote this book, Miranda Carter has provided about as comprehensive an examination of Blunt's several "lives" as can possibly be reconstructed. I must assume that her two greatest obstacles were, first, the necessarily secretive, indeed defensive nature of the global intelligence community (even after the demise of the U.S.S.R.) and second, the extraordinarily detached personality of Blunt himself. With consummate skill, he devised and sustained so many different "lives" which resemble, for me, a series of "bulkheads." Gaining entry to any one of them (much less to all of them) would have required exceptional patience as well as persistence. It is to Carter's great credit that she was able to gather, evaluate, and correlate so much information and then present it eloquently in a narrative worthy of Dickens. Those who enjoyed reading this book as much as I did may wish to check out Christopher Andrew's For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, Christopher Felix' A Short Course in the Secret War, and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's The CIA and American Democracy.
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Summary: Not a man to know . . .
Comment: The book is well-written, but Blunt and his circle are very
"precious" in their interests and relationships. It is rather like reading about a curious creature than about someone you would have enjoyed knowing. He was a warped man, not a sympathetic character at all. This book would be "way down" on the list of interesting biographies to read.