Did Soviet spy Blunt share our secrets with the Nazis?
ANTHONY Blunt may have passed secrets to the Nazis that resulted in the deaths of thousands of allied troops, a book has claimed.
The art historian, who died in 1983, confessed in 1964 to spying for the Soviets and was publicly exposed 15 years later by Margaret Thatcher.
Now a bombshell book – The Traitor of arnhem – says he was probably ‘Josephine’, a spy who told the Germans about Operation Market Garden, a crucial allied offensive in 1944.
The failure of the operation might have been attractive to Joseph Stalin who was desperate for his Soviet forces to seize Berlin and other territory ahead of the anglo-americans.
The book’s author, Robert Verkaik, said that if Blunt did compromise Market Garden it would have ‘contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of allied serviceman and women and countless civilians who perished as a result of a prolonged war’.
Blunt joined the secret service in 1940 and used his role to relay information to the Russians.
Verkaik said he would have been aware of plans under Market Garden to use thousands of paratroopers to seize Rhine bridges and open up northern Germany for invasion.
But the operation encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance and failed – dashing chances of a quick conclusion to the war in Europe. The British, Polish and US forces suffered around 16,000 losses in dead and wounded.
A Dutch double-agent, Christiaan Lindemans, is known to have leaked the operation to the Germans, but Berlin received a second, more concise briefing from a spy with the code name Josephine. Verkaik claims Blunt, who had been given the task of tracking down Josephine in 1943, was in effect investigating himself. ‘Blunt had the means, the motive, and the opportunity,’ he added.
According to Verkaik, one MI5 officer said that Josephine’s reports were ‘the best illicit intelligence derived by the enemy’ he had ever come across.
Verkaik admitted that he could not wholly prove his theory and it was correct ‘more on the balance of probabilities, than beyond all reasonable doubt’. Blunt was the fourth member of the Cambridge Five – a ring of Cambridge Universityeducated spies working for the secret services but who smuggled intelligence to the Russians.
His confession stunned the Royal Family because at the time he held the title of surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
The scandal was hushed up and he was offered immunity from prosecution if he admitted his treachery. The deal cut by the Home Office and MI5 was so secretive that even the prime
‘Stunned the Royal Family’
minister, alec Douglas-Home, was unaware if it.
Documents in the National archives show Douglas-Home found out about Blunt’s betrayal only in November 1979 when Margaret Thatcher outed the spy in the House of Commons.
Blunt, who had been recruited by the Russians in the 1930s, was a professor of art history at the University of London after the war and director of the Courtauld Institute.
He was stripped of his knighthood and lived as a recluse in London until his death from a heart attack aged 75.