"Louis MacNeice, at the time an assistant lecturer in classics. He became a lifelong friend. According to MI5 files, Smith was recruited as a Soviet spy by the art historian Anthony Blunt during a visit to Cambridge in 1938. He commented later, ""I think I presented Anthony Blunt with a conundrum: was I rough trade or was I a gent slumming? I think that it went through his mind that I might make good spy material."" Smith was unusual material for a spy; ebullient and friendly, he made no secret of his communist beliefs, and friends reported him unable to"
"she told Rothschild that she thought that Tomás Harris and Kim Philby were Soviet spies. When Anthony Blunt was unmasked as a member of the Cambridge Spy ring in 1964, Rothschild was questioned by Special Branch (though Blunt was not publicly identified as a Soviet agent until 1979 in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). Rothschild was cleared, and continued working on projects for the British government. Rothschild was head of the Central Policy Review Staff from 1971 to 1974 (known popularly as ""The Think Tank"") a staff which researched policy specifically for the Government until Margaret"
"Blunt, MI5 officer, director of the Courtauld Institute, and art adviser to the Queen as his recruiter and a Soviet spy. Confronted with Straight's confession, Blunt acknowledged his own treason and revealed that he had also drawn into espionage his fellow Apostle Leonard ""Leo"" Long. Straight also told investigators that the Apostle John Peter Astbury had been recruited for Soviet intelligence by either Blunt or Burgess. Leo Long confessed to delivering classified information to the Soviets from 1940 until 1952. Writers have accused several other Apostles of being witting Soviet agents. Roland Perry in his book, ""The Fifth Man"" (London:"
"radical patricians like himself and joined the Communist Party...mostly in sympathy with its Popular Front objectives of supporting democrat governments against the rising tide of Nazism."" He was enlisted into the (now infamous) Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring led by Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, which successfully penetrated Britain's MI-6 on behalf of the Kremlin during the early Cold War. He was recruited by Blunt, who according to ""The Telegraph"", was also briefly his lover. Straight then moved to Washington DC in 1937 where, ""after spurning Blunt's order that he take a job on Wall Street"
"him in the mid-1930s, while both were at Cambridge University. Straight was an American who had been at Cambridge with several of the Cambridge spies. John Cairncross, alleged by many to be ""The Fifth Man"", also admitted to Martin that he was an associate of Blunt and that he had passed papers to the Soviet government. Martin set up a meeting with Blunt on 23 April 1964. At that meeting, Blunt admitted that he had worked for the Soviet government. Blunt was later interrogated by Peter Wright. In 1964, Labour leader Harold Wilson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom."
"his public exposure. In 1948, demobilised army officer Philip Hay attended an interview at Buckingham Palace for the post of private secretary to the Dowager Duchess of Kent. After passing Blunt in a corridor, Sir Alan Lascelles, the King's private secretary, told Hay: ""That's our Russian spy."" According to MI5 papers released in 2002, Moura Budberg, known as the Russian Mata Hari and suspected of being a double agent, reported in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but this was ignored. According to Blunt himself, he never joined because Burgess persuaded him that he would be"
"by the Royal Navy. During that same year he was recruited to MI5, the Security Service. Before the war MI5 employed mostly former Indian policemen, for it was in India that the British Empire faced security threats. MI5 may have known Blunt's views, for an officer later claimed that it had been virtually running the Communist Party of Great Britain and complained about the cost of pension payments to its retired infiltrators. Blunt passed the results of Ultra intelligence from decrypted Enigma intercepts of Wehrmacht radio traffic from the Russian front. He also admitted to passing details of German spy"
"immunity by the Attorney General, in exchange for revealing everything he knew. Peter Wright, one of Blunt's interrogators, describes in his book ""Spycatcher"" how Blunt was evasive and only made admissions grudgingly, when confronted with the undeniable. By 1979, Blunt was publicly accused of being a Soviet agent by investigative journalist Andrew Boyle, in his book ""Climate of Treason"". In November 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher admitted to the House of Commons that Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet spy fifteen years previously. The term ""Five"" began to be used in 1961, when KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn named Maclean"
"Blunt. In the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed Blunt's wartime role, firstly on Thursday 15 November 1979, and in more detail on 21 November. Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's press secretary, suggested, ""I believe she did it because she didn't see why the system should cover things up. This was early in her prime ministership. I think she wanted to tell the civil service that the politicians decide policy, not the system. She wanted them to know who was boss."" In a statement to the newsmedia on 20 November, Blunt claimed the decision to"
"with tax remission) and is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. There are numerous versions of how Blunt was recruited to the NKVD. As a Cambridge don, Blunt visited the Soviet Union in 1933, and was possibly recruited in 1934. In a press conference, Blunt claimed that Guy Burgess recruited him as a spy. Many sources suggest that Blunt remained at Cambridge and served as a talent-spotter. He may have identified Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Michael Straight – all undergraduates at Trinity College (except Maclean at the neighbouring Trinity Hall), a few years younger than he –"
"attached to the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1940, appointed OBE and Officer of the Legion of Merit in 1945. He retired in 1946 with the rank of colonel. Blunt was a leading numismatist. He was director of the British Numismatic Society from 1935 and its president from 1946 and 1950, and the president of the Royal Numismatic Society between 1956 and 1961. He was the general editor of the Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles from 1956 to 1987. He was elected FSA in"
"was informed shortly thereafter. He also gave up John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leonard Henry (Leo) Long as spies. Long had also been a member of the Communist Party and an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. During the war he served in MI14 military intelligence in the War Office, with responsibility for assessing German offensive plans. He passed analyses but not original material relating to the Eastern Front to Blunt. In return for Blunt's full confession, the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret for fifteen years, and granted him full immunity from prosecution."
"as potential spies for the Soviets. Blunt said in his public confession that it was Burgess who converted him to the Soviet cause, after both had left Cambridge. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles, and Burgess could have recruited Blunt or vice versa either at Cambridge University or later when both worked for British intelligence. With the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet forces, Blunt joined the British Army in 1939. During the phoney war he served in France in the intelligence corps. When the Wehrmacht drove British forces back to Dunkirk in May 1940, he was evacuated"
"the United Kingdom. Persons have been removed from the order at the monarch's command. Anthony Blunt, a former surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, was in 1979 stripped of his knighthood after it was revealed that he had been a spy for the USSR. Also, William Pottinger, a senior civil servant, in 1975 lost his membership in both the Order of the Bath and the Royal Victorian Order when he was jailed for corruptly receiving gifts from the architect John Poulson. As the Royal Victorian Order is open to the citizens of sixteen different countries, each with their own system of"
"Anthony Blunt (cryptonyms: Tony, Johnson) and John Cairncross (cryptonym: Liszt) confessed to British intelligence but this remained secret for many years, until 1979 in the case of Blunt. It therefore took several years for the usual modern name to evolve through the Cambridge Four to the Cambridge Five. In the innermost circles of the KGB, they were supposedly known as the Magnificent Five. The term ""Cambridge"" refers to the recruitment of the group during their education at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. Debate surrounds the exact timing of their recruitment by Soviet intelligence; Anthony Blunt claimed that they"
"figure involved in the notorious spy ring of the 1950s was Sir Anthony Blunt. So sure was Sutherland that in the course of his research he approached Blunt for a meeting over a drink at the Travellers Club in London. Blunt's response was to threaten legal action should his name appear anywhere connected with the case. Further pressure was then placed on the authors from the highest level, and Sutherland and Purdy were obliged to suppress their information for reasons of national security. After Blunt's exposure some twenty years later, Sutherland immediately released ""The Fourth Man"", the first full uncensored"
"Anthony Blunt. In return for his cooperation, his own involvement was kept secret and he continued to serve in various capacities for the US Government until he retired. Straight admitted his involvement in his memoirs; however, subsequent documents obtained from the former KGB after the fall of the Soviet Union indicated that he drastically understated the extent of his espionage activities. In 1995, writer Ruth Shalit was fired for repeated incidents of plagiarism and an excess of factual errors in her articles. In 1998, features writer Stephen Glass was revealed in a ""Forbes Digital"" investigation to have fabricated a story"
"among visitors to the Elm Guest House. Other prominent people who allegedly visited the house included the Liberal MP Cyril Smith, the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, a Sinn Féin politician, several Conservative politicians, and a Labour MP. In January 2015, an academic researcher found in The National Archives a reference to a file entitled ""Allegations against former public [missing word] of unnatural sexual proclivities; security aspects 1980 Oct 27 - 1981 Mar 20."" which had gone to the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. The file had been classified, since it contained information from"
"classified information to his Soviet contact, ""Michael Green."" He also claimed to have broken with the Party in 1941. Privately, Straight first confessed in 1963 to family friend and fellow cold war liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was then serving as a special assistant to John F. Kennedy. Having been invited to work in the White House and concerned about undergoing a background check, Straight confided to Schlesinger who sent him to the Department of Justice, which helped trigger an investigation that resulted in Anthony Blunt's exposure. With Straight's previous activities remaining undisclosed, he maintained good standing in Washington, and"
"Andrew Boyle Andrew Philip More Boyle (27 May 1919 – 22 April 1991) was a Scottish journalist and biographer. His biography of Brendan Bracken won the 1974 Whitbread Awards and his book ""The Climate of Treason"" exposed Anthony Blunt as the ""Fourth Man"" in the Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring. He was born in the Scottish city of Dundee and was educated at Blairs in Aberdeen and the University of Paris. During the Second World War he was part of Britain's military intelligence in the Far East. After the war he joined the BBC as a radio scriptwriter and producer."
"been given; on Sirnis, for example, the file that was started on her in 1938 ""was soon closed without any effective consequence."" Tudor-Hart, too, even though clearly (although perhaps peripherally) involved in Glading's cell, faced no effective action from the secret service. MI5's own report into the Glading affair was itself removed, copied and transmitted to Moscow in 1941 by the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. Soviet espionage in Britain remained a priority for the security services into the next decade, and culminating with the revelations of Walter Krivitsky—a defector from Soviet Military Intelligence—in 1940. Overall, the situation has been described"
"Crown Jewels"" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, indicate that it was Burgess who seduced and led Blunt into the Soviet underground. As the Queen's art adviser, Blunt was knighted in 1956, but was stripped of his knighthood in 1979 after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly named him as a spy—his confession having been kept secret before then. Members of the Apostles include (with the year they joined in brackets, where known); Cambridge Apostles The Cambridge Apostles is an intellectual society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge"
"Philby, in 1951 Blunt realised ""quite clearly that I would take any risk in [Britain], rather than go to Russia."" After he was publicly exposed, he claims to have considered suicide but instead turned to ""whisky and concentrated work"". Throughout the time of his activities in espionage, Blunt's public career was as an art historian, a field in which he gained eminence. In 1940, most of his fellowship dissertation was published under the title of ""Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600"", which remains in print. In 1945, he was given the distinguished position of Surveyor of the King's Pictures, and later"
"former Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the NPA, Doug Anthony, who had resigned his seat. Blunt was immediately promoted to the opposition front bench, serving as shadow Minister for Social Services. He was returned to parliament at the 1984 and 1987 general elections. In 1989 he organised a leadership coup against the veteran leader of the NPA, Ian Sinclair. Blunt aimed to modernise the NPA and bring it into closer alignment with the Liberal Party, particularly on issues of economic deregulation. He was also more socially liberal than most NPA members. Unfortunately for Blunt, neither of these things was"
"Band Aid and Live Aid when his reports for BBC TV News helped to raise £70 million in aid. Other major assignments he covered for the BBC and Sky News was the first television interview with Anthony Blunt after the master spy's exposure by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; Spain's re-opening of the border with the Rock of Gibraltar 13 years after it was closed by Franco; the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the attempted coup in Russia against president Mikhail Gorbachev; the release after 27 years in prison and first face-to-face interview with Nelson"
"spy for the Soviet Union. Despite working with Blunt for almost 30 years Zarnecki described him as elusive, and was horrified by the spying revelation. Zarnecki officially retired in 1982, though he still continued to do much scholarly work. In 1984 he was the chairman of the committee that organised the Arts Council's major exhibition on English Romanesque art, held at The Hayward art gallery. This exhibition was the first time the subject matter had received such a wide audience. In 1987, Zarnecki and French scholar Jean Bony conceived the idea of creating a publicly available digital archive of British"
"the Durham Union Society in 1983 and graduated with a 2:1 degree. In 1991, he gained an MBA at the Cranfield School of Management. Blunt was commissioned as an Army Officer into the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary's Own) and served until 1990. During the 1980s, he was stationed in Cyprus, Germany and Britain, serving as a Troop Leader, Regimental Operations Officer and Armoured Reconnaissance Squadron Commander. He resigned his commission as a Captain in 1990, having been awarded the Queen's Medal. Blunt contested his first Parliamentary seat at the 1992 general election, as the Conservative Party candidate in West"
"leaving Christie's he became an art dealer. He completed his National Service as a commissioned officer in the Royal Army Service Corps. He took LSD as a young man, describing it in 2007 as a drug ""for people of my age. It's wonderful. The one thing you could not do, however, was drip it into your eyeballs. It sent you absolutely bonkers."" In 1979, after Blunt's exposure as the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring, gaining much media attention, Sewell assisted in sheltering him in Chiswick. Following the Blunt affair, Sewell was hired as art critic for Tina Brown's"
"career was ended following further investigation into Cairncross by MI5 investigative officer Arthur S. Martin. After Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, Martin reopened the files to hunt for the fourth and fifth men. To Martin's surprise, Cairncross made a full confession. Martin also received a denunciation which led to Blunt's confession. Despite his confession to Martin, Cairncross was never prosecuted for his espionage activities. The confession, conducted in Cleveland, Ohio, was not made within British jurisdiction or under caution and would have been ineligible in court. Cairncross moved to Rome, where he worked for the United Nations Food and"
"Five remained a mystery outside intelligence circles until 1990, when KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed Cairncross publicly. Cairncross actually worked independently of the other four and did not share their upper-middle-class backgrounds or tastes. Although he knew Anthony Blunt at Cambridge and Guy Burgess in the Foreign Office (and had a personal dislike of both of them), he claimed not to have been aware that they or any of the others were also passing secrets to the Russians. At the end of the war Cairncross joined the Treasury – he claimed that he ceased working for the MGB (later to"
"employed as a ""Romeo spy"" with the codename SKOT. He was directed by his Soviet masters to seduce women working in Western embassies with the aim of obtaining secrets. In 1981, he returned to England. Symonds revealed himself as a spy to the police and security services in the 1980s, and appeared on the front page of the ""Daily Express"" (1985) and in the ""News on Sunday"" (1987), but was dismissed as ""a fantasist"". It was only with the defection of Major Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992 and the subsequent publication of the Mitrokhin Archive in 1999, in which Symonds was"
"running a newspaper in the 1970s, he nurtured many notable talents, including Robert Fisk, Peter Hennessy and Paul Vallely. With his independent, earthy and instinctual style, he was't always happy within the confines of the editorial offices. In 1979, he oversaw the joint interviews, in ""The Times"" boardroom, with Sir Anthony Blunt after he was unmasked as the Fifth Man in the Cambridge Soviet spy ring. Heren drew fierce criticism from some newspapers after it became known he had asked for kippers to be brought in from a nearby smokehouse for Blunt's lunch. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the paper, Heren"
"He pointed out that ""Burgess was one of our oldest friends and to denounce him would not be the act of a friend."" Blunt quoted E. M. Forster's belief that country was less important than friendship. He argued that ""Burgess had told me he was a spy in 1936 and I had not told anyone."" Blunt was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1956 by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1963, MI5 learned of Blunt's espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April 1964, and Queen Elizabeth II"