In the epilogue to this, his first book, Piers Blofeld explains that due to his surname, he grew up feeling “proprietorial” about James Bond’s arch-nemesis. “I was always faintly rooting for the bad guy,” he writes.
He may have championed a fictional bad guy but he makes clear in his book that his real-life subject, Anthony Blunt – the Soviet agent and “fourth man” in the notorious Cambridge spy ring – is a villain worthy of fascination but on no account admiration. “What Blunt did was monstrous,” he informs us. “Extraordinary but terrible.”
Master of Lies tells the story of a man who was, in Blofeld’s words, “the ultimate establishment figure.” As a world-renowned art historian, surveyor of the King’s and then Queen’s pictures and a knight of the realm, Blunt enjoyed the rarefied company of palace dignitaries, cultural luminaries and powerful and wealthy movers and shakers. But for years, in his other, more shadowy life, Blunt followed his Marxist beliefs and siphoned British state secrets to his Russian handlers.
Much of this treachery is well documented. But instead of merely regurgitating old facts, Blofeld has trawled the archives and delved into new material to produce fresh analysis, greater insight and a more damning portrait of a master of deception.
Born in 1907, Blunt’s early years contained formative episodes. When he was four, his family moved to Paris; as a result, he grew up bilingual. Later, in his last year at Marlborough College, he feuded with, then publicly humiliated, the arts master. “It is a hugely telling moment in Blunt’s life,” Blofeld claims, “combining crucial elements of his adult persona: his love of art, his taste for intellectual dominance and his ruthlessness in pursuit of a vendetta.”
If Blunt was unpopular at school, then at Cambridge he found his tribe and excelled socially and academically. As an undergraduate, he gained entry to the secret society the Apostles; later, after being approached by operatives from Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, he and his friend Guy Burgess joined an even more clandestine organisation. Together with their other comrades-in-arms they insinuated themselves into right wing circles and acted as talent spotters to enlist more students committed to the communist cause.
When war broke out, Blunt was made a captain and sent to France to oversee port security at Dunkirk. It wasn’t long before MI5 decided his talents were better served with them.
Once recruited, Blunt earned a reputation as a safe pair of hands. Unfortunately, those hands were passing on intelligence to Moscow – intelligence that ranged from documents pertaining to an operation Blunt ran called Triplex, involving the highly sensitive surveillance of diplomats, to secret-service dossiers on Russia’s very own agents.
Blunt’s material was so good that some in the NKVD came to suspect he was a triple agent. MI5 also grew suspicious, both before Blunt resigned in 1945 and almost 20 years after.
The net eventually closed in, and in 1964, in return for immunity, Blunt confessed behind closed doors to being a traitor. However, the cover-up didn’t last.
Fifteen years later, Margaret Thatcher denounced him in the Commons and Buckingham Palace stripped him of his knighthood. He died in 1983, disgraced but not punished. As Blofeld puts it, “no one ever did give Blunt the chop to his neck that he probably deserved.”
Master of Lies is no conventional cradle-to-grave biography. It opens in 1951 with Blunt pulling off a neat trick by aiding MI5 while at the same time orchestrating the defection of Burgess and co-conspirator Donald Maclean (he later helped fellow spy Kim Philby in his hour of need). From there, Blofeld flits backwards and forwards. Finally, and somewhat bizarrely, after more than 70 pages, Blunt is born.
This non-linear approach proves disorientating. But once the narrative unfolds chronologically, it builds in momentum and becomes captivating. There are riveting accounts of espionage and thrilling instances of Blunt narrowly avoiding exposure. A lot of Blunt’s secret work remains classified, but Blofeld sifts facts, examines mysteries (including unexplained deaths) and puts forward educated guesses as to his role in certain operations.
In one standout chapter, Blofeld makes a plausible case for Blunt being the traitor, codenamed Josephine, who leaked intelligence to the Germans with the aim of prolonging the war in the west to ensure the Russians reached Berlin first from the east. If this is true, then Blunt, who was in charge of the MI5 inquiry to unmask Josephine, would have been in the remarkable position of leading an investigation into himself.
Blofeld also debunks myths surrounding Blunt. He didn’t just betray his country, he also betrayed his friends. His treachery wasn’t harmless, it resulted in the deaths of thousands and the suffering of millions. And he never completely hung up his cloak and dagger: long after the war, he continued to do intelligence work for both the British and the Russians.
The man who emerges from this compelling study is shrewdly manipulative but also childishly naive. At the end of his life, when asked why he had spied for the Russians, Blunt would reply “Cowboys and Indians”.
It was all a game for him, one in which he made up the rules, played for each side, and came out on top.
Master of Lies by Piers Blofeld is published by Quercus
Malcolm Forbes is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh
