5. Anthony Blunt’s role in the Cambridge 5 remains somewhat mysterious
Some claim Anthony Blunt entered the spy ring when Guy Burgess recruited him while both were at Cambridge. Other claim the opposite. The exact time of his recruitment is equally difficult to pin down, but by the late 1930s, Blunt appeared in NKVD records as code name Tony. His initial role was to identify potential agents for NKVD operatives to approach. Blunt served in the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940. He endured the evacuation from Dunkirk, and upon return to Britain joined MI5, British Intelligence’s domestic security branch. His position afforded him access to top-secret Ultra information, itself derived from decoding German Enigma messages. He provided such information to his Soviet contacts, both before and after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
Blunt also recruited John Cairncross, then with MI6 and working at Bletchley Park, into the Cambridge spy ring. He resided for some of the war with Burgess and Maclean in the home of Baron Rothschild, himself another Cambridge graduate. Near the end of the war in Europe, Blunt accepted the position of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, which put him into direct contact with King George VI. By the late 1940s, Soviet handlers suspected Blunt may be a double agent, or even a triple agent, based on the sheer volume of classified information he provided. As with the other members of the Cambridge 5, his social standing and class status placed him above reproach. As the decade of the 1940s drew to a close, suspicions regarding Blunt and his former Cambridge classmates began to gain focus. British intelligence feared a looming major embarrassment.