For decades, Anthony Blunt was dismissed as the least significant of the Cambridge spies – a cultured art historian who happened to pass a few secrets to the Soviets during the war. Piers Blofeld’s new book, Master of Lies, argues that Blunt was not an afterthought but a master of deception whose treachery cost thousands of Allied lives and shaped the Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other..
When Margaret Thatcher stood up in the House of Commons in November 1979 and named Anthony Blunt as a former Soviet spy, the revelation sent shockwaves through Britain. Here was a man who had been Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures – a knight of the realm, a pillar of the establishment – unmasked as a traitor. Yet for most people, Blunt remained a footnote to the more famous story of Kim Philby, the charismatic MI6 officer who had defected to Moscow a decade earlier.
That, Piers Blofeld argues in his new book Master of Lies, is precisely what the British secret services wanted.
Blunt, it turns out, was not a minor player. He was a spy of exceptional skill whose work fundamentally altered the course of the Second World War and the shape of the post‑war world. And for decades, MI5 and MI6 went to extraordinary lengths to hide that fact – protecting Blunt, rewriting history, and directing public attention towards Philby as the villain of the piece.
The Cambridge Ring
The Cambridge Spy Ring – Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt (and arguably a fifth man, John Cairncross) – were recruited by the NKVDNKVD Full Description The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) was the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 1946, responsible for political repression, the administration of the Gulag, and the terror purges of 1936–1938. Under Nikolai Yezhov during the Great Terror, the NKVD executed approximately 750,000 people and arrested over 1.5 million. It also conducted mass deportations of ethnic minorities and operated a network of foreign intelligence and assassination operations. Critical Perspective The NKVD institutionalised the principle that the state’s survival required pre-emptive destruction of potential enemies. Interrogation protocols routinely used torture to extract confessions — not to discover truth but to perform it. The show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, in which loyal communists confessed to absurd crimes, demonstrated that no loyalty to the party could protect an individual once designated an enemy. in the 1930s. They were young, idealistic, horrified by the Great DepressionGreat Depression The global economic collapse that began with the US stock market crash of October 1929 and deepened through bank failures, trade collapse, and mass unemployment to produce the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century. By 1932, a quarter of American workers were unemployed; industrial production had fallen by half. The Great Depression began not with a single event but with a series of interconnected collapses. The October 1929 stock market crash wiped out speculative fortunes but would not, alone, have produced a decade-long depression; the depression was deepened by bank failures that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans, by the Federal Reserve’s contractionary monetary policy that reduced the money supply, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 that triggered retaliatory trade barriers worldwide, and by the gold standard constraints that prevented governments from expanding their monetary supplies in response to the crisis. By 1932–33, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, industrial production had fallen by fifty percent, and the banking system had effectively ceased to function. The international dimension was crucial: Germany’s reparations obligations and war debt structure, financed by American loans, made the German economy uniquely vulnerable to the credit contraction. The Depression contributed directly to Hitler’s electoral rise — the Nazi Party gained over 37% of the vote in July 1932 in conditions of mass unemployment and national humiliation. The policy responses — Roosevelt’s New Deal, Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, the various autarkic nationalisms of the 1930s — produced partial recovery in some countries while deepening the crisis in others. Full recovery required the Second World War’s military spending to restore full employment. The Great Depression was not a natural disaster but a political-economic failure: decisions made by governments, central banks, and financial institutions that could have been made differently. Keynes’s analysis — that the depression reflected a collapse of effective demand that markets could not self-correct without government intervention — was substantially correct, but politically unacceptable to the orthodoxies of the 1930s. The lasting significance of the Depression is not economic but political: it demonstrated that sustained mass unemployment was politically uncontainable, that democracies unable to provide economic security were vulnerable to authoritarian alternatives, and that the international economic system required political management that pure market mechanisms could not supply. The post-war Bretton Woods system — managed exchange rates, capital controls, the IMF and World Bank — was designed precisely to prevent a recurrence by building the international economic management mechanisms that had been absent in the 1930s. and the rise of fascism. Communism seemed to offer an answer.
Blunt was an art historian, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, already making a name for himself as a critic for The Spectator. But beneath the cultured exterior, he was planning something far more sinister. With extraordinary patience and skill, he manoeuvred himself into MI5, the interior security service, during the war. He was vouched for by a network of friends and acquaintances – a Hungarian art historian, an artist’s wife connected to the deputy director of MI5’s spouse, the peer Victor Rothschild, a senior Treasury official who was himself a Soviet agent. The vetting, such as it was, seemed thorough. But Blunt had already been a communist for years.
The Postgraduate Level of Espionage
Blofeld draws a crucial distinction. Most people think of espionage as stealing secrets – blueprints, codes, battle plans. That, he says, is the “undergraduate level”. The postgraduate level is disinformation: misleading your enemy about your intentions, your capabilities, your very reality.
Anthony Blunt was a postgraduate.
During the war, he ran a deception operation that mirrored the famous “Garbo” network – the double agent who convinced the Germans that the Normandy landings were a feint, and that the real invasion would come at Calais. Garbo was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans for his supposed service. But Blunt’s information reached German High Command via Sweden four hours before Garbo’s did – and they exactly mirrored each other. The Germans, receiving two separate sources from opposite ends of Europe, were convinced. D‑Day succeeded in part because of Blunt.
So far, so ambiguous. Blunt was passing information that helped the Allies – and helped the Soviets, who desperately needed the Second Front to draw German resources away from the Eastern Front. But just three months later, Blunt did something far darker.
The Market Garden Massacre
Operation Market Garden – the audacious plan to seize bridges in the Netherlands and punch a route into Germany – was put together in just three weeks. It was a gamble. And Blunt sabotaged it.
He released detailed Allied order of battle to the Germans. The Germans knew exactly what was coming. The result was catastrophic: 16,000 Allied casualties, a failed advance, and a war that dragged on for another eight months. Thirty thousand Dutch civilians died in the famine that followed.
Why would a Soviet agent sabotage an Allied offensive? Because if Market Garden had succeeded – if British tanks had punched into Germany – the German High Command would almost certainly have surrendered. The war in Europe would have ended in late 1944. And StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More, at that moment, was still fighting his way out of Ukraine. He would have arrived in Berlin after the Western Allies, not before. The post‑war partition of Europe, the division of Berlin, the entire architecture of the Cold War – all of it was at stake.
Blunt, acting in Stalin’s interest, ensured that the war continued. The bodies stacked up at Market Garden can, in part, be ascribed to his treachery.
The Cover‑Up
Blunt understood that the net was closing. In 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk defected, and the Venona decryption project began to unravel Soviet networks. Blunt watched as his comrades were exposed. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow in 1951, Blunt was given unrestricted access to Burgess’s flat. He had four days to edit everything that was found there. He helped conduct the first searches. He made sure that the investigation pointed away from himself.
The British secret services knew. By 1956, senior figures in MI5 had worked out the truth. But they made a deal with Blunt: confess privately, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. His confession was carefully framed – he had spied only during the war, while the Soviet Union was an ally. It was “naughty”, perhaps, but not treachery. He helped win the war, after all.
That confession was sat upon for fifteen years. Blunt continued as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. He continued to live a gilded life. The establishment protected one of its own – not because Blunt was particularly posh (he wasn’t, and neither were the other Cambridge spies) but because the truth was too awful to admit.
Why Thatcher Spoke
Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street in 1979 as a believer in open government. She was appalled – in a decent, middle‑English way – that a knight of the realm had been a traitor, and that a network of upper‑class men had protected him. She thought the public should know.
But she was comprehensively misled by her own cabinet secretary and the secret services. They told her a limited, sanitised version of Blunt’s treachery. She repeated it in the House of Commons. And then, almost immediately, she stopped believing in open government. The secrets services had taught her a lesson.
Within months, the narrative shifted. Attention was redirected towards Roger Hollis – a former director‑general of MI5 – as the suspected “fifth man”. The whole spy‑catcher circus of the 1980s kicked off. Its function, Blofeld argues, was to draw attention away from Anthony Blunt.
The Legacy
Today, Russian propaganda websites – “cambridgespies.org” – proudly vaunt their “magnificent five”. They place Kim Philby as the star, the charismatic hero. But the true story of Anthony Blunt – the master of lies, the disinformation artist whose work prolonged the war and shaped the Cold War – remains obscured.
Blofeld’s Master of Lies is an attempt to correct that. It is the untold story of what Anthony Blunt really did – and why the British establishment went to such lengths to keep it hidden.
The dead of Market Garden, the partition of Berlin, the half‑century of Cold War – these are not abstract historical processes. They are, in part, the consequences of one man’s calculated betrayal. Anthony Blunt was not an afterthought. He was the spy who mattered most.
*Piers Blofeld’s *Master of Lies* is available from all good bookshops. Please consider buying from an independent retailer.*
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