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 War.
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 NKVD in the 1930s. They were young, idealistic, horrified by the Great Depression 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 Stalin, 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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