Anthony Blunt - Joining MI5

Joining MI5

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 by the Royal Navy. During 1940, he was recruited to MI5, the Security Service. Before the war MI5 mostly employed former Indian policemen, for it was in India that the British Empire faced security threats. But now much new brainpower arrived. 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 rings, operating in the Soviet Union. Ultra was primarily working on the Kriegsmarine naval codes, which eventually helped win the battle of the Atlantic, but as the war progressed Wehrmacht army codes were also broken. Sensitive receivers could pick up transmissions from Berlin, relating to German war plans. There was great risk that if the Germans found out that their codes had been compromised, they would change the settings of the Enigma wheels, blinding the codebreakers.

Full details of the entire Operation Ultra were fully known by only four people, only one of whom routinely worked at Bletchley Park. Dissemination of Ultra information did not follow usual intelligence protocol, but maintained its own communications channels. Military intelligence officers gave intercepts to Ultra liaisons, who in turn forwarded the intercepts to Bletchley Park. Information from decoded messages was then passed back to military leaders through the same channels. Thus, each link in the communications chain knew only one particular job, and not the overall details of Ultra. Nobody outside Bletchley Park knew the source.

John Cairncross, another of the Cambridge Five, was posted from MI6 to work at Bletchley Park. Blunt admitted to recruiting Cairncross and may well have been the cut-out between Cairncross and the Soviet controllers. For although the Soviet Union was now an ally, Russians were not trusted. Some information concerned German preparations and detailed plans for the Battle of Kursk, the last decisive encounter on the Eastern Front. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a wartime British agent, recalls meeting Kim Philby and Victor Rothschild, a friend of Blunt since Trinity College, Cambridge. He reported that at the Paris meeting in late 1955 Rothschild argued that much more Ultra material should have been given to Stalin. For once, Philby reportedly dropped his reserve, and agreed.

During the war, Blunt attained the rank of major. In the final days of World War II in Europe, Blunt made a successful secret trip to Schloss Friedrichshof in Germany to retrieve sensitive letters between the Duke of Windsor and Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis. George VI asked Blunt, who worked part-time at the Royal Library, to conduct the Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, to Friedrichshof in March 1945 to liberate letters to the Empress Victoria, a daughter of Queen Victoria, and mother to Kaiser Wilhelm. Papers rescued by Morshead and Blunt were deposited in the Royal Archives.