"Peter has been doing the analysis, Anthony. I think he has something to say..."
I switched off the tape recorder and paused for effect.
"It's quite clear to me, reading the transcripts, that you have not been telling us the full truth..."
Blunt flinched as if I had struck him. He was sitting in an easy chair with his pencil-thin legs crossed. His outstretched leg kicked involuntarily.
"I have told you everything which you have asked," he replied, looking me straight in the eye.
"That's nonsense, and you know it is, too. You say you only know about Long and Cairncross, those were the only ones. I don't believe you!"
He purpled, and a tic began to flicker on his right cheek. He poured himself another gin, playing for time.
"We've been very fair with you," I went on. "We've been polite, and we've kept our side of the bargain like gentlemen. But you have not kept yours..."
He listened intently as I made my play. Where was he not telling the truth? he wanted to know. I pointed out areas where we felt he was holding back. I knew he was trying to gauge whether I had fresh evidence or information which could put him on the spot, or whether we were just working from gut feelings. After a few minutes' discomfort, he began to resume his poise. The tic began to settle down. He knew we had nothing to throw at him.
"I've already told you, Peter," he muttered, "there was nobody else!"
I switched tack, and began to press his conscience.
"Have you ever thought about the people who died?"
Blunt feigned ignorance.
"There were no deaths," he said smoothly, "I never had access to that type of thing..."
"What about Gibby's spy?" I flashed, referring to an agent run inside the Kremlin by an MI6 officer named Harold Gibson. "Gibby's spy" provided MI6 with Politburo documents before the war, until he was betrayed by Blunt and subsequently executed.
"He was a spy," said Blunt harshly, momentarily dropping his guard to reveal the KGB professional. "He knew the game; he knew the risks."
Blunt knew he had been caught in a lie, and the tic started up again with a vengeance. We wrestled for an hour, but the longer it went on, the more he realized the strength of his position. The session broke up with ill-concealed temper.
"The truth is, given the choice, you wouldn't betray anyone you thought was vulnerable, would you?" I asked, as Blunt prepared to leave.
"That's true," he said, standing to his full height, "but I've already told you. There are no more names..."
He said it with such intensity that I felt he almost believed it himself.
There had been an incident which was perturbing. The tape recorder which we overtly had in the room decided to scramble up its tape. I knelt on the floor and proceeded to straighten the tape out and get it going again. While I was doing this, Blunt said to Arthur, "Isn't it fascinating to watch a technical expert do his stuff?"
Now, Blunt had not been told by either Arthur or me that I was a scientist. I had been introduced as the man processing what he, Blunt, had told us. I looked Blunt straight in the eye and he blushed purple. Somebody had told him who I really was.
"You take him on," snapped Arthur when Blunt had left. "He's played out..."
Arthur was keen to strip the bones of his other carcasses, Long and Cairncross.
Long was in the Apostles Society at Cambridge, a self-regarding elite club of intellectuals, many of whom were left-wing and homosexual. When war broke out he joined Military Intelligence, where he was posted to MI14, responsible for assessing Oberkommando Wehrmacht SIGINT and hence military strength. Throughout the war he met clandestinely with Blunt and handed over any intelligence he could lay his hands on. After the war he moved to the British Control Commission in Germany, where he eventually rose to become deputy head of Military Intelligence before leaving in 1952 to pursue a career in commerce. He left Intelligence because he was getting married and did not wish to have to tell his wife that he had been a spy.
I met Long several times with Arthur, and disliked him intensely. Unlike the other members of the Ring, he lacked class, and I often wondered how on earth he was accepted into the Apostles. He was an officious, fussy man with a face like a motor mechanic's, and seemed still to regard himself as a superior Army officer, despite his treachery. Far from being helpful in his debriefing, his attitude, when challenged on a point, was invariably to say that we would just have to take his word for it. He went through his story with us briskly. No, he knew of no other spies, and claimed that he gave up all espionage activities in 1945. This failed to tally with what Blunt had told us. He said that in 1946 he went to Germany to persuade Long to apply for a post inside MI5. Long agreed, and Blunt, then a trusted and well-respected recent departure from the Service, wrote a recommendation for him. Luckily for MI5, Guy Liddell had a marked prejudice against uniformed military officers, and blackballed him at the Board, even though Dick White supported him, much to his later embarrassment. But despite this attempt to join MI5, and Long's continuing secret work in Germany, he denied all further contact with the Russians, which was clearly rubbish.
Cairncross was a different character entirely. He was a clever, rather frail-looking Scotsman with a shock of red hair and a broad accent. He came from a humble working-class background but, possessed of a brilliant intellect, he made his way to Cambridge in the 1930s, becoming an open Communist before dropping out on the instructions of the Russians and applying to join the Foreign Office.
Cairncross was one of Arthur's original suspects in 1951, after papers containing Treasury information were found in Burgess' flat after the defection. Evelyn McBarnet recognized the handwriting as that of John Cairncross. He was placed under continuous surveillance, but although he went to a rendezvous with his controller, the Russian never turned up. When Arthur confronted Cairncross in 1952 he denied being a spy, claiming that he had supplied information to Burgess as a friend, without realizing that he was a spy. Shortly afterward, Cairncross left Britain and did not return until 1967.
After Cairncross confessed, Arthur and I traveled to Paris to meet him again for a further debriefing in a neutral venue. He had already told Arthur the details of his recruitment by the veteran Communist James Klugman, and the intelligence from GCHQ and MI6 which he had passed to the Russians, and we were anxious to find out if he had any other information which might lead to further spies. Cairncross was an engaging man. Where Long floated with the tide, Communist when it was fashionable, and anxious to save his neck thereafter, Cairncross remained a committed Communist. They were his beliefs, and with characteristic Scottish tenacity, he clung to them. Unlike Long, too, Cairncross tried his best to help. He was anxious to come home, and thought that cooperation was the best way to earn his ticket.
Cairncross said he had no firm evidence against anyone, but was able to identify two senior civil servants who had been fellow Communists with him at Cambridge. One was subsequently required to resign, while the other was denied access to defense-related secrets. We were particularly interested in what Cairncross could tell us about GCHQ, which thus far had apparently escaped the attentions of the Russian intelligence services in a way which made us distinctly suspicious, especially given the far greater numbers of people employed there.