Cairncross told us about four men from GCHQ who he thought might repay further investigation. One of these worked with him in the Air Section of GCHQ, and had talked about the desirability of enabling British SIGINT material to reach the Soviet Union. Cairncross, although amused by the irony of the man's approach, was in no position to judge his seriousness, so he kept quiet about his own role. The second man, according to Cairncross, had been sacked after returning to Oxford and telling his former tutor full details of his work inside GCHQ. The tutor, appalled by the indiscretion, reported him to GCHQ, and he was sacked. A third man named by Cairncross, like the first, had long since left GCHQ for an academic career, so effort was concentrated on the fourth, a senior GCHQ official in the technical section. After a full investigation he was completely cleared.
GCHQ became highly agitated by the D Branch inquiries resulting from Cairncross' information, as did C Branch, both protected their respective empires jealously, and resented what they saw as interference, particularly when I made some caustic comments about how they could improve their vetting.
As my D3 section pursued these leads, I wrestled with the problem of how to handle Blunt, now that he was my responsibility. Before I began meeting Blunt I had to attend a briefing by Michael Adeane, the Queen's Private Secretary. We met at his office in the Palace. He was punctilious and correct, and assured me that the Palace was willing to cooperate in any inquiries the Service thought fit. He spoke in the detached manner of someone who wishes not to know very much more about the matter.
"The Queen," he said, "has been fully informed about Sir Anthony, and is quite content for him to be dealt with in any way which gets at the truth."
There was only one caveat.
"From time to time," said Adeane, "you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace -a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security."
Adeane carefully ushered me to the door. I could not help reflecting on the difference between his delicate touch and the hysterical way MI5 had handled Blunt, terrified that he might defect, or that somehow the scandal might leak. Although I spent hundreds of hours with Blunt, I never did learn the secret of his mission to Germany. But then, the Palace had had several centuries to learn the difficult art of scandal burying. MI5 have only been in the business since 1909!
When I took over Blunt I stopped all meetings with him while I considered a new policy. Confrontation was clearly never going to work, firstly because Hollis was vehemently opposed to anything which might provoke a defection, or a public statement from Blunt, and secondly because Blunt himself knew that our hand was essentially a weak one, that we were still groping in the dark and interrogating him from a position of ignorance rather than strength. I decided that we had to adopt a subtle approach, in an attempt to play on his character. I could tell that Blunt wanted to be thought helpful, even where it was clear that he was not. Moreover, he disliked intensely being caught in a lie. We had to extract the intelligence from him by a slow process of cumulative pressure, advancing on small fronts, rather than on any large one. To do that we needed a far more profound knowledge of the 1930s than MI5 at the time possessed.
I decided, too, that we had to move the interviews onto his patch. He always came to Maurice Oldfield's flat in a confrontational mood, defensive, on edge, sharpened up, and aware that he was being recorded. I felt moving to his place would lessen the tension, and enable us to develop something of a relationship.
Every month or so for the next six years Blunt and I met in his study at the Courtauld Institute. Blunt's study was a large room decorated in magnificent baroque style, with gold-leaf cornicework painted by his students at the Courtauld. On every wall hung exquisite paintings, including a Poussin above the fireplace, bought in Paris in the 1930s with 80 pounds lent to him by Victor Rothschild. (He was supposed to have left this painting to Victor's oldest daughter, Emma, but he failed to do this. The picture was valued at 500,000 pounds for his estate and went to the nation.) It was the perfect setting to discuss treachery. For every meeting we sat in the same place: around the fireplace, underneath the Poussin. Sometimes we took tea, with finely cut sandwiches; more often we drank, he gin and I Scotch; always we talked, about the 1930s, about the KGB, about espionage and friendship, love and betrayal. They remain for me among the most vivid encounters of my life.
Blunt was one of the most elegant, charming, and cultivated men I have met. He could speak five languages, and the range and depth of his knowledge was profoundly impressive. It was not limited solely to the arts; in fact, as he was proud of telling me, his first degree at Cambridge was in mathematics, and he retained a lifelong fascination with the philosophy of science.
The most striking thing about Blunt was the contradiction between his evident strength of character and his curious vulnerability. It was this contradiction which caused people of both sexes to fall in love with him. He was obviously homosexual, but in fact, as I learned from him, he had had at least two love affairs with women, who remained close to him throughout his life. Blunt was capable of slipping from art historian and scholar one minute, to intelligence bureaucrat the next, to spy, to waspish homosexual, to languid establishmentarian. But the roles took their toll on him as a man. I realized soon after we began meeting that Blunt, far from being liberated by the immunity offer, continued to carry a heavy burden. It was not a burden of guilt, for he felt none. He felt pain for deceiving Tess Rothschild, and other close friends like Dick White and Guy Liddell (he was in tears at Guy's funeral), but it was the pain of what had to be done, rather than the pain of what might have been avoided. His burden was the weight of obligation placed on him by those friends, accomplices, and lovers whose secrets he knew, and which he felt himself bound to keep.
As soon as we began our meetings at the Courtauld I could see Blunt relax. He remained canny, however, and since he knew all about SF, I soon noticed that the telephone was placed discreetly at the far end of the hall. On the first afternoon we met there I noticed it as he went out to fetch some tea.
"Bring the tea cozy to put on the telephone," I shouted.
He laughed.
"Oh no, Peter, you'll never be able to hear us down there with that thing."
At first I took notes in a small notebook, but it became difficult to take everything down, so I had to plan a way of obtaining clandestine coverage of the meetings. Eventually the premises next to the Courtauld were modernized, and I arranged for a probe microphone to be inserted through the wall into Blunt's study. It was a ticklish job. The measurements needed to be perfect to ensure that the probe emerged at the right spot on Blunt's side of the fireplace close to where we sat. A2 arranged for an artist friend of Blunt's to telephone him at a prearranged time when I was visiting him. and while he was out in the hall talking, I produced my tape measure and made all the necessary measurements for the microphone, which was successfully installed and working beautifully until the end. For all I know, it is probably still there now.