For our first sessions I relaxed things. I tried not to press him too hard, content simply to run through the old memories. He talked of how he had joined the Soviet cause, recruited by the then youthful, brilliant Guy Burgess. Guy was still a painful subject for Blunt; he had just died in Moscow, alone, his once virile body broken by years of abuse.
"You probably find this impossible to believe," he told me as he poured the tea, "but anyone who knew Guy well, really well, will tell you that he was a great patriot."
"Oh, I can believe that," I said. "He only wanted Britain to be Communist! Did you hear from him, before he died?"
Blunt sipped his tea nervously, the cup and saucer shaking slightly in his hand. Then he went to his desk and fetched me a letter.
"This was the last one," he said. "You didn't miss it; it was hand delivered..." He left the room.
It was a pathetic letter, rambling and full of flaccid sentimental observations. Burgess talked of Moscow life, and tried to make it sound as if it was still as good as ever. Now and again he referred to the old days, and the Reform Club, and people they both knew. At the end he talked of his feelings for Blunt, and the love they shared thirty years before. He knew he was dying, but was whistling to the end. Blunt came back into the room after I finished reading the letter. He was upset, more I suspect because he knew I could see that Burgess still meant something to him. I had won a crucial first victory. He had lifted the veil for the first time, and allowed me a glimpse into the secret world which bound the Ring of Five together.
Blunt joined the Russian Intelligence Service in the heyday of the period now known in Western counterintelligence circles as "the time of the great illegals." After the ARCOS raid in London in 1928, where MI5 smashed a large part of the Russian espionage apparatus in a police raid, the Russians concluded that their legal residences, the embassies, consulates, and the like, were unsafe as centers for agent running. From then onward their agents were controlled by the "great illegals," men like Theodore Maly, Deutsch, "Otto," Richard Sorge, Alexander Rado, "Sonia," Leopold Trepper, the Kecks, the Poretskys, and Krivitsky. They were often not Russians at all, although they held Russian citizenship. They were Trotskyist Communists who believed in international Communism and the Comintern, They worked undercover, often at great personal risk, and traveled throughout the world in search of potential recruits. They were the best recruiters and controllers the Russian Intelligence Service ever had. They all knew each other, and between them they recruited and built high-grade spy rings like the "Ring of Five" in Britain, Sorge's rings in China and Japan, the Rote Drei in Switzerland, and the Rote Kapelle in German-occupied Europe - the finest espionage rings history has ever known, and which contributed enormously to Russian survival and success in World War II.
Unlike Philby and Burgess, Blunt never met "Theo," their first controller, a former Hungarian priest named Theodore Maly. Maly understood the idealism of people like Philby and Burgess, and their desire for political action. He became a captivating tutor in international politics, and his students worshipped him. In 1936-37 Maly was replaced by "Otto," and it was he who orchestrated Blunt's recruitment by Burgess. Like Theo, ''Otto" was a middle-class East European, probably Czech, who was able to make the Soviet cause appealing not simply for political reasons but because he shared with his young recruits the same cultured European background. Blunt admitted to me on many occasions that he doubted he would ever have joined had the approach come from a Russian.
For some reason, we were never able to identify "Otto." Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross all claimed they never knew his real name, although Philby in his confession told Nicholas Elliott that while in Washington he recognized "Otto" from a photograph in the FBI files as a Comintern agent named Arnold Deutsch. But when we checked we found that no picture of Deutsch existed in FBI files during Philby's time in Washington. Moreover, Deutsch had fair curly hair. I used to bring Blunt volume after volume of the MI5 Russian intelligence officer files in the hope that he might recognize him. Blunt treated the books as if they were catalogues from the National Gallery. He would study them carefully through his half-moon spectacles, pausing to admire a particularly striking face, or an elegantly captured figure on a street corner. But we never identified "Otto" or discovered the reason why the Ring were so desperate to conceal his identity so many years later. In 1938 Stalin purged all his great illegals. They were Trotskyists and non-Russians and he was convinced they were plotting against him, along with elements in the Red Army. One by one they were recalled to Moscow and murdered. Most went willingly, fully aware of the fate that awaited them, perhaps hoping that they could persuade the demented tyrant of the great services they had rendered him in the West.
Some, like Krivitsky, decided to defect, although even he was almost certainly eventually murdered by a Russian assassin in Washington in 1941.
For over a year after "Otto's" departure, the Ring remained in limbo, out of touch and apparently abandoned. Then Guy Burgess and Kim Philby reestablished contact with the Russians through Philby's first wife, Litzi Friedman, a long-time European Comintern agent. According to Blunt, the Ring was run through a complex chain of couriers: from Litzi Friedman messages passed to her close friend and fellow Comintern agent, Edith Tudor Hart, and thence to Bob Stewart, the CPGB official responsible for liaison with the Russian Embassy, and thence on to Moscow. Until Blunt confessed we were entirely unaware of this chain, and it had enormous implications. Each member of the chain almost certainly knew the identities of the Ring, claimed Blunt, and it had always puzzled him that the Ring was not detected at this point by MI5. We had always assumed the Ring had been kept entirely separate from the CPGB apparatus, which was thoroughly penetrated in the 1930s by agents run by Maxwell Knight. But now it appeared that we had missed the greatest CPGB secret of all. In 1938 MI5 were basking in the success of the Woolwich Arsenal case, where evidence from Maxwell Knight's best agent, Joan Gray (Miss X), secured the conviction of senior CPGB officials for espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal Munitions Factory. Had we run the case on longer, we might well have captured the most damaging spies in British history before they began.
At the end of 1940, the Russians finally reestablished contact with the Ring, and from this period onward they were directed into the intelligence world. Their controller during this period was "Henry," a Russian intelligence officer named Anatoli Gromov, or Gorski, who was working under diplomatic cover. Gromov ran all the spies in the Ring, almost certainly the eight whose cryptonyms appear in the VENONA traffic, until he left for Washington in 1944 to run Donald Maclean, who was posted to the British Embassy. Those who were left in London were taken over by Boris Krotov, the KGB officer whose VENONA messages revealed the existence of the eight spies. Blunt said he had a great respect for the professionalism of his KGB controllers, but they never really stimulated him in the way that "Otto" had. Gromov and Krotov were technocrats of the modern Russian intelligence machine, whereas to Blunt, the talented European controllers of the 1930s were artists.
"Was that why you left MI5?" I asked.
"Oh, that partly," he said. "I was tempted to stay. But they didn't need me. Kim would serve them well. He was rising to the top, I knew that. And I needed my art. After all, if they had wanted me, they could so easily have blackmailed me to stay."