Robert Verkaik, a British publicist and historian, discovered that Anthony Blunt, a famous double agent recruited by Stalin, passed British secrets to Nazi Germany, according to The Times. His betrayal led to the failure of a major Allied operation in the Netherlands, resulting in over 17,000 British and American military deaths.
Anthony Blunt is one of the Cambridge spies – the group of double agents of the noble class who for years during the Second World War and the Cold War passed British and American secrets to the USSR.
For decades, Blunt was generally regarded as one of the most inoffensive of the bunch. But new information from the archives shows that he may have been the most destructive of them all.
Blunt was a world-renowned mathematician, art historian, and supervisor of Queen Elizabeth’s painting collection. In 1979 he was publicly exposed as a Soviet double agent by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Blunt lost his knighthood.
Although most of the Cambridge spies defected to Russia – Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, and Kim Philby in 1963, Blunt continued to enjoy the protection of his rich and powerful friends in Britain who publicly protected him because he would transmit secrets to the Soviets only while they were Britain’s allies during the war against Nazi Germany.
After a brief stint in army intelligence, Blunt joined MI5, the United Kingdom’s intelligence and internal security agency, in 1940, by which time he was already working for the Russians. His career took off: he became the personal assistant to the head of counterintelligence, and then drafted personal security briefings for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, playing a key role at the heart of Allied intelligence.
“What I was to discover was that his betrayals directly and intentionally aided the Nazi war machine and caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians. I came to realize that the establishment’s version of Blunt as a noble, unprejudiced figure, somehow removed from the dirty realities of his betrayal, was not just a myth, but that he was truly monstrous, far more so than any of the other spies of the at Cambridge,” writes Robert Verkaik in The Times.
He discovered that Anthony Blunt had helped the Nazis with information that led to the failure of Operation Market Garden: 40,000 paratroopers and glider troops (Market) were to be parachuted into Holland in September 1944 to secure six bridges over the Rhine, opening the way XXX (Garden) Corps tanks to penetrate Germany.
The D-Day landings in June 1944 brought the Allies to the brink of victory. Had Operation Market Garden succeeded, the road to Berlin would have been opened and the war could have ended by Christmas, with hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
But British spy Anthony Blunt’s brief tip-off to the Nazis led to the failure of this operation, writes historian Robert Verkaik.
