Soviet traitor and Cambridge Five spy ring member Anthony Blunt may also have passed secrets to the Nazis resulting in deaths of thousands of Allied troops, new book claims
Soviet traitor and Cambridge Five spy Anthony Blunt may also have passed secrets to the Nazis, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Allied troops, a new book claims.
Blunt, who died in 1983 aged 75, privately confessed to being a Soviet spy in 1964 and was publicly exposed by Margaret Thatcher 15 years later.
In the book The Traitor of Arnhem, the British art historian is now accused of being the most likely candidate for the role of ‘Josephine’, who provided crucial details of an Allied operation to the Germans and whose identity has never been revealed.
Stopping the infamous Operation Garden Market, an Allied military operation aimed at encircling German defenses along the Rhine and allowing a rapid advance into the heart of Germany, would have been attractive to the Russians, as Stalin did not want that American and British troops would land. in Berlin while his army was still in action on the Eastern Front.
Tyrant Stalin had plans to take over Eastern Europe.
According to author Robert Verkaik, Anthony Blunt was said to have been a spy codenamed ‘Josephine’ who passed on information about Operation Garden Market to the Germans in 1944.
Blunt had been recruited by Stalin’s security service, the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, in the 1930s.
Blunt had joined the British Army and MI5 before starting a career as an art historian and curator for Queen Elizabeth
A letter signed by Anthony Blunt, part of the exhibition on the lives of spies currently running at the University Library in central Cambridge
If accurate, Blunt’s actions “would have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen and countless civilians who died as a result of a protracted war,” author Robert Verkaik wrote in The Sunday times.
He also chillingly added that the alleged mole could also be blamed for the rapes of at least a million German women by the Russians after they achieved victory.
Blunt graduated from the prestigious Cambridge University and went straight into the army before joining the secret service MI5 in 1940.
At that time he was already passing on vital information to the Russians.
The spy quickly rose through the ranks and is believed to have been part of the small group that was aware of the plans for Operation Market Garden in September 1944.
The major operation saw thousands of paratroopers land in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to force a route into central Germany.
But the Allies faced unexpected and fierce resistance in what would ultimately be their final defeat of the war.
Having failed to capture the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, the operation fell short of its main objective.
The rescue of the First Airborne Division survivors ended the operation.
American losses totaled 3,996 killed, wounded, or missing, while British and Polish losses totaled 11,000 to 13,000 killed or wounded and 6,450 captured.
The number of German casualties was 7,500 to 10,000.
If accurate, Blunt’s actions “would have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers and countless civilians who died as a result of a protracted war,” according to the author of The Traitor of Arnhem.
In 1951, Burgess (right) and Maclean (left) were exposed as double agents, but after being tipped off by Philby they were able to escape to Moscow.
Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge Five, was head of MI6’s counterintelligence department
The five men were graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge
It is already known that a Dutch double agent, Christiaan Lindemans, passed information about the operation to the Germans, but Berlin received a second, more brief briefing from a spy codenamed ‘Josephine’.
In his book, Verkaik claimed that Blunt, who had been assigned to track down ‘Josephine’ a year earlier, eventually did his own investigation.
“Blunt had the means, the motive and the opportunity,” the author said, claiming the spy was the only person who fit the profile of the mysterious mole.
At the time, British intelligence services and military planners panicked over fears that the Nazis had a mole in their brutal war effort.
According to Verkaik, an MI5 officer had even cited ‘Josephine’s’ reports as ‘the best illegal intelligence obtained by the enemy’ the country had ever seen.
A year prior to the devastating Operation Garden Market, MI5 had revealed that the German spy behind the elaborate ‘Josephine’ disguise was the lawyer Karl Heinz Kraemer, whose reports were read by Hitler himself.
Verkaik admitted that he could not fully prove his theory behind Blunt as ‘Josephine’, but said ‘this depends more on probability than on all reasonable doubt’.
Blunt was known as the fourth member of the Cambridge Five – a group of Cambridge University-educated spies who worked for the British government and smuggled intelligence to the KGB.
Blunt’s confession had stunned the royal family and British secret services, but was hushed up when the former professor was offered immunity if he admitted his role.
The deal struck between the British Home Office and MI5 was so secretive that even the then Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, was unaware of the information.
National Archives documents show that Douglas-Home knew of Blunt’s betrayal in November 1979, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher exposed Blunt in the House of Commons.
Recruited by Stalin’s security service, the People’s Commissariat for the Home Affairs, in the 1930s, Blunt later joined the British Army and MI5 before starting a career as an art historian and curator to Queen Elizabeth.
He was stripped of his knighthood and lived as a hermit in London until his death from a heart attack.
Who were the Cambridge Five? The Soviet double agents who turned the British establishment upside down
The ‘Cambridge Five’ spy scandal rocked the establishment by exposing Soviet double agents at the heart of many of Britain’s most important institutions.
Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt all met at Cambridge University, where Blunt was an academic and the other three were students.
The older man recruited the students to the Soviet cause before World War II – and they remained committed to the USSR even after the start of the Cold War.
Donald Maclean (left) and Kim Philby (right) were also members of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring
Philby was head of counter-intelligence for MI6, while Maclean was a Foreign Office official and Burgess worked for the BBC.
Blunt was the most eminent of them all, as director of the Courtauld Institute and keeper of the royal family’s art collection.
In 1951, Burgess and Maclean were exposed as double agents, but after being tipped off by Philby they were able to escape to Moscow.
Despite the suspicion surrounding Philby, he avoided detection until 1963, when he too defected to the USSR.
Blunt escaped exposure for even longer – it was not until 1979, when Margaret Thatcher named him as a suspect in the House of Commons, that he confessed to his treason and was stripped of his title.
The ‘fifth man’ in the spy ring has never been definitively identified, but was named John Cairncross by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.
The story of the unlikely traitors has been dramatized several times, including in John le Carré’s classic book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and in a 2003 BBC series entitled Cambridge Spies.
Anthony Blunt (left), the keeper of the royal family’s art collection, was exposed in 1979 as the fourth member of the Cambridge spy ring. The fifth member was never formally identified, although Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky named ex-British intelligence officer John Cairncross. (right) as the last link