Anthony Blunt Soviet spy and courtier told colleagues he was illegitimate child of George V

[Magda Hassan]

Soviet spy and courtier told colleagues he was illegitimate child of George V


By Ephraim Hardcastle
Last updated at 10:32 PM on 30th June 2009

Now the unpublished memoirs of the late royal courtier, Soviet spy and aesthete Anthony Blunt are back in the news, why did the Royal Family shield his treachery for 15 years until it was exposed to the world by then Tory premier Margaret Thatcher in 1979?

According to a new source, wartime MI5 officer Blunt, who was sent to Germany to get all correspondence between Empress Frederick and her mother Queen Victoria - the House of Windsor not wishing their private family papers falling into foreign (ie. Russian and American) hands - told his colleagues he was actually the illegitimate child of King George V, by his mother, Hilda Blunt. Food for thought!


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...rge-V.html

[Magda Hassan]

Nice little piece of right wing clap trap from a Thatcherite groupie but why now?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No remorse from KGB spy Anthony Blunt... and no clue as to the traitor who saved him from hanging


By Anthony Glees
Last updated at 3:17 AM on 24th July 2009


Not a word of genuine remorse. Not a hint of repentance for the damage inflicted on his country in a lifetime of treachery. Not a mention of the brave people he betrayed to Stalin's torturers. The only regret ever felt by the traitor Anthony Blunt was the fact that he was eventually found out.
It is a measure of the man that even in his memoirs, published this week 25 years after his death, he lacked the courage to be honest about his part in one of the greatest security scandals of the 20th century.
And the scandal might not be over yet. For there is one great unanswered question in this sorry saga. How on earth did Blunt the betrayer get away with it for so long, when there should have been suspicions at the very top about his activities?



Royal connections: The Queen with Anthony Blunt in 1959. The spy was friendly with the late Queen Mother


Had he been caught early in his career, he might have hanged for his crimes. At the very least he would have spent years in jail.
Yet he became Surveyor of the King's Pictures in 1945, achieved his knighthood in 1956, escaped prosecution when MI5 finally caught up with him in 1964 and was allowed anonymity thereafter.
He might easily have ended his days honoured and secure in his reputation. The suspicion is that he was protected by someone at the pinnacle of Britain's intelligence establishment and that the full truth is still being concealed.
Before we examine those issues, it is necessary to consider the background that Blunt's grubby exercise in self-justification attempts to hide.
For years, the circle of Cambridge spies - which included Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and others - wielded immense influence at the heart of British life.
They were prominent in the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence and the BBC. Their controllers in Moscow probably knew more of Britain's secrets than most government ministers.
So what does Blunt's memoir tell us about this demeaning and dangerous episode? The answer is: precious little. He fails to give anything away about the nature of the work he did for the NKVD - the forerunner of the KGB - and indeed reveals nothing we didn't know already.
Instead, he pleads naivety instead of wickedness for starting his career as a master spy in the 1930s.

He seeks to excuse himself by claiming 'the atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense, the enthusiasm for anti-fascist activity so great that I made the biggest mistake of my life'.
What bunkum! While many people were desperately worried about Hitler in the Thirties, few felt it necessary to betray their country as a result. Moreover, Blunt wasn't some silly little romantic who thought Soviet communism was the key to an earthly paradise.
No, he was an academic star, a don at Trinity, one of the brightest and best-informed men of his generation. He knew all about the mass executions perpetrated by the NKVD, the torture, the show trials, the reign of terror inflicted on the Russian people. He chose to work for the butchers anyway.
And he continued to work for them after Hitler and Stalin signed their brutally cynical non-aggression pact in 1939, when they agreed to the rape of Poland and divided that unhappy country between them.
That agreement enabled Hitler to attack France without worrying what the Russians might do - leaving Britain to stand alone and virtually defenceless against a Nazi invasion.








Traitor: Blunt continued to divulge secrets after Hitler and Stalin signed their brutally cynical non-aggression pact in 1939

But that didn't trouble the 'naive' Blunt. Throughout the war he worked in MI5, using his position to pass hundreds of secrets to Russia.
Just as seriously, he wielded enough political clout to influence British perceptions of how the Stalinist regime would behave after the war. He was among those who persuaded the Western allies to drop their guard. And we all know what happened then.

Millions in Eastern Europe who had survived the evils of Nazism were condemned to years of further misery behind the Soviet iron curtain.
In short, the Blunt memoir is as hypocritical and self-serving a document as it is possible to imagine. It is the exercise of a ruthless master-spy who hopes to rewrite history and in some measure rehabilitate himself. It deserves contempt.
But there remains a nagging question: have others colluded in a cover-up?
One of the great holes in Blunt's account is his failure to reveal just when he became aware of the fact that MI5 was on to him. We know that he was interrogated in 1964, when he confessed to everything in exchange for immunity from prosecution. But might he not have been challenged long before that?
We know that MI5 staged a major operation - codenamed Post Report - in the early 1950s, designed to assess the number of communist sympathisers who might act as a Fifth Column in the event of a Soviet attack. And we have good reason to believe that Blunt was among those suspected of unfriendly intent.
Was that suspicion passed up the line to senior officers in MI5?
It certainly should have been. Blunt was a favoured royal courtier. He was friendly with the late Queen Mother and had even been known to accompany her on official occasions. The alarm bells should have been deafening.
But as far as we know, nothing was done. Blunt seems to have been ignored for another decade or more, until that fateful confrontation in 1964. And even then he was let off the hook, granted anonymity and allowed to continue as an honoured courtier at the Palace.
Offering immunity from prosecution might sometimes be necessary in the murky world of intelligence work. But immunity from any punishment whatsoever? For a man who was as much a criminal as any murderer or rapist? To me, that seems utterly bizarre.


Named: Margaret Thatcher decided to name Blunt as the traitor he was after refusing to let his crimes be swept under the carpet

Yet Blunt doesn't seem to have been chastened by his lucky escape. Far from lying low after his interrogation, he seemed to glory in his royal duties, cutting quite a dash in society.
Only in one respect did he appear to show some caution. As a former Cambridge man, he was a regular at academic dinners at his old university.
But I have it on excellent authority that there was one noticeable feature of those evenings: he always took great care to avoid any contact with guests who were his former colleagues in British intelligence. Presumably, he was capable of feeling embarrassment after all.
And so he might have proceeded for the rest of his life, still honoured, still respected, still considered one of the great and the good, even though his treason was known. He might have died to glowing obituaries had it not been for that remarkably non-establishment outsider, Margaret Thatcher.
She refused to abide by the cosy consensus that Blunt's crimes should be swept under the carpet. With rumours sweeping Westminster in 1979 after a newly-published book on Soviet espionage, she decided to name Blunt as the traitor he was.
Perhaps the reason it took so long for the truth to come out is that few members of the establishment shared Margaret Thatcher's sense of morality and justice. Alternatively, it might be that Whitehall simply wanted to avoid a scandal that might have embarrassed the Royal Family.
But I wonder. We know that the Soviet infiltration of MI5 didn't end when Blunt left the service after the war.
Could it be that he left behind another traitor, never discovered, who became senior enough and powerful enough to ensure that the truth remained hidden?
We will never know for sure unless and until we see the official intelligence files on Blunt and his associates. Would it surprise anyone if they never see the light of day?
• Professor Anthony Glees is Director of the the Centre for Security and Intelligence, University of Buckingham

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...nging.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Charles wrote in the other Blunt thread here:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=1764

One cannot understand any of this absent the appreciation of the so-called third alternative to the conventional Cold War construct -- what George Michael Evica referred to as the "treasonous cabal" of intelligence operatives whose masters were above Cold War differences.

This third force is at work throughout the Philby layers -- and in so many other places.

I'm bearing this in mind whilst considering what it would mean if Blunt was the illegitimate son of British King George V.

During WW1, HG Wells criticized the "alien and uninspiring court" of George V. Of course, the "British royal family" was in fact a bunch of Germans, aka the House of Saxe-Coburg, squatting and lording it in London.

In 1917, George V changed the family name of the British royal family from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. An early example of rebranding, since adopted by numerous multinationals from the United Fruit Company to Blackwater, who have been caught red-handed in disgraceful and shameful behaviour.

In addition, George V's mother was the sister of the mother of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Can you tell British King and Russian Tsar apart in the picture below?

If Blunt was really a blood member of the octopus-like, bloodsucking, "pan-European royal family", would he really have been a communist sympathiser, betraying his country and his blood family out of a self-claimed hatred of Nazism?

It makes little sense.

Unless and until one considers the "treasonous cabal" hypothesis.

[Charles Drago]

Jan, et al,

From the July 10, 1994 New York Times comes "Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia," by Ron Rosenbaum:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/magazi...anoia.html

Just a taste:

"But then, in 1991, as Greene lay dying of a blood disease in a Swiss hospital, a letter [threw all] into question. It suggested Philby had a wild card up his sleeve he'd never disclosed.

"The provocative new take on the ambiguity-riddled Philby question came in the form of a letter from Greene's biographer Norman Sherry, who'd been researching Greene's Secret Service connections. Pursuant to that, Sherry had been conferring in Washington with Anthony Cave Brown, the espionage historian then researching a forthcoming Kim Philby biography. Cave Brown was the intrepid spy sleuth who'd first revealed (in Bodyguard of Lies) the details of the elaborate D-Day deception strategy -- the way the Allies used the 'double cross system' to blind Hitler to the truth about the Normandy landing.

"Cave Brown had put forth a startling proposition to Greene's biographer: that Kim Philby might have been part of an even more complex deception operation than anyone had imagined -- a double double-cross." [emphasis added]

Keep this in mind: Even a "double double-cross" operation relating to the Cambridge spies pales in complexity and significance to the "Treasonous Cabal" hypothesis.

So back to Blunt: Two points must be considered:

1. Given the chain of custody of his memoir over the years, we have every reason to assume that the papers have been altered by those with the most to hide/gain.

2. Current mainstream speculations regarding the odd protection from on-high that spared Blunt from the gibbet may be on-target. In any event, they are so startling -- and therefore so satisfying to the conspiracy-minded among us -- that they in effect flood the intellectual and emotional systems and deflect our attention from the search for additional, far deeper and more troubling explanations.

We are being fed Blunt the way we were fed post-Cold War KGB and Stasi "revelations."

[Jan Klimkowski]

I'm bumping this thread as a further reminder of the deep and multi-layered nature of key political events.

[Jan Klimkowski]

A year and more has passed, so time to bump this thread again....

[Charles Drago]

For me, your timing is perfect.

Less than 12 hours ago, thanks to a friend who, not exactly immersed in studies of deep politics in general and political assassinations in particular, ventured an off-the-cuff comment about the death of Diana, I experienced one of those all-too-rare EUREKA! moments.

And while few of them ever generate true paradigm-shifting insights, almost all manage to stretch the boundaries of one's analytical imagination (no contradiction in terms) and demonstrate that no idea is too wild for consideration -- even if only for a moment or three.

I'll go into detail on a separate thread. But to conclude this brief consideration of serendipity, I'll note that, within the past ten days, a good friend who is an expert in the studies referenced above revealed that he shares one of my most closely-held and rarely encountered hypotheses regarding JFK's murder. And last night, I was inspired -- albeit unintentionally -- to apply it to the Diana affair.

How does this relate to Blunt and, by extension, to the nature of Philby's game?

I'll try to explain in detail on the new thread (coming soon -- probably after Christmas).

[Peter Lemkin]

An early example of rebranding

Ain't that the truth! Always needed in Potemkin Villages! Always needed when attempting to hide the ugly truths! The treasonous threesome and moresome that permeated UK intelligence were always very 'out' and visible for all to see.....unless there was a reason to 'look the other way' at a certain level. Most of the 'Oligarchy' in the UK were not so very opposed to either Nazism nor Bolshivism....except when it affected their 'pockets'...in fact, they backed and promoted both ideologies and systems for their OWN purposes...not that they necessarily believed them [although many did - one or the other]. Its all about money and power...not systems and ideology.....that's the big LIE.

[Charles Drago]

Its all about money and power...not systems and ideology.....that's the big LIE.

The truth distilled to its essence.

[Phil Dragoo]

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?


Observing Morsi, does he bar the justices for justice or "just us"?

The son of El Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz now empowered to kill any earthen vessel via drone wishes to raise the debt ceiling at will.

The tsar and the king: all in the family. Diana dealt with in the manner of a mafia family.

Was Donovan a British agent? Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid, "was intricately involved in getting Donovan selected as the head of the OSS." Stephenson to British intelligence chief, Stewart Menzies, "You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man [Donovan] is in a position of such importance to our efforts."*

*Robert K. Wilcox, Target: Patton, pp 96-7.

Churchill's grand cabal; Charles and George Michael Evica's "above Cold-War differences"--and now, the chess pieces Muslim Brotherhood vs. Assad as proxies for Saudi's Hussein and Vlad Polonium in loco Oceania et Eurasia.

How much of Angleton was farce: Golitsyn-Nosenko: rebranding?

Hussein sent back the bust of Churchill, flashing cheeks, Mao-Maoing the Meat-Fly-Catchers.

All in the family and who shall sit at the head of the table.

Bon apetit, Litvinenko--Blunt was waved through.

We await Charles' Thirteenth Day of Christmas.