Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt may have helped Hitler too

This is not the story I intended to tell. I set out to write a book about a distant relative, Eddy Verkaik, who had fought in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Eddy had helped alert the British to the treachery of a fellow Dutch resistance fighter — a terrifying giant of a man known as “King Kong”: Christiaan Lindemans.

Lindemans had betrayed Operation Market Garden, the ambitious and ill-fated Allied airborne mission that dropped thousands of paratroopers into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the 80th anniversary of which falls this September. Had it succeeded, it would have kicked open the door to the heart of Germany and brought the conflict to a speedy end. In the event the Allies lost more than 17,000 men in what was to be their final defeat of the war.

But one day in the archive everything changed. I discovered a second double agent had betrayed Operation Market Garden to the Germans — a spy codenamed Josephine, whom history had all but forgotten and whose identity has never been revealed. As I started to pull on that thread, who should pop out but Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies — the group of upper-class double agents who, for years during the Second World War and the Cold War, passed British and American secrets to their communist masters in Russia.

For decades Blunt has widely been regarded as one of the more harmless of that group. But my research would suggest he was perhaps the most devastatingly treacherous — and without realising it I had uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century, a story with ramifications that are still felt to this day.

Of all the Cambridge spies, the privileged sons of the British establishment recruited by Stalin in the 1930s, Blunt remains the most elusive. He was a polymath, a multilingual mathematician, world-famous art historian, surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, knight of the realm. Rumours had swirled about his loyalty for years. In 1964 he secretly “confessed” to being a Russian spy — but extraordinarily was allowed to keep his job in the royal household.

So when, in 1979, he was named publicly as a double agent by the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, the establishment of the day went into a frenzy of damage limitation. Blunt lost his knighthood, but otherwise survived remarkably unscathed.

Most of the Cambridge spies had defected to Russia: Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled there in 1951 and 12 years later they would be joined by Kim Philby. While they were drinking themselves to death in their dingy Moscow flats, Blunt continued to bask in the approval of rich and powerful friends who were all at pains to point out that he had passed secrets to the Soviets only while they were our allies during the war. That wasn’t treachery, they said; it was misplaced idealism. Nothing like the others, who were busy passing on nuclear secrets and betraying agents in the field at the height of the Cold War.

That, to a large extent, is still the general view of Blunt, who died of a heart attack at his home in Highgate, north London, in 1983, aged 75: the most benign of the group in terms of the damage done and the betrayal wrought; notable as much for cropping up in the Netflix show The Crown, played by Samuel West, as anything else.

But his story never really made much sense. The son of a well-connected Hampshire vicar and a distant cousin of the Queen, Blunt had got to Cambridge on a maths scholarship but took a first in modern languages and then almost single-handedly created art history as an academic discipline in the UK. He was an intellectual with a global reputation.

After a brief stint in army intelligence Blunt joined MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence and security agency, in 1940, by which time he was already working for the Russians. Once he got his foot in the door his career grew wings. During the Blitz he was the personal assistant to the head of counterintelligence; by the end of the war he was writing Churchill’s personal security briefings with a pivotal role at the heart of Allied intelligence. As the spy writer Nigel West put it, “Few spies in history could ever have been presented with such a spectacular opportunity.” Given such a unique position, could he have really done so little with it?

What I would go on to discover was that his betrayals had directly and intentionally aided the Nazi war machine and caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians. I would come to realise that the establishment version of Blunt as a high-minded, unworldly figure somehow removed from the grubby realities of his treachery was not just a myth but that he was truly monstrous, far more so than any of the other Cambridge spies.

The last Allied defeat of the war

Operation Market Garden retains a romantic hold on the national imagination that puts it alongside Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Despite its failure, it is still regarded as the greatest airborne operation in history: 40,000 paratroopers and glider troops (Market) were to be dropped in the Netherlands to secure six bridges over the Rhine, clearing a path for the tanks of XXX Corps (Garden) to push into Germany.

The D-Day landings in June 1944 had brought the Allies to the brink of victory. One final blow and the whole Nazi carapace would come crashing down. Had it succeeded, the road to Berlin would have been opened. The war could have been over by Christmas, with hundreds of thousands of lives saved.

The brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, it was a huge gamble. The marshy terrain of the polders made for treacherous going. Above all, the air drop was at the limit of operational range and on a scale never attempted before. British tanks would have 48 hours to cover 64 miles and link up with the 1st British Airborne Division, who were to land by glider and parachute around the town of Arnhem and secure the last bridge over the Rhine — immortalised in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.

At 2.30pm on Sunday, September 17, the tanks of the Irish Guards started their advance towards Eindhoven. After just half an hour, the antitank guns of Kampfgruppe Walther, a unit cobbled together by the German commanders, ripped into the British column. Sixty miles away, 20,000 British and American paratroopers had landed and marched to Arnhem and Nijmegen. They too ran into unexpected resistance from the improvised 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions.

German reinforcements flooded in. Bitter fighting ensued for three days, until the last paras at Arnhem surrendered with the tanks of XXX Corps just ten miles away. The losses were devastating: Allied casualties amounted to more than 17,000.

Consequently, it was to be the Russians who would win the race to Berlin, redrawing the map of Europe and paving the way for the Iron Curtain.

At Arnhem the Allies had expected little resistance, but were met by a German force that was resilient and prepared. Was that just because they were battle-hardened veterans or had Market Garden been betrayed?

The King Kong problem

I was deep into my research of the biggest German counterintelligence coup of the war, Englandspiel — the England Game, and how Christiaan “King Kong” Lindemans, a hero of the Dutch resistance, had been passing secrets to the Germans. After the D-Day landings, when Allied victory was all but inevitable, he mystified the Germans by volunteering to continue to spy for them. Lindemans would cross and recross the front lines, bringing intelligence to his Nazi paymasters and in particular warn them — several times, in increasing detail — of the vast airborne attack.

In truth, Lindemans’s story is far from unknown, although experts disagree on how important a figure he was. In the UK most military historians have little regard for the impact of his treachery. The story is very different in the Netherlands, whose people suffered so terribly, and certainly in the immediate aftermath of Market Garden there were many senior figures who regarded his betrayal as crucial. The point everyone can agree on is that the Germans did an unexpectedly brilliant job of improvising a defence.

After a couple of years of following the archival trail, I found a secret report in the National Archives in Kew dating from 1946 about a meeting between a British intelligence officer and Lindemans at the prison in the Hague where he was being held on treason charges. According to the files, the officer discovered that Lindemans and his wife were working for the Russians. Lindemans then named leading communist agents operating in key positions in the West. Within days Lindemans was dead, supposedly by suicide — although there is strong evidence he was the victim of a poisoning. (The Kremlin playbook hasn’t changed very much over the years.)

The second spy: who was ‘Josephine’?

The Russian link was an unexpected twist that led me to a separate file in Amsterdam, and a reference to another warning that the Germans had received about Market Garden. This second briefing was sent to Berlin the day before the Allied airborne assault by a spy codenamed Josephine. What was even more puzzling was that it was clear that the accuracy of this second warning was far greater than the intelligence passed on by Lindemans.

If I was surprised, the reaction from British intelligence and Allied military planners at the time was something close to panic. Who on earth was Josephine? It turned out that because of a bureaucratic error the warning didn’t reach the German generals until the armada of Allied aircraft, carrying the first lift of paratroopers, had already crossed the Dutch border and so those historians who were even aware of it have dismissed its significance. Yet this intelligence included a detailed order of battle and strategic objectives.

Josephine even neutralised MI5’s own double agents who had been sending deceptive messages to the Germans saying that any airborne attack in the Netherlands would be a dummy run and the real target was Scandinavia. On September 17 the German high command issued a briefing to field commanders warning them of this.

The view from the British intelligence establishment at the time was far from sanguine. MI5 had assured the cabinet that there was not a single Nazi spy on British shores who hadn’t been exposed and arrested or turned. Now it appeared the Nazis had a mole at the heart of the war effort. The British codebreakers of Bletchley Park, alerted by the American Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, had been monitoring Agent Josephine for more than a year, since mid-1943, when an MI5 officer described her reports as “the best illicit intelligence derived by the enemy from this country which I have seen”.

By late summer 1943 British intelligence had identified the German spymaster running Josephine as Karl Heinz Kraemer, a lawyer operating out of the German embassy in Stockholm. Kraemer’s reports were so trusted that they were read verbatim by Hitler himself. Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, and Walter Schellenberg, the head of the Nazi secret service, also regarded Josephine as their top source of Allied intelligence.

The threat from Josephine was all too real and MI5 handed the job of tracking her down to one of their top men, a rising star who was already tipped to be director general — none other than Anthony Blunt.

Blunt’s investigations in 1943 were supported by a cast of sub-agents, many of whom were his former lovers. Blunt, who was gay, recruited them independently and ran them outside of MI5. He and his team chased a succession of leads that led nowhere. But then at the end of the year there was an apparent breakthrough by MI6, the intelligence agency that runs a network of spies overseas.

As luck would have it, MI6’s man in Stockholm, Peter Falk, had befriended Kraemer’s housekeeper earlier that year and persuaded her to pass on intelligence. As well as copying documents that she found in his office, she managed to press the key to Kraemer’s personal safe into a pat of butter. From the impression it made, Falk was able to send measurements to London. By some miracle the key they sent back fitted perfectly, giving London a line deep into the mystery of Josephine. The problem was Kraemer himself didn’t appear at all sure who Josephine was, or where her information came from.

One tranche of papers was deemed so sensitive that Falk decided to fly back to London to deliver the information in person. On December 23, 1943, he met Blunt for dinner at the Reform Club and passed across the table documents that seemed to suggest a Russian link to Josephine. Falk records in his unpublished memoir that Blunt became uncharacteristically angry, insisting that there could be no such connection, before gathering up the papers, warning Falk to say nothing and promising to investigate. There is no record that Blunt did any such thing, nor that he made any report of what he had been told.

Shortly afterwards Blunt was to identify Josephine as a loose-lipped Swedish diplomat called Frank Cervell, to whom he had been able to feed false intelligence: sure enough, the flow of Josephine’s accurate and damaging material was stemmed. It looked as if Blunt had got his man. But then a strange thing happened. As preparations began in earnest for the D-Day landings of June 1944, Josephine piped up again.

The D-Day deception

D-Day, the British and American invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, was one of the greatest intelligence coups of this or any war. British intelligence (it was a joint MI5/MI6 operation) had an agent in Spain, one Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, masquerading as a fanatical Nazi who passed information to the Germans and deceived them into believing that any attack in Normandy was a feint and that the real attack would come around Calais. It was stunningly successful; the Germans held back vital Panzer tank reinforcements for days in anticipation of an attack that never came. Despite the fact that he had got it so wrong, Pujol was even awarded the Iron Cross for his services to the Reich.

Garbo was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, known only to a tiny number of intelligence officers — one of whom was Anthony Blunt — and yet it transpired that Josephine had been passing on the same disinformation to the Germans. When this fact emerged after the war, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, who had been a key member of the D-Day deception team, was baffled and dismayed to discover that “Josephine had been playing with our toys”. After the war, Jodl, the chief of the German staff, was adamant it was Josephine’s intelligence that had been the most significant reason for Hitler holding back reinforcements.

After D-Day, Josephine’s tactics changed: she now began to pass on worryingly accurate information about the Allied war effort, culminating (but not ending in) the hugely detailed Market Garden intelligence, which, at the time it was sent to Kraemer, was still known by only a handful of senior Allied officers.

Clearly Blunt had got the wrong man. And it was at this point that I began to seriously wonder what he had been up to. It was as if he was deliberately looking the wrong way. Could it be that Blunt was Josephine and had been tasked with investigating himself? How could that make any sense? After all, Blunt was a Russian spy not a German one.

The race to Berlin

Of course in 1944, after the success of D-Day, it was unthinkable that a senior British figure could be passing secrets to the Nazis. Apart from anything else, who would be willing to risk execution for treason in pursuit of a losing cause?

However, thwarting Operation Market Garden was of strategic importance not just to the Nazis but to Russia too. Stalin had wanted D-Day to succeed because it would open up a second front in Europe and draw German troops away from the Russian front. But if Market Garden was successful the Americans and British would arrive in Berlin first, while Stalin’s troops remained stranded hundreds of miles to the east. As Vladimir Putin recently reminded us, Stalin was less concerned about the struggle against fascism than winning the “great patriotic war”. It was about advancing Russian interests and, above all, that meant getting to Berlin and dominating eastern Europe. Without that victory, there would have been no Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the line of communist rule that cut Europe in half at the war’s end, would have extended barely beyond the borders of Russia. Josephine’s leaks align with Stalin’s strategic goals to a remarkable degree.

On May 12, 1945, a British special forces unit based in Denmark captured Kraemer, the German spymaster who was the conduit for Josephine’s intelligence, in an office at Flensburg, a town in the north of Germany that was serving as the country’s foreign office. Five days after being roused from the bed he was sharing with his secretary, Kraemer arrived in England for interrogation. Leading the investigation was Anthony Blunt.

MI6 continued to insist that Kraemer was being fed intelligence by a source in London and asked Blunt to investigate links to Moscow, following reports that Kraemer was working for the Russians. According to one of the MI5 memos, Blunt responded by saying this line of questioning was “flogging a dead horse” and that he strongly believed Kraemer was mostly telling the truth about his contacts, who he said were Japanese diplomats and Hungarian agents operating from the Iberian peninsula.

By now many of Kraemer’s colleagues from German intelligence had also fallen into Allied hands. One of them was his boss, Walter Schellenberg, who was certain that Josephine had helped the Germans by providing a detailed description of Allied battle plans around the Dutch town of Arnhem, near the German border — a critical point in Operation Market Garden.

At 3pm on September 17, just two hours after Allied paratrooper and glider landings had begun, two SS Panzer Divisions, the 9th and 10th, were sent immediately to engage the enemy at Arnhem and nearby Nijmegen, an order that is credited with playing a decisive role in securing the German victory. There is a strong case to be made that the speed of their deployment was as a result of the intelligence the Germans had received.

MI6 continued to faithfully pass on the Arnhem information to the MI5 interrogators, but none of these allegations were ever put to Kraemer. Instead, just as the year before, a succession of false leads were followed and went nowhere until, on Blunt’s orders, the case was quietly dropped and Kraemer was sent back to Germany on October 26, 1945.

He was declared by the British to be an “inveterate liar”, a justification that MI5 used as the reason for refusing to share its reports on Kraemer’s interrogation with the Americans. Given that it was American intelligence that had first alerted the British to the existence of a high-level Nazi agent codenamed Josephine, this must have seemed an act of extraordinary hypocrisy.

It was one of Blunt’s last official duties as an MI5 officer. He spent much of early 1946 in Germany, where, among other things, he recovered Edward VIII’s deeply compromising fan letters to Hitler. It seems likely there were numerous other royals to be disentangled from their enthusiasm for the Nazi cause, as well as royal art to track down, and that all this was to provide him with a healthy store of kompromat against the royal family that was to protect him for the rest of his life, as well as get him his job as surveyor of the King’s pictures.

The elusive ‘Major Blunt’

The official story of Josephine is told in a 300-page report commissioned by the British secret services in the 1970s. Written by the retired intelligence officer Patricia McCallum, it calls itself, simply enough, a report into “the Kraemer (or Josephine) case”. No explanation is given as to why, thirty-odd years after the event, MI5 were still scratching their heads.

The report was declassified in 2003 when MI5 quietly released it into the National Archives. It painstakingly examines how Kraemer had received the Arnhem report from Josephine on the eve of Market Garden, and presents in great detail how MI5 and MI6 had mounted a forlorn hunt to establish the mole’s identity.

McCallum noted that MI6 and MI5 had bitterly disagreed over the provenance of the intelligence. MI6 were convinced Josephine was a real agent working out of London. MI5, guided by Blunt, had come to deny her very existence and said Kraemer had invented her to hide from Berlin the fact he didn’t have any real agents. Certainly Kraemer never met Josephine and had no idea who or what she was. He merely received her intelligence from a variety of sources and passed it on to his masters in Berlin.

McCallum notes how odd it is that no investigation into the Arnhem betrayal had taken place immediately after it came to light. Thirty-plus years later, having been asked to conduct her inquiries, she concludes that it is impossible to discover who had given away the Arnhem intelligence. She writes: “Finally, it must be admitted that the Kraemer case is and will always remain something of a mystery.”

Yet there is one name at the heart of the Josephine inquiry that raises questions the report doesn’t even begin to address. A certain “Maj. Blunt” strolls in and out of its pages without the author once mentioning that this is that Major Blunt, the Russian double agent. When McCallum came to write her report, Blunt had admitted his treachery a decade earlier. So why wasn’t his double agent status taken into account? It is surely worth a mention if one is looking into how vital operational intelligence came to be passed to Britain’s enemies?

Why was Blunt being treated as if he was just another bona fide intelligence officer? Why was it that McCallum makes no reference to the fact that Blunt had also led the 1943-44 investigation into the identity of Josephine? McCallum refers to the earlier investigation often, but without ever mentioning Blunt. The oddities mount up, but perhaps the most startling is the moment when, in reference to the D-Day deception, she writes cheerfully: “One thing is certain. Had Josephine been a real agent, she would have had to be a member of the deception staff!’’ Anthony Blunt was a member of the deception staff.

The reality is that just as Christiaan Lindemans’s treachery only really makes sense when seen through a Russian lens, so it is that Josephine only really makes sense as Blunt. The alternatives are either that there really was a fervent Nazi at the heart of the Allied war effort who operated in secret and then disappeared from view having fooled every single intelligence agency in the world, or that Kraemer was such an inspired liar that he was able to invent Allied battle plans with startling accuracy. Neither alternative stacks up.

The cover-up: Kim Philby steps in

A smoking gun, if there is one, is hidden in the files of either the British or Russian secret services and there it will for ever remain. But Anthony Blunt had motive, means and opportunity in spades. He could also rely on a highly organised and well-resourced network of Russian agents and British traitors working out of London and Stockholm. Russian intelligence had a large official presence in London from 1941. It was all too easy for him to pass on at least 1,700 secret documents to Moscow and, if he was Josephine, then he was the apex of a well-oiled Russian disinformation machine cherry-picking what to feed back to the Germans.

By 1944 Blunt was writing Churchill’s security briefings; he was the liaison for intelligence sharing between MI5 and MI6; he had an oversight role on the deception committee. He was also in charge of the Triplex operation, still secret today, that intercepted every single diplomatic bag from Allies and neutral countries with embassies in London. It was this role that gave him the most likely means to pass on intelligence to the Nazis. The Arnhem warning was delivered directly to Kraemer by diplomatic mail. If that failed there were regular commercial flights to Stockholm from Scotland and he even had the extensive Iberian spy network of his fellow Cambridge spy Kim Philby to call on.

The day after the Arnhem betrayal an emotional Blunt contacted his Russian handler to say that he was quitting. The Russians responded by love-bombing their agent and at the end of September 1944 Blunt met his handler, Boris Kreshin, in London. The Russians wanted to pass on to Blunt how delighted they were with their English spy and Kreshin took great pride in reading out a commendation from the Kremlin. It was accompanied with a £100 payment, worth about £6,000 today. Until then Blunt had always been careful not to accept money from the Russians as he maintained his treachery was motivated by political ideology. This time he gratefully accepted the cash.

Tellingly, it was Philby — then in charge of anticommunism as head of MI6’s Section IX — who oversaw the handling of the Kraemer case after Blunt’s retirement from the secret services in 1945, at the age of 38. And it was Philby who kept the Americans at bay when they began asking tricky questions about Josephine and Kraemer.

Philby would become the most famous of the Cambridge spies. But if Blunt really was Josephine then that not only places him as the most important member of the group, but arguably the most influential spy in history. His actions contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen and women and countless civilians who perished as a result of a prolonged war. The million or more German women who were raped by the Russians in the aftermath of their victory can also be laid at his door, as well as the decades of brutal oppression under the Soviet yoke suffered by millions more citizens of eastern Europe. His actions shaped the history of the 20th century and continue to shape the world today.
The Traitor of Arnhem by Robert Verkaik (Headline £20) is published by Headline on May 9. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount available for Times+ members