Word: bluntly
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Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to answer some of these questions during an extraordinary debate in the House. She said Britain's intelligence chiefs had not wished to tip off Blunt's former employers in Moscow that he had been caught by removing him from his royal curatorship. The security service had told the Queen's private secretary that Blunt was thought to be a Soviet agent; the secretary, however, was also advised that the Queen should not seek to remove him. Beyond that, Thatcher said, "the immunity was offered to Blunt to get information on Soviet...
...position was upheld by two of her predecessors as Prime Minister in what Callaghan called "a calm and rational debate." Speaking from the corner Commons seat once occupied by Winston Churchill during the '30s, Edward Heath strongly denied that there had been any "coverup" and insisted that Blunt's disclosures about other Soviet spies had provided "a great deal of valuable information." Callaghan agreed with Heath, but allowed, with hindsight, that "the advice at the time about Blunt being allowed to stay in a palace post was wrong." And Callaghan added the icy comment: "I am bound...
...feeling was clearly shared by British newspapers excluded from the cozy press conference arranged by the Times for Blunt. Huffed the Daily Express: "Professor Blunt would not have been offered so much as a stale kipper at the Express office, he is such a phony old humbug." Maureen Bingham, who spent 30 months in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act, charged, "It is one law for the rich and one law for the poor...
...will be harder to cover up similar scandals in the future: last week, as a result of the Blunt debate, the House scuttled a proposed Protection of Official Information Act, whose stringent security regulations would have made the expo sure of the art historian as a spy all but impossible...
...Blunt affair came as no shock to the author of this Essay. He was recruited into the M16 branch of British intelligence during World War II, and operated for 18 months as a spy at Lourengo Marques in Mozambique. His boss at M16 headquarters was Kim Philby-as it turned out-of the KGB. "Intelligence gathering, "the author later observed, "is even more fantasy-prone than news gathering. In the latter, you are often expected to make bricks without straw, but in the former, to grow lemons without a tree. "He thus retired from spying with some relief...