Word: thatchers
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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...
...been a "fourth man" in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby spy ring of the 1940s and early 1950s. Boyle, who apparently drew heavily on sources formerly in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, even hinted broadly at his name, prompting questions from Labor members in Parliament. Last week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replied with a written statement that essentially admitted it was all true. There had been a fourth spy, and he had confessed to British intelligence in 1964. He was Sir Anthony Blunt, an art historian who was knighted by the Queen in 1956 and had served as curator and adviser...
...served as a "talent spotter" who recommended Britons for spy work. Among them were Undergraduates Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who later passed secrets to the U.S.S.R. while working in the British embassy in Washington after World War II. Blunt, a Marxist, joined British intelligence in 1940 and, said Thatcher, became an active spy himself. He supplied information to the Soviets until 1945, when he became royal art curator...
...Thatcher's version is different. According to her, British intelligence questioned Blunt eleven times between 1951 and 1964. In the initial investigation of Burgess and Maclean, said Thatcher, an unnamed source told the spy catchers that Maclean had said he was a "Comintern agent" as early as 1937 and that Blunt was one of his contacts. But the investigators could find no concrete evidence of treason, and finally decided that only an offer of immunity could induce Blunt to talk. The offer was made, Thatcher said. Blunt confessed and "subsequently provided useful information about Russian intelligence activities." The Queen...
...before Thatcher made that public statement, an official of the Cabinet Office discreetly warned Blunt of the impending disclosures and the erstwhile curator immediately vanished from his London flat. "The situation is quite scandalous," declared Labor M.P. James Wellbeloved. The Prime Minister's spokesman replied that the warning was a "common courtesy" and denied that Blunt was a fugitive from justice. Though the Queen stripped him of his knighthood last week, he apparently will incur no other punishment. Reflecting widespread public indignation over the incident, the Guardian charged that the cover-up by successive governments was "a totally abject...