- BBC television, sir. Anything to say to us at all, sir? - On November the 20th 1979, a distinguished-looking 72-year-old ` a knight of the realm, a royal courtier for almost 30 years, and one of the finest art historians in the world ` was about to reveal another, more sinister side to his character. This was Sir Anthony Blunt, Russian secret agent, the spy inside Buckingham Palace. - How do you feel about being called a traitor now? - I can't deny it. - It wasn't just having a traitor in the royal household. He was a criminal, but he was a Savile Row-suited criminal. - In a career of treachery spanning three decades, he gave away the Allies' most precious wartime secret, the D-Day invasion plans. - He threatened the whole operation and thousands of lives. - He spends his lunch hours searching through files and looking at his colleagues' desks. - He seems to have had a mania for betrayal. - He sent an astonishing nearly 1800 documents to Moscow Centre while he was at the heart of MI5. - But he claimed to be loyal at least to the British crown. He undertook secret missions for them to smuggle art treasures and perhaps to smuggle documents, which the House of Windsor had to keep secret. Some suggest, though, that his true loyalty was not to the crown but to the Kremlin. - He microfilmed a lot, and that went off to the Russians. - The question now is could these secrets still harm the royal family today? While the history of the House of Windsor is well known, hidden in archives across the country are stories waiting to be uncovered. Now, with access to some of these previously classified documents, private diaries, and communiques, this series can now reveal some of the secrets of the royals. Captions by Able. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021 (INDISTINCT CHATTER) Anthony Blunt felt at home with the royals. A great palace filled with art treasures was his happy place. He always seemed easy in the Queen's company. After all, the Queen Mother was his third cousin. Blunt's in with the royals began as an early age. And as a little boy, he'd got to know the current queen's grandmother, the formidable Queen Mary. - When Queen Mary was a girl, she was Princess May of Teck, and she lived in a quite grand house in the middle of Richmond Park. And that was only a mile or so away from the house in Petersham where Anthony Blunt's mother, Hilda, grew up. When Mary was queen of England, she would give second-hand clothes to his mother, Hilda. It was a big family secret in the Blunts that the ladies of the family would wear Queen Mary's castoffs. - Little Anthony would see this very imposing lady arrive but could never breathe a word about why she was visiting. - Early on, Anthony learned to keep the royal family's secrets. He was also related distantly to the Queen Mother. His mother's family was rather grand. So it's definitely the case that Anthony was the sort of person that, in that day and age, went to work for the royals. - But before that, the traditional route of boarding school and Oxbridge. Blunt arrived here at Marlborough College in Wiltshire in 1921, aged 13. He hated games, but he was a natural scholar with a love for the arts. - He went to Marlborough, where two of his best friends were Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman, the poets. This is where his interest in art began. And he was a rather more cosmopolitan figure, I suspect, than most of his contemporaries. - Teenage Blunt's favourite pastime was to stride out with his poetry-loving pals along nearby Martinsell Hill, a place that he'd return to for solace for the rest of his life. From Marlborough, Anthony Blunt got a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. And Trinity is a very, very particular college. Amazingly beautiful buildings and the biggest college at either Oxford or Cambridge, so a very, very strong sense of itself. - (AGGRESSIVELY SPEAKS GERMAN) - As fascism grew in Germany, many across Europe, including Britain, were attracted to its ideology. - In the early days of the '30s, there was a lot of sympathy in aspects of the British establishment. There was a lot of interest in how the Nazi regime was creating greatness, as they saw it, how the Nazi regime was obsessed with hierarchy and aristocratic elite and also white supremacy. And these things, I think, were very appealing to many members of the aristocracy. - In 1933, Hitler's taken over Germany. The fascists are becoming more powerful in Europe, and we must do something about it. I think there was certainly a sort of ideological contagion in 1930s Cambridge which was a left contagion and the left the only way to fight fascism. Some of them went the communist route. - With the 1917 Russian revolution still a recent memory, Blunt was among the many intellectuals beguiled by the idea of a Soviet worker's paradise. - In theory, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idealisation of the masses. In practice, it was a new kind of tyranny headed by Stalin. And yet he abdicated his intellectual responsibilities by refusing to face up to what was evident ` not to everybody but should have been evident to him ` namely, that Stalin was a mass murder of an entirely new kind. - And Cambridge is absolutely crucial in Blunt's development as an academic, as a personality, and politically, and on his road to becoming a spy. - Blunt could flaunt his communist sympathies but not the fact that he was gay. - Although homosexuality was completely illegal in the country until 1967 and punishable with prison sentences, it wasn't the normal culture at Trinity, but I think you could get away if you were in a certain aesthetic sect. You could get away if you were discreet with a measure of homosexuality. - At Cambridge, Blunt met the man who'd shape the rest of his life, another brilliant scholar who would become one of the most dangerous spies in British history. - He met Guy Burgess, this extraordinary, cherub-faced creature who had huge, huge amounts of energy, was very mischievous, very funny but really chaotic. Burgess had a reputation for sort of bringing out his shy and anxious homosexual friends by sort of taking them to bed maybe once and then kind of encouraging them to be more out about it. And Burgess was good at that, and so Blunt gets caught up in this. He would never become a spy had it not been for Burgess. - A friend of Anthony Blunt's, first a student then a colleague on artistic projects, confirms in a rare interview how crucial this friendship would prove. - It don't think he actually admitted to the fact that he was perhaps almost in love with Burgess, but I think that is part of it. If he wasn't in love, he was somehow lost in admiration for him. - Even as Blunt committed himself to communism, still those links with the royal family remained. As Blunt and his communist friends pledge their opposition to fascism, sympathy to the Nazi cause in sections of the British establishment continue to grow. In what would later become the notorious policy of appeasement, many across British society thought the best way to keep peace in Europe was to be on good terms with Adolf Hitler, and among them was some of Britain's royal family. - The Windsor dynasty was actually German, and the royal family had large numbers of German relations, many of whom, during the 1930s, threw in their lot, to a greater or lesser extent, with Hitler. A lot of the royals felt that this was a legitimate thing to do and that Germany ought to be appeased and that the two nations should get on together. - It was King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 to become the Duke of Windsor, who's been most often accused of having Nazi sympathies. But many historians believe he wasn't alone. - The Duke of Windsor was presented always as the fall guy because we have film of the Duke of Windsor in Nazi Germany with the Duchess, having a conversation with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and being generally complicit in what was going on in Nazi Germany from '37, '38, and '39, the three years before the war starts. That's been unfair to Edward because it paints him as the sole figure who was doing this, whereas in the background all the while was an equally avid collaborator with the Nazis and the Germans, which was his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, who, right up until September 1939, was trying to make contact with Hitler to get a last-minute peace plan accepted with Hitler before the outbreak of war. - The new head of the royal family, the King, also seemed to want peace at any price, and historians believe he'd later need Anthony Blunt to keep the Windsor family secrets under wraps. - I think what people tend to forget is that George VI was just as much an appeaser as his eldest brother, the Duke of Windsor, as he now was. I think one can really point the finger legitimately at George VI and say that, even as late as 1940, he was still hankering for appeasement. He was certainly implicated in the appeasement business right up to his fetlocks. - By the end of the 1930s, with war on the horizon, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess had been secretly recruited as potential agents for the Soviet Union. Along with three associates ` Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross ` they would be known to history as the Cambridge Five. Their glittering academic backgrounds would earn them easy access to government jobs, where secrets were ripe for the picking. By 1940, to counter the growing Nazi threat, British intelligence was expanding rapidly. - A lot of people got in, and they got in on the old boy network. At that point, the fact you'd gone to the right school and the right university and you had friends in high places would get you in, and no one, before then, they imagined would ever betray their country. - Kim Philby's in MI6. Anthony Blunt's in MI5. Burgess is sort of swanning around between the two and doing little bits of extra work. John Cairncross is the private secretary of the cabinet minister without portfolio, so he has access to all cabinet papers. I mean, how extraordinary! - Blunt picks up office gossip, which he passes across. Anything that crosses his desk he will give to the Russians. He's meeting them every week and giving them material for them to photograph and return. - He spends his lunch hours searching through files and looking at his colleagues' desk, so he's an incredibly active spy. He brings out papers hidden in his briefcase, wrapped up in brown paper, and then he hands it over to his Russian contact, who takes it and photographs it overnight and then delivers it back to him in the morning. - Blunt was so keen to keep Stalin in the loop that he passed on secrets which could have proved disastrous for the Allies. When questioned in 1979, he was less than candid about what actually happened. - What kind of work were you doing for the Russians, then, inside MI5? - The information that I passed to them was almost exclusively about German intelligence services. And I had no information about military defences or military... anything to do, really, with the military side. - Blunt was part of the planning staff for D-Day. What's so extraordinary is that he passed across information to the Russians which could easily have found itself in German hands and betrayed the whole operation. Blunt was aware that the invasion was going to take place not in the Pas de Calais, which was part of the deception plan, which was, of course, the closest point between Britain and France, but actually along the Normandy coast. By giving this information to the Russians which could possibly have found its way to the Germans, he threatened the whole operation, the whole deception plan going back several years, and, you know, thousands of lives. - He jeopardised that operation because had there been a German mole at Moscow Centre who could have tipped off Hitler, that would have been a catastrophic act on his part. - Were any lives put at risk during the war when you were inside MI5 and also working for the Russians? - Owing to me? - Yes. - I think the answer to that is categorically no. - The thing about Blunt is he worked like a vacuum cleaner. He sent an astonishing nearly 1800 documents to Moscow Centre while he was at the heart of MI5. (ENGINE RUMBLES) PHONE: My dad always taught me that you gotta ride like everyone's out to get you. (LOUD WHOOSHING) (ENGINE RUMBLES SOFTLY) (ENGINE RUMBLES LOUDLY) I'll be learning to ride a bike for as long as I live. (ENGINE RUMBLES IN BURSTS) Ride for your whole life, not a short amount of time. - By the war's end, Blunt had been offered a prestigious new job, one which rekindled those distant boyhood memories when he was close to the royals. - In 1945, he had impressed the court sufficiently for him to take over the role of surveyor of the King's pictures. It gave him fantastic influence in all sorts of ways. - In 1945, I went back to my normal academic work and was also appointed surveyor of the King's pictures. I did not apply for or seek this appointment, but I was pressed to allow my name to be put forward, and, when offered it, accepted on the grounds that I knew there was much work to be done on the collection and that I believed I could do it. - He's working at Windsor Castle on the collection owned by the royal family, going in in his shirt and tie and occasionally having lunch with the King and Queen at Windsor. What an extraordinary dance. - I think Blunt would have been enormously amused in his heart of hearts by the fact that he, a Russian spy, had found a little niche in the court. - What is this ex-Marxist historian doing taking this job? I think he thought that it was a safety measure. Who would suspect somebody who was the surveyor of the King's pictures of having been a Soviet spy? I mean, nobody, obviously. It sort of absolutely puts him in a very, very safe space. - Just how far Blunt was trusted by the King soon became clear. He was asked to carry out a series of mysterious missions, searching for art treasures and for sensitive documents. - In August 1945, Blunt was sent to Germany on a mission to recover letters and other things that perhaps belonged to the British royal family that they wanted to have returned for safekeeping in the chaos at the end of the war. - The story at the time was that the letters to be collected were those written by Queen Victoria to her daughter, Empress Victoria, mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. Blunt was sent because he'd be able to identify the letters quickly and easily, but there are suggestions Blunt was looking for more than just Victoria's correspondence. - What are they searching for? There's been tonnes of speculation over the years. The crucial suggestion being made is that they went to try and find correspondence about the possibility that Edward might perhaps have been talking to the Nazis about if the Nazis took over Britain, he might take over the throne. - Blunt headed for the Hesse family stronghold, Friedrichshof, in southwest Germany. Prince Philipp of Hesse was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, well known to King George and his family, and also one of Hitler's most powerful aristocratic henchmen. - Prince Philipp of Hesse is number 53 in the list of wanted Nazi criminals. He's been one of the intermediaries during the war and indeed before the war. He's been very close to Windsor and other members of the royal family, like the Duke of Kent. And I think the suggestion is that there may be correspondence at Friedrichsberg that needs to be recovered. - There's no doubt that George VI was very... anxious about what might be found at this particular palace. George VI did not want the fact that Philipp of Hesse had been quite close, quite friendly with him and his brother, George, before the war to come out. I think it would have been very embarrassing. - Churchill sanctioned this mission as well as George VI because they both understood the threat potentially caused by knowledge of how far back this sympathy with the Nazis ran through the royal family. If this comes out, the monarchy would be very, very jeopardised. What's amazing about this to me is that Anthony Blunt knew exactly where to go, and they knew exactly what they were looking for. Blunt assigned two soldiers to go into the place and locate these documents, which are in the place in two packing cases, so there's the presumption that they know what they're looking for, really, and they're on the road, taking the papers away. - In the chaos of newly defeated Germany, there's evidence that Blunt was also on the lookout for treasure to which the Windsors felt they had a family claim. There was a treasure trove which had belonged to a Windsor relative, the Duke of Brunswick ` gold bracelets, a pearl and diamond necklace, a diamond and pearl brooch, and much more. It was all gathered up and signed for by Anthony Blunt. It was only after they'd been smuggled back to Windsor for safekeeping that doubts arose. Was this such a good idea? If word ever got out... - There was a suggestion that this would not look good. It would look like war looting themselves, this safekeeping. - And so, as one document claims, in an episode rather like a wartime Ealing comedy, Blunt was ordered to smuggle the treasures back into Germany. - I've uncovered a file from March 1946 showing Blunt returning material to the Duke of Brunswick, material that had been taken presumably the previous year for so-called safekeeping, to keep it away from the Russians, to keep it away from some of the American looters. And this varied from pictures, Madonna, to furniture to, again, letters. - As documents which sped between the foreign office and the palace make clear, the main thing was to keep the story out of the newspapers, especially the American ones. A foreign office official was confident he could handle the British press. - You suggested on the phone that we might nobble the editor of The Times. Blunt will consult with the Private Secretary to the King and see if he would like to nobble the editor. Blunt, of course, will be as silent as the tomb. - Anthony Blunt had proved he could carry out tricky tasks for the palace and keep his mouth shut. After the top-secret missions on behalf of the King, Blunt's position in the royal household was cemented. He was really very trusted. - But was that trust perhaps misplaced? For over 30 years, one investigator has tried to establish exactly what happened in the world of smoke and mirrors created by Anthony Blunt. Roland Perry is a writer and historian who believes Blunt betrayed not just his country but also the House of Windsor. His source is the Russian spy master who controlled the Cambridge Five, Yuri Modin. He operated in London throughout the 1950s but made his claims in Moscow, where he lived out his retirement. - Yuri Modin was in Moscow with the KGB as a young man during the war. And he was on the foreign desk, which meant he was looking after, in this case, all the British double agents' material that was coming in. I met him in his West Moscow apartment in 1993 and 1996. - Blunt and...? - And the royal family. - Ah, royal family. - He made a special mission for King George VI. - Yes. - But Modin claimed that Blunt wasn't only working for the royals when he scooped up palace secrets from war-torn Germany. - Yuri Modin was very clear that it was important information that was given to the Russians ` microfilmed and given to them. The major stuff I was fascinated in was the relationship between the Duke of Windsor, the Duke of Kent, and others in the royal family in England with the German cousins who were cousins of the Kaiser. He didn't really open up about it. He just said, 'We have that material.' I said to him, 'What did you have? What letters did you have?' And he said, 'Oh, the two dukes,' and he mentioned Windsor, and he mentioned Kent. - What Modin claimed was that Anthony Blunt double-crossed the royal family. Far from keeping their family secrets under wraps, he passed them to Britain's principal Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. - Blunt got all of the documents out. He microfilmed the lot. He took a few days over it. And that went off to the Russians in KGB headquarters, and then it was taken back to Windsor Castle. - There is no firm evidence proving what the spy master said is true. There's not even evidence that Blunt had gathered compromising material in the first place. But events which would play out later certainly suggest that here was a man was some kind of secret knowledge which would help to protect him when the chips were down. At the war's end, Blunt left MI5 and focused on what he always claimed to be his true vocation. As an art historian, he steadily achieved a world-class reputation as a teacher and, in particular, the greatest living expert on the French painter Nicola Poussin. He was admired, adored even, by his students at the prestigious Courtauld Institute. - He spoke on their level, was prepared to accept correction from them if they thought that he'd said something that they thought was wrong, and, unlike a lot of art historians, was prepared to admit he was wrong. - Neither did he boast about his access to royal circles ` or even much enjoy it. - If you were working for the crown, you were, to some degree, a courtier, so you were expected, when invited, to turn up to a state dinner or something like that, and I don't think Anthony liked doing that at all. - But Blunt's secret missions for the King had cemented his relationship with the royal family. And as surveyor of the vast royal collection, 7000 paintings and even more drawings, many of them priceless works of art, he was a familiar figure at the various royal palaces and still, of course, a Soviet spy. - The point about the palace is that it was a place where those on the inside were insiders and got access to inside gossip, so even if it was only snippets of information, it would have been invaluable to the Soviets as background. - Obviously, there was no value in his telling them what the King was having for breakfast, but it's possible that just by social interchange, he will still pick up stuff that he could tell the other agents. - But two of Blunt's fellow spies had been far more active, and they came under scrutiny from Britain's spy catchers. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean felt the net closing around them. With Blunt's assistance, they disappeared. - When Burgess and Maclean defect, a lot of suspicion comes on Blunt, and you would think that might be a moment when the royal family say, 'OK, time for a new broom now. We'll get a new surveyor in,' but instead, he continues. - MI5, based then in this unassuming street in London's Mayfair, suspected Blunt knew more than he was telling. After all, he was one of Burgess's closest friends. - He is interviewed 11 times between 1951, I think, and 1964. Some of the people they sent to interview him he'd known really well during the war. He'd known them for ages. - REPORTER: No day has ever dawned that rivalled this, this regal lady leaving her palace to be crowned queen. - 1952 Queen Elizabeth succeeded her father, George VI. If the suspicions about Blunt ever did reach the throne, they appear not to have counted. - The Queen Mother had a lot of power over the young queen, and Blunt was still someone who the Queen Mother trusted, and the Queen herself knew Blunt had been privy to her father's secrets, and now, now she's on the throne, they really are her secrets. - The early 1960s were challenging times for Britain's intelligence services, as traitors appeared one after another. In 1961, double agent George Blake was outed. In 1962, John Vassall, also a Russian agent. And in 1963, Blunt's associate Kim Philby finally fled to Moscow. - There just seems to be these terrible, terrible scandals in which British intelligence and the British government have behaved really woefully incompetently. - Then, in 1964, the American FBI told their MI5 colleagues that they'd had a positive tip-off; Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy. No doubts remained. But instead of being hauled off to jail, Blunt was offered immunity without publicity if he just told them all he knew. - The main thing that MI5, the government, and the royal family don't want is for the story of his spying to come out. You know, that's the key thing. They don't want the fuss. If this story comes out, heads will roll. - MI5 passed the news to the Queen's private secretary. There was a spy inside the palace. - One can only speculate about this, but I would have thought the Queen would have been absolutely horrified by this revelation. What Blunt was doing was not just a betrayal of the nation. It was a betrayal of her father, her family. - There's complete panic in the Queen's household. If it got out that she'd had a Soviet spy in the bosom of her household all along, it would, at best, suggest the Queen and her father and her mother were very naive and the royal household had no governance, and at worst, it might suggest that there was some kind of relationship, some kind of knowledge, some kind of forgiveness of traitors. - The Queen was in a very tricky position. She had to take the advice that she got, and I think she received very strong instruction from the government that this was something for the benefit of the country and that she's got to go along with it. - MI5 told the royal household that they should leave Blunt be. He could easily have retired or resigned. He had plenty of other things to do. But MI5 actually tells the royal household, 'Don't do anything because it might draw attention.' That's just nonsense. - He keeps his knighthood, he keeps his positions, and he seems to keep his social standing in the British establishment. - He was... given an extraordinary deal. And he took advantage of it, and he was rather pleased about it. Blunt absolutely got away with it. - Some historians are convinced that Blunt's secret knowledge now served to protect him. - It made sense for Blunt to exploit that situation and for Blunt to say, 'I could embarrass you further by coming out with what I was sent to do in 1945.' Blunt was literally the man who knew too much. - They play the game. He plays the game. He stays with his job. He wouldn't discuss with them the letters, of course, but the King knew how much he knew, and then Queen Elizabeth knew and the Queen Mother. She was very clear about what he'd done for her husband. She was always in defence of him. And she had a lot of power. Don't underestimate her power and influence over her daughter. - It is absolutely astonishing, really, that the Queen personally congratulated him on his retirement. You just thought they'd fix it so that she never saw him again. - I think it must have niggled away at her, the fact that she was nurturing a viper in her bosom, as it was. She must have felt extremely uncomfortable about this. - REPORTER: Here comes the prime ministerial Rover, bearing now Mrs Thatcher as prime minister. - For 15 years, Blunt's secret remained within the top tier of government until a new prime minister came to power and decided enough was enough. On Thursday, the 15th of November 1979, the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, read a statement to the House of Commons. - Her position is 'He's a traitor. 'I'm not gonna lie for him. I'm gonna admit it.' And she does. She stands up in the House of Commons, and she confirms that Anthony Blunt was this traitor. And there's this huge furore. You know, the establishment covered up for so long. They let him off. They let him get away with it. He has to resign all his fellowships and is sort of cast out. And there is this sort of 'how awful'; a man who looked after the Queen's paintings was a Russian agent. - For Thatcher, the whole Blunt story typified a kind of cronyism, upper-class, old boys network that she completely despised. And she felt this is exactly the sort of thing she wanted to sweep out of government and he sort of had it coming. - Part of that was her anti-establishment instinct. She just thought, 'Here's this guy. 'If he hadn't been Sir Anthony Blunt ` posh, well connected ` 'they would have thrown him to the wolves.' - Blunt gave a stage-managed press conference ` half interview, half reluctant confession. - In the mid 1930s, it seemed to me and to many of my contemporaries that the Communist Party and Russia constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism since the western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude towards Germany. I was persuaded by Guy Burgess that I could best serve the cause of anti-fascism by joining him in his work for the Russians. This was a case of political conscience against loyalty to country. I chose conscience. - when you made your confession, did the Queen know? - Well, this is a question, again, which I would rather not discuss because my information, certainly, if not second-hand, is rather vague. And I can only say that as far as I was told at the time ` and later ` she was not. But I may be wrong about this. That was what I was told. - Certainly, the Queen's private secretary knew. And when asked if, as a self-confessed traitor, the decent thing to do would be to resign as a palace employee, his response was typically bullish. - I don't see... I was there to do a job. And I still thought it was important to do, and I was still doing it. - What will you do now? - I hope to be able to go back and do some work on art history. - Anything to say to us at all, sir? It must have been a very bad time. - The interview only worsened Blunt's position for many who watched. Where was the apology or any sense of shame? - One must also think oneself back to that time and to his own age and time. Now it's absolutely expected that everyone will show contrition publicly and all the rest of it. That wouldn't have been, you know, part of the way he was brought up. - The papers labelled him 'the spy with no shame'. His knighthood was revoked. But questions remained for the royals. - The Queen was really exposed, not just the fact that there'd been a spy in the royal household but also that when it had been discovered, nothing really had been done. What did the Queen know, and why didn't she do anything about it? - The Queen Mother was known as the Imperial Ostrich because she tended to bury her head in the sand. She didn't like to face nasty realities. She liked everything to be sweetness and light. And when she was asked afterwards about Blunt, she replied, charmingly, 'Isn't it a lovely day?' In other words, she refused to say anything about this at all. Where Blunt was concerned, silence was the best protection that they could possibly find. - In '79, he was a washed-up spy. He was quite happy to see his life out, even though he was harassed by the media, of course, anywhere he went. He just remained mute, and it was a smart move for him. - It wasn't just having a traitor in the royal household. It was having a criminal. He was a criminal. But he was a Savile Row-suited criminal. His last years were lonely and unhappy, but he was not put in jail, where I think he should have been put. - Anthony Blunt had just four years to live after his public shaming. He died in 1983 at the age of 75. But there are suggestions his secrets did not die with him. If what the old spy master Yuri Modin said is true ` and there's no way of proving it ` then Russia still possesses a file detailing the fascist sympathies of the wartime-generation Windsor family. In many ways, it doesn't need to be true. What's important is that Russia claims to have a file of royal family secrets gifted to them by Anthony Blunt. In Russia, Modin served as a role model and an instructor to a rising generation of KGB officers. According to Perry, one of his star pupils was a certain Vladimir Putin. In 2014, a strange thing happened. On a walkabout in Canada, Prince Charles got chatting and, in an unguarded moment, compared Putin to Hitler for what Russia was doing in the Ukraine. It made the news across the world. - Shortly after this, Gennady Sokolov, a respected Russian journalist, hinted that there might be a release of a file connected with Blunt. Sokolov has close connections to the Russian intelligence services, and so this is probably something that would have come not just from a journalist but from some authorised source. - So did Anthony Blunt pass on compromising material, kompromat, to the Russians? No one in the west really knows. But for operational purposes, that's irrelevant. The mere threat of the Tony files can still do damage. - One of the Russian specialities is intelligence is what they call active measures, which is black propaganda, and so one of the challenges is to recognise what is truth and what is, in a sense, material released by the Russians in very covert forms which is not true at all. - Blunt took the secret of how far he betrayed the royals, if at all, to the grave. His ashes were scattered on Martinsell Hill, the place where he'd loved to roam as a schoolboy. Blunt's friend, Alastair Laing, never asked what lay behind his decision to become a spy. - No, I didn't. Perhaps I should have said to him, 'Why on Earth did you do this?' But I always felt that I did know why he'd done it, and it was all hung up with Guy Burgess, essentially, having this malevolent influence over him. - And he believes there could be a second reason why Blunt felt little loyalty to king and country. - I do think that there must have been... When he was this sort of servant of the crown, to be a homosexual, when to indulge in any homosexual act and be discovered in it would have meant instant dismissal and disgrace, he must have felt, you know, in some way, 'Well, you know, how loyal am I to a country that could potentially do this to me?' Captions by Able. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air.