Showing posts with label NKVD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NKVD. Show all posts

Thursday 18 May 2017

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 8): Red Spies’ Century-Old Creeping Barrage into Woolwich Arsenal.

It had been an extraordinary day.

I’d known that some six weeks earlier my distinguished mentor at Stoneburgh Military Academy had taken himself off to his old haunts when active undercover as an agent in Leipzigonce a Stasi nerve centre in their ruthless subjugation of over 16 million citizens of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik . . .  for over forty years that grim buffer zone between the Soviets and the West. As I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and is now Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, and a respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion.
           On that Monday I’d encountered him again in the staff refectory. A privilege of rank, he sat at his usual table wreathed in dense tobacco smoke, even though it was lunchtime. He unclenched his pipe and beckoned to me with that grave smile of his, which his enemies hereabouts call a hired assassin’s grin.

File labelled Woolwichkanonen from the archive of
East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in Leipzig. 
   

Secret Mines may take the Citadel when open Batteries cannot . . . the Woolwichkanonen Dossier . . . Operational Westspionage.

‘Take a look at a dossier we’ve turned up in our Stasi-Stadt of fond memory!’ He handed me a bulky manila wallet bound in faded brown tapes. It was marked Woolwichkanonen, and bore the imprimatur of East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit and its Leipzig District HQ’s address. Evidently, Weissener on his research trip had been rootling through more Stasi files unearthed by his former Bundesnachrichtendienst confederates from West Berlin.
           ‘Ein klassisches Kriegsspiel!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s beyond price! Woolwich Arsenal! Operational Westspionage, I suspect, for more than a century! A breach in the very crucible of naval munitions! Visit the Registry and see what they can make of it! Their precious stacks have records all the way back to the days of your good Queen Anne, but I suggest you start with files no later than the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Good hunting!’
           (The Registry of Stoneburgh Military Academy holds archives of counter-espionage actions from Britain’s earliest exploits in the Great Game, even covert adventures on the continent that hastened the Treaty of Utrecht.)
           ‘You’ll know MacGuffin when you find him,’ Weissener added mysteriously and, with that, he dismissed me and reacquainted himself with his companionable pipe.

In the Registry I consult POI(NTS)

I was greeted eagerly by our Custodian-Marshall, Dr Elwyn Challis, as soon as I set foot over the threshold of Stoneburgh’s Registry, the stately vaulted library – Piranesian in its immeasurable volume – that houses the largest single collection of printed source material related to the secret histories of centuries of imperial counterespionage. 
           The reason for Dr Challis’s eager greeting was not far to seek. Hilary Challis, Elwyn’s youngest daughter, sulked in a dark corner, telling the beads of a computational necklace of her own devising; there were many strings. 
           As I have touched upon in other despatches, Hilary is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall. A mathematical prodigy and fixated numerologist, she is generally to be found on non-regular (N-R) assignment to our Decrypt section, possibly because neither her father nor Stoneburgh’s resident shrink knows quite what to do with her.  
           So when I stated the nature of my research, Dr Challis hastily seized his chance for an extended smoke-break in the quad while I stood in as nursemaid.
           ‘But where do I start?’ I protested less mildly than was entirely proper. 
           Dr Challis waved airily at a pile of ancient card index boxes seemingly abandoned on a dusty shelf of rusty oak.
           ‘Look in the box marked “POI(NTS)”.’
           I must have looked blank, so he spelled it out for me: ‘Persons-Of-Interest (Non-Traceable-Suspects).’ His glance fell on Hilary, almost tenderly. ‘Little-Miss-Bolshie here knows where to dig. After all, she concocted the locator-codes for the cross-indexing. You have only to ask.’ Elwyn then twitched his necktie to share a look full of meaning and, brooking no further debate, he slipped away.

Herbert John Bennett.
Scapegoat or guilty of premeditated murder? 

An Unknown Quantity.

I had only one name from the Woolwichkanonen file to go on, so while Hilary stared vacantly at the shifting patterns of playing cards in one of her interminable games of Fortress Solitaire, I flipped through the first set of index cards to section B.  
           . . . Barker, Barlow, Barnes, BarrettBarsowski (see Barzowski) . . .  and there it was! Bartlett (see Bennett, H. J.)!
           Herbert John Bennett. The notorious Yarmouth Sands Murderer of 1900! At once all the pieces fell into place, which was more than could be said for Hilary’s playing cards whose empty columns led me to conclude the hand she’d dealt herself was hopelessly unwinnable. It was a state of hopelessness that served to compound her agitation. Her hand twitched at her throat where her metal dog tag (imprinted In Case of Emergency and listing her psychotropic medication) tangled with the abacuses strung round her neck.
           I’m ashamed to reveal that I was now facing a not inappreciable ethical dilemma, which I intended to ignore. Hilary was prone to forget the frequency of her prescribed doses (they were stowed in the patch pocket of her mountainous starched smock) yet I needed the acuity of Little-Miss-Bolshie’s brain before her drugs masked the phenomenal data retention that was the special gift of her congenital mental state. So I suppressed my better instincts and appealed to her for clarification, not to say indiscretions; a subsidiary acronym appended to the Bennett record card puzzled me.
           ‘U.Q. query H?’ I asked. 
           ‘Unknown Quantity, of course, dope,’ Hilary deigned to reply, fingers twitching. ‘That ID’s hidden on purpose. We call him Hyde. Daddy says he’s a wetjob merchant from the Dark Ages of the SIS.’
           Obviously, I would like to have pressed her more on this astonishing intelligence but, just then, I heard the stairs creak so I poured a glass of water from the carafe on Dr Challis’s desk and Hilary, docilely, reached for her pillbox. 
           ‘Citations in nine D files. Hyde is classified,’ she whispered dully. ‘Shh!’ I was enjoined to silence. ‘No use asking Pa.’
           I knew what a D file meant. It was chilling. 
           Don’t-Leave-a-Trace.
           When Dr Challis entered I gathered up my notes and made for the door.
           ‘Any luck with the cards?’ he asked breezily. I handed him the empty glass.
           ‘At first it seemed like a losing hand,’ was my obscure answer. ‘So now Hilary’s started another game.’ 
           Which was more or less true.


An Innocent Man Hanged? Or Payback for a Spy? 

I have mentioned elsewhere the milieu of our quarters at Cutter’s Gate, just inside Stoneburgh’s razor-wire perimeter fence, where the female members of the Decrypt Unit, together with other female N-R Personnel, are billeted. It’s an accommodation block converted from a Georgian terrace that was once home to army tailors.
           At that hour of the day – early afternoon on a Monday – I was pretty sure the old mess hall would be empty, and so it proved.
           Two ancient cutting tables had been retained as relics of the tailors’ former occupancy and one now served as a magazine exchange, where old copies of Cosmopolitan and Harpers & Queen mingled with current issues of Soldier.
           I cleared a space for my notes on the larger table and laid out my exhibits:
           Exhibit A: A postcard, printed in Great Yarmouth, dated September 15th 1900, 
           with a message penned in an unlettered hand  – 
           Just a card to say I got the £ Pos. alright and should have written sooner but 
           we are so busy at it till 10 at night on the guns which came on Thursday. 
           I think this is all this time. John Bartlett.
           Exhibit B: Annotated pages 22 and 23 – labelled 15th Gun Section Woolwich –
           with formulæ (derived from Krupps’s experiments reported in the Revue 
           d’Artillerie) to be applied to 12 inch guns, torn from The Artillery of the Future 
           and the New Powders by James Atkinson Longridge (both extracts published
           decade earlier). 
           Exhibit C: Attached clipping of trajectory diagram for the computation of 
           ballistics in naval gunnery. Source unknown.
           (Note: All the foregoing exhibits overstamped with the insignia of  the 
           okhrannoye otdelenie, otherwise known as the Okhrana, the secret police force
           of the Russian Empire. In addition, documents overstamped as archived by 
           Library of the Imperial Security Division in Saint Petersburg; and, latterly,
           appropriated by Abteilung IIIb, the Military Secret Service Section of the 
           Imperial German Army.)
           Exhibit D: (Huh! DDon’t-Leave-a-Trace!) My scribbled transcription of the 
           Index Card for Bennet/Bartlett from the POI(NTS) Persons-Of-Interest 
           (Non-Traceable-Suspects) box in the Registry.
           I released a prolonged sigh of pent up tension, because from these disparate scraps I began to see a schematic trajectory, too, it seemed to me – a trajectory of Russian espionage that had begun in Great Yarmouth and had advanced in a kind of creeping barrage of increasing precision ever closer to the heart Woolwich Arsenal throughout the first four decades of the 20th Century. 
           How?
           Curiously, my father – an armchair criminologist – knew the cause célèbre of Great Yarmouth very well. He had attended Gresham’s in Norfolk as a teenager, and this seaside resort was just along the coast so the notorious Bennett case was familiar to every schoolboy.
           So let us look at the chronology.

Manufacture of shells for 38-ton guns
at Woolwich Arsenal.

Chronology of Woolwich Espionage : Timeline of ‘John Bartlett’

The briefest aid to historical contextualisation . . . 
           1897-1899: Conman Herbert John Bennett marries Mary Jane Clarke in July 1897. He embarks on a series of swindles with his wife as accomplice. 
           1900: Bennett travels to South Africa where he remains exactly five days. Trial evidence points to Bennett’s rôle as spy in the pay of the Boers. Later in the year Bennett installs his wife in a house in Bexley Heath, adopting the false name ‘Bartlett’. At the same time, he begins the courtship of a parlourmaid, representing himself as a single man. The evidence gathered later indicates he is flush with cash at this time, although he earns only 30 shillings a week working at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich
           1900-1901: On September 15, 1900 (according to the Woolwichkanonen Dossier) a John Bartlett writes on an unfranked postcard from Great Yarmouth (Bennett was known to have been in Yarmouth that same night) admitting the receipt of a number of £1 Postal Orders. On September 23, 1900, Bennett’s estranged wife is found murdered on Great Yarmouth beach. When discovered that morning by a beachcombing boy of fourteen, the face of Mary is black and blue; round her neck is tied a bootlace with two knots: a reef knot and a granny knot. The lace is from one of her own boots. She is thought to have been killed late the previous night. After Bennett’s trial and conviction for his wife’s murder, his defence counsel, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, claimed his client was not guilty of the crime and he never ceased to believe in Bennett’s innocence. On March 21, 1901, Bennett was executed by hanging at Norwich Gaol, still denying his culpability in the killing.
           To the amazement of onlookers, as the large black flag was being hoisted at the gaol to indicate the hanging, the flagpole snapped in half – a sign that an innocent man had been executed, according to popular belief.


Chronology of Woolwich Espionage:                                                                         Timeline of the Third Departments and the Fifteenth Section.

A further stab at a potted historical contextualisation . . . 
           1880-1917: From its foundation in the Third Section of Russia’s Imperial Chancellery, the Okhrana is formed in 1880. As the Tsar’s Department of the State’s Secret Police force, the Okhrana is charged with the objective of actively pursuing and undermining revolutionary organisations by creating an espionage network of domestic and foreign agents in its mission to defend the monarchy from enemies at home and abroad. The Okhrana is dissolved in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and the Provisional Government is removed and replaced with a communist state.
           1889-1917: Department IIIb (Abteilung IIIb), the Military Secret Service of the Imperial German Army, conducts a formidable campaign of espionage against the Russian Empire. 
           1917-1991: Files of the Russian imperial secret police pass into possession of the Cheka, the first of a succession of Soviet state security organisations (GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and KGB) who become custodians of  records documenting the history of operational Westspionage from the 19th Century to the present day. 
           1925-1938: The vast, 1300 acres, Woolwich Arsenal munitions factory in south-east London is penetrated by Soviet Intelligence. The spy ring is centred on Gun Examination Workshop D.15 within the Inspector of Naval Ordnance’s Department. In 1935, the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) gets wind of the Royal Navy’s prototype 14-inch gun, under development at Woolwich Arsenal. In 1937, in a bid to match this firepower of British gun-armed ships and win the armaments race for the Soviet Navy, ‘sleeper’ spies are activated in London, and in 1938 they are trapped by an MI5 surveillance operation, and indicted for ‘obtaining a plan of a naval gun calculated  to be, or might be, or intended to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy.’ The ring-leaders are convicted under the Official Secrets Act for the theft of secret naval blueprints from Woolwich Arsenal and imprisoned. 
           1949–1990: At the end of WW2, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), becomes the Eastern Bloc state that’s at the frontline of the Cold War, and the main conduit to the Soviets of civil and military intelligence from Europe, gleaned from a spy network of  20,000 informants, one the most widespread and penetrative in the history of espionage.

German pocket guide to warships compares HMS Dreadnought
(ten 12 inch guns) with HMS Agamemnon (four of 12 inch calibre).

Short Notes on the Woolwichkanonen File :                                                             
for the attention of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener                           
MI13/HumInt/Psy-Ops/Politico-Criminalistics/Ksector-Block8.8g

‘I expected you to be clued up in no time,’ Prof. Weissener commended me, ‘and I have not been disappointed.’ Weiss prides himself on his command of English idiom. 
           I presented him with two sheets of data grouped by a number of heads, a template that had won his approval : 

1 : Herbert John Bennett alias John Bartlett.  Evidence from the POI(NTS) Persons-Of-Interest (Non-Traceable-Suspects) index, cross-referenced to our DA(W/NS) file i.e. Double-Agents (Weaponry/Naval Subornation) Classified Personnel, Boer War to WW1 1899-1918, suggests that between 1899 and 1900 Bennett was under surveillance by our Criminal Investigation Department. Code-named Hyde, an ex-Royal Marine, whose service record reveals his sinister name to be Pierce Dyer (1869-1917), was directed to shadow Bennett who was suspected of peddling hush-hush specifications of British ordnance (extracted clandestinely from Woolwich Arsenal) to the Boers, in Africa, and thence to their allies, represented by the Military Secret Service of the Imperial German Army operating under diplomatic cover in London.

2 :  1900 Foreign Intelligence Market for Stolen British Blueprints. At the turn of the 19th Century, an intense rivalry existed between Britain, the imperial ruler of the seas, and the domains of Queen Victoria’s cousins, those two dynastic autocratic nations, Germany and Russia. Their ambitions were to match the firepower of the Royal Navy by learning the secrets of British naval gun production, the research for which was undertaken at Woolwich. In 1900, full-scale production was only five years away for manufacture of the 12 inch 45-calibre naval gun which was to be mounted as the primary armament on battleships and battlecruisers: HMS Dreadnought was to be fitted with the ten 12 inch guns that revolutionised naval power in 1906. 

3 :  The Woolwichkanonen File Documents would seem to suggest that ‘Bartlett’ (the alias of Bennett) was successful in commanding a high price for his treachery (we do not know how many £1 postal orders he received from his foreign spymaster but contemporary accounts record he was flush with money and uncharacteristically scrupulous – for a conman – in settling tradesmen’s bills). The readily cashable postal orders would, indeed, have been a discreet method of payment, untraceable as to origin. From the annotation, 15th Gun Section Woolwich, the spy ring would appear to be fully established, as early as 1900, in the Gun Examination Workshop D.15 within the Inspector of Naval Ordnance Department.

4 : Into which Foreign Power’s hands did the Woolwichkanonen File fall?
If betrayal as a spy inside Woolwich Arsenal was Bennett/Bartlett’s true criminal enterprise, as contemporary commentators at his trial alleged, then to which foreign power did his spymaster pledge allegiance? Imperial Germany or Imperial Russia? The fact that the documents were, paradoxically, recovered from a Stasi archive in East Germany suggests their possession by Abteilung IIIb in the turbulent years preceding the Russian Revolution, when graduates from the elite War Academy in Berlin were trained for infiltration of the Russian Empire from Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) – a port city on the south eastern corner of the Baltic Sea – and a foothold into Russia from its peculiarly tactical vantage as a Prussian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania. 
           So we may assume that – during the upheavals of the Russian Revolution of 1905, fuelled by worker strikes and military mutinies, which prefaced the abdication of the Tsar – secrets were for sale by desperate functionaries from the silovaya byurokratiya (security bureaucracy) fleeing the chaos for refuge in western Europe. So, our best guess is that Bennett/Bartlett was, in 1900, peddling his merchandise of secrets to a secret agent of the Tsar, operating out of Russia’s established rezidentura in London, in the misguided belief that he was trading with an agent of the Imperial Germany Navy.  

5 : Who murdered 
Mary Jane Bennett by strangulation in 1900 and whyIf the foregoing new evidence is now permitted to colour accounts of the trial of Herbert John Bennett for the murder of his wife on September 23, 1900, a wholly different picture emerges as to the motive and opportunity of her killer. As one contemporary commentator on the trial observed, Bennett’s refusal to confess his complicity in espionage only weighted the suspicions against him. ‘It may be argued that had there been such a conspiracy, Bennet would surely have confessed it to save his skin. But he would confess nothing, not even that he had been in Yarmouth on the crucial dates . . . Innocent or guilty, his behaviour was baffling. He made no protest. He lied fantastically or blankly denied everything, to the despair of his advisors. There was no appeal.’ Crucially, the commentator concludes, ‘His lies are understandable if, conscious of innocence of the murder charge, he was apprehensive of arrest on a charge not capital , and so fell into one pit to avoid the other.’ 
           These speculations come into more intense focus once we consider the fact that during this time, in Yarmouth and London, Bennett was being shadowed by a secret agent of the CID. In addition, we should not ignore the politico-social context of the Britain of those times, consumed by Invasion Fever and fear of the incursions of the ‘Kaiser’s Spies’ sent to prepare for war. 
           So my own verdict is this: The rogue agent, Hyde, the ex-Royal Marine with a dishonourable service record, Pierce Dyer, in all probability raped and murdered Mary Jane Bennett, employing the close-combat techniques of the garrotte he’d been taught in the Senior Service (the twice-knotted cord is entirely characteristic of this makeshift weapon, as the knots are devised to lodge each side of the windpipe). 
           Evidence deposed stated: ‘The boot lace, by which the woman had been strangled, was found to be so tight that it could only be cut by cutting the skin of the throat . . . death was the result of strangulation . . .’
           Such a killing would serve as a powerful warning to the spy networks of foreign powers operating in Britain. Perhaps the scheme’s intention was to compromise Bennett, then to ‘turn’ him as double agent biddable within the spy-infested Woolwich Arsenal. However, unforeseen circumstantial evidence was stacked against him. But the question remains: On whose authority was the deed done? Defence counsel, Marshall Hall, maintained that the murder was committed by an erotic maniac, and Bennett was incapable of such a crime. This would not rule out Dyer (codenamed ‘Hyde’) and, if nothing else, it certainly fits the character of a Hyde, described by Stevenson as ‘strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain.’ 

Professor Weiss pronounces on my Report.

‘Ah, yes. Your Mr MacGuffin. Strung to the pitch of murder,’ Professor Weissener brooded, after reading my preliminary Report. ‘And a garrotte. Most apt. It’s a twitch on a thread,’ he framed the word with relish, ‘that extends, indeed, a very long way back. In truth, threaded all the way through the first four decades of the Twentieth Century. Specifically, from the pursuit of 12 inch naval gun secrets in 1900 to the theft of plans for a prototype 14-inch gun in 1937. A period of successful enemy infiltration and subversion – not to say agitation – at Woolwich Arsenal, which, as you have uncovered, continued to be active in Gun Examination Workshop D.15 of the Inspector of Naval Ordnance’s Department.’
           (I preened myself and considered I’d earned a little feather in my cap.)
           ‘Only two omissions.’
           ‘Omissions?’ (The feather was fast dissolving.)
           ‘You rightly state that Pierce Dyer was active as an agent between 1899 and 1917 but disappears from the records on January 19 1917. That date clearly has no significance for you.’
           ‘Significance?’
           In 1917, on Friday, January 19, fifty tonnes of TNT exploded at the Silvertown munitions works near the Royal Victoria Dock, killing 73 people and injuring 400 more. The site was a stone’s throw from Woolwich across the river. I don’t doubt that Dyer was again undercover on a secret mission of surveillance. Perhaps he was too late to prevent an act of sabotage for he died that day, as his record shows.’
           ‘I see. Black mark. And the second omission?’
           ‘Bexley Heath.’
           ‘Bexley Heath? Really? I’m all ears.’
           ‘You note, yourself, that in 1900 Bennett installed his wife in a house in Bexley Heath, under the false name of “Bartlett”. But you refrain from mention of the hotspot for spies and Communist and Anarchist agitators that was Bexley Heath in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Bennett’s choice of neighbourhood was no accident. I have no doubt that a number of precursors of the Woolwich plot of 1938 were already embedded in that locality. After all, the main co-conspirators were an examiner in the Department of the Chief Inspector of Armaments, Woolwich Arsenal, and a gun examiner for the Inspector of Naval Ordnance at Woolwich, a man who was also known to MI5 as a member of the underground Communist Party and under surveillance since 1927. That same man had been Chairman of the Bexley Communist Party before he went ‘underground’. After 1928, CP members in British Naval Dockyards ceased to be issued with Party cards and became “undercover” members. Lying “doggo”as Moscow Centre would have it.’
          I must have looked glum at my failure to unravel this web of suburban intrigue.
          Never mind. Your efforts do you much credit. And remember,’ he added archly, ‘Marx was to Engels what Freud was to Jung.’ 
          On such occasions, having bested me, he invariably reserved this mantra of his as a consolation prize for my defeat. A sly smile would lurk in the corner of his mouth. 
          (Oddly, the professor’s only daughter, Klara, just a while past had shown me her father’s certificate of Aryan descent. It was clear, then, that Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener, Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, would never suffer the matter of our mutual points-scoring to end without an oblique nod, as it were, to the diasporic history of my antecedents, for it is indeed true that my German-speaking grandfather with his son, my father then aged nine, set sail for America from Liverpool at the height of the ‘Invasion Scares’ in early 1912.)

A product of ‘Invasion Fever’ and the
‘Kaiser’s Spies Scare', the Coast Watchman
Boy Scout proficiency badge, introduced
in 1912, required a boy to know the
national flags of ships that passed, the
locations of lifeboats and rocket apparatus,
the nearest telegraph offices and telephones,
and know the beacons, storm signals, and
the mercantile code of signals. No such
opportunity was extended to my father, then
aged nine years, whose German-speaking
father condemned them to self-imposed
banishment, destination New York from
Liverpool for the duration of WWI.
Property of The Scout Association (UK)
Heritage Collection and reproduced with permission.  


Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Monday 28 October 2013

Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man

How extraordinary to read long after the publication of my In Search of the Fourth Man (Ambit 193, 2008) that, according to Brigid Brophy, Anthony Blunt’s ‘... hospitality was multifarious but his own consumption [of alcohol when dining with him was] nil.’ 

Agreed, Blunt’s tastes were ‘austere’, as Brophy observes, but not in the matter of alcohol. Even when granted hindsight of Blunt’s public exposure as a Soviet spy (1979), Brophy misreads certain other character traits when she writes in 1986: ‘He spoke in a charming upper-class drawl that was neither an affectation nor quite an Edwardian relic, and he seemed forever on the verge of utter exhaustion.’

‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk.’

‘Utter exhaustion?’ No wonder, when you consider that Blunt’s decades-long dependence on barbiturates (Seconal) was complicated by his alcoholism. Seconal can cause daytime drowsiness but this effect invariably worsens when the drug is taken with alcohol. Blunt would start drinking at 11 o’clock in the morning, and his alcoholism almost certainly inhibited the anaesthetic activity of his brain’s barbiturate receptor sites. These co-existing counteractions would have significantly increased the anxiety neurosis that his chronic alcohol ingestion sustained, a conflict that was manifested in the jaded, unrousable manner I describe as evident when meeting him at the Courtauld Institute.
    I heard the voice – a mellifluous modulated drawl ...  I observed Sir Anthony surreptitiously beneath lowered lashes while I pretended to examine a small maquette on his desk, an ill-carved figure he evidently used as a paperweight among his card index boxes.
    ‘One can see with half an eye it’s a fake,’ were Blunt’s first words.   
    In his own eyes, I thought, there is nothing written he allows you to read.
    They were eyes of palest Cambridge blue, set in the face, I assumed, of a jaded critic nothing could rouse.
    There were wine bottles on the table and he poured me a glass ... 
    Blunt took a sip of wine and his nose wrinkled. That acidic downcast mouth reminded me of a turbot with a lemon slice in it.
    ‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk,’ he observed sorrowfully.      
    We were drinking a four-year-old Château Mouton Rothschild and it tasted of rotten mushrooms. The label of naked dancing Bacchantes, I later learned, was designed by a noted Surrealist painter and sculptress, which was distinctly odd since Blunt’s biographer tells us that he abhorred le Surréalisme (or ‘Superrealism’, as he referred to it) and, besides, that Bordeaux we drank that night was one of the worst vintages of the last two centuries.

As you’re no doubt aware, Brigid Brophy was married to Sir Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery in London, so her insights into the intimate domestic arrangements of Anthony Blunt’s top floor flat at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square are to be relished for their candour. ‘Whenever we went there, the evening was tattered by brief incursions of young men introduced by first name only, who might have been sailors or might of been students of Poussin or were very likely both.’

What then, drove Brigid Antonia Brophy to identify so completely with her host of those tattered evenings as to write a gender-bending satire in which the Anthony she knew became the Antonia of her sapphic alter ego? Answer: ‘What my imagination did, when it picked him up by the scruff of his neck, was change his sex and make him the headmistress of a finishing school for girls. Perhaps it was the hell he had imagined for himself.’

The Two Antonias.

Were any evidence needed that Brigid Brophy, that remarkable Firbankian pastichiste, was possessed of a wit of outshining intellectual brilliancy then the following passage from her girls’ school fantasia, The Finishing Touch (1963), set on the Riviera, would bear out the claim:
    Twenty-six heads bent over the school’s die-stamped paper …  At least thirteen tongue tips protruded in concentration.
     Scurrying pens on the paper made a noise like cicadas.
     Outside, as the sun rose to zenith, cicadas made a noise like scurrying pens.
Just think. Ten years earlier, aged twenty-four, she was writing schoolgirl adventure fiction in my sister’s Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, a feat of recall that seemingly allows me to pluck ephemera out of the air yet is explained by our crammed family attic, where our childhood favourite reads still remain stowed. 

Quite by chance, a yellowed Collins Annual fell open the other day at the first page of Brophy’s Story of an Old Master and a Very Old Umbrella. It is a strangely resonant text that presents us with an unusual opportunity to observe, in a seemingly innocent text for children, nascent epigrammatic locutions stirring in those transgressive preoccupations that were to shape her idiosyncratic mature prose. The gallery she describes in the yarn, by the way, is pretty certainly the National.
     ‘But it can’t possible rain to-day,’ protested the boy, looking up at the blue sky.
     ‘Aunt Sarah,’ explained his sister, ‘is an alarmist. She probably sees our quiet visit to the gallery as a reckless adventure fraught with perils.’
     ‘I wish it were,’ her brother said gloomily. Then his spirits seemed to brighten. ‘Perhaps it will be,’ he added, and used the umbrella to hail the ’bus.
I shall not spoil the fun for those coming fresh to Brophy’s Bluntian satire, but, as she wrote in her review of Myra Breckinridge, ‘The trans-sex fantasy explodes, I suspect, at a level even deeper than the one from which it liberates the homosexual imprisoned in every heterosexual and also, of course, the heterosexual in every homosexual ...’

Not that these insights would necessarily have conditioned my own perceptions of Blunt’s character, which have been mediated latterly through my studies of graphology; studies that have revealed in his handwriting a hunted, haunted, inherently secretive man whose every pen stroke appears to express the intense anxiety and caution underlying his warped purpose.

So how close was Brophy to the truth of Blunt’s character in 1963, sixteen years before the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy reporting to his masters in the Soviet Intelligence service, the NKVD? Let us, then, examine common features of resemblance in The Finishing Touch where the traits of francophone headmistress Antonia Mount and francophone institute director Anthony Blunt coincide.

Alcohol.

‘My dear ... It’s a night, perhaps, for Chartreuse?’
‘Yellow or green?’ ...
‘...put out both, my dear, if you would ... I am a person,’ said Antonia,‘who all her long life has been unable to decide whether she prefers green or yellow Chartreuse.’
...
Antonia poured a glass of madeira from a decanter strangely stoppered.

Bilingualism.

Non, elle me ferait une scène, Antonia thought, hating, above all things in life, scenes ... I am tired. I am, even, old … I am—utterly—excédée.

Exhaustion.

‘Have you,’ Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’
‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’
‘What,’ asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and the Privy that, can one expect ...?’

Fondness for English sailors.

O dreadful, dreadful tropical kit, the white socks long and the white trousers short ... [a] uniform one would expect to see directing the traffic from a white tub in Morocco ... And yet ... there was ... A charm, even, in the absurd uniform, in revealing the knees (could they be made to blush?). Pleasure could be derived from these northern complexions (so easily blushing for one thing) which took so ruddily to southern sun ...
And finally, and devastatingly, here is virtually an entire chapter from Brophy that spookily (in 1963) foresees a future of denied honours (Antonia Mount’s fictive Damehood thwarted, and Anthony Blunt’s very real knighthood stripped from him) ... and, moreover, daringly touches upon the BIG SECRET that MI5 had kept the lid on for more than a decade ...

Treason and Communism.

(Opening paragraph of Chapter XI)
    ‘I say. get me some background on this [Antonia] Mount woman, will you?
    ‘Right. I’ll look through the files. You’ll have to tap the old boy network.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Find out if she’s that kind of woman.
    ‘Right you are. If she’s a communist, you mean?’
    ‘No, no, no, no, no’ (agacé).
 ‘Beneath Brophy‘s sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption.’ 
Sir Peter Stothard (introduction to 2013 reissue of The Finishing Touch).

Blunt’s zigzagging signature is composed of lots of sharp points, so he is likely to have been waspish in his comments. The sharp angle on the A shows hardness and probing.  This seems to be rather resentful writing, there are lots of sharp angles, which means that he possibly took things personally and saw slights where none was intended. And note, also, his arrow-shaped flourish is pointing Leftward.
Evidently, there was strong need in the signatory to see his name much sharpened, and his signature gives the whetted edge to what was hereditarily Blunt.
(From In Search of the Fourth Man, 2008, Ambit 193.)

For further remarks recording Blunt’s views on Social Realism in art, see . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html
and also some reflections on Anthony Blunt’s psychometric profile from Intelligence sources:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
and also more of Brigid Brophy’s penetrating insights may be read in the footnote to:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html 

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  
and A Bad Case (2015)