DIANA TRILLING
37
own engagement in espionage. This pertinent information he seems to
have withheld even from Boyle. From this fuller, more accurate account
which he gave Boyle, we learn that, in his second meeting with Liddell,
Goronwy revealed that Burgess had once identified Blunt as a fellow–
conspirator.
As evidence of the way in which at this time the political winds
were blowing in England through the halls of power, the story given us
by Boyle is startling enough. But it was not only in official circles that
Goronwy's attempt to disclose what he knew about the Cambridge spies
brought him alone into disfavor. His belief that it was his duty to speak
up against Communist infiltration ran counter to the temper of the pe–
riod and violated that seemingly most sacred of Britain's moral
imperatives, loyalty to one's friends.
Rees's revelations were no surprise to Andrew Boyle: he had long
been on Blunt's trail. On November 15,1979, largely as a result of the
publication of Boyle's book,
The Fourth Man
-
its title was only later
changed to
The Climate of Treason
-
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
was forced to admit in Parliament that as far back as 1964, fifteen years
previously, Sir Anthony Blunt had confessed his espionage to the British
Security Services: he had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence while still
a Cambridge don and throughout the war had regularly passed informa–
tion to the Soviet Union. Nothing had been officially done in response
to Blunt's confession, nor did the British government fall as a result of
Thatcher's admission, or even totter. In proper British fashion, the scan–
dal was absorbed. Sir Anthony was now relieved of his title but he never
went to jail. As if in classic self-parody, a well-situated member of the
British intellectual establishment is said to have remarked that Blunt's
having been deprived of his accustomed place at the high tables of
Cambridge was one of the worst catastrophes of the century.
Rosamond Lehmann is not without her share of responsibility for
the bad light in which Rees is viewed by the British historians of espi–
onage. In an interview with John Costello which Costello reports in his
influential volume,
Mask of Treachery ,
Lehmann described Goronwy as "a
thumping liar." The interview in which she gave this characterization of
Rees took place in the mid-Eighties. Rees had by this time been dead for
several years and the British public was by now well aware of the exis–
tence of the Cambridge spies. Weare moved to ask what precisely was
the thumping lie of which Lehmann was accusing Rees. Relative to
whom did she indict her old lover: a truthful Burgess? A truthful Philby
or Maclean? A truthful Blunt? If she was suggesting to Costello that
Goronwy was himself a Comintern agent, why did she not forthrightly
