The Greatest Traitor Page 10

  Until then I had made little distinction between the notions ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’, and regarded the Russians as semi-barbarians, oppressed by a ruthless, atheistic dictatorship which relentlessly persecuted all Christians . . . During the war I had, of course, looked towards the Soviet Union with hope, admired its fighting spirit and welcomed its victories . . . but these sentiments were mixed with fear and dislike for Communism and devoid of any particular affection for the Russian people. Now I began to admire their courage, their patience, their generosity and their piety.

  With his interest in philosophy and theology, Blake was increasingly attracted, through books like Gogol’s Dead Souls, to the mysterious, poetic idea of the Russkaya dusha (‘Russian soul’), a kind of national consciousness that, for its adherents, developed from the sum of personal and spiritual experiences. This romantic ethos, appealing to feeling rather than fact, reflecting a sense of connectedness rather than competition, contrasted the purity of traditional Russian values against the encroachment of Western enlightenment, rationalism and secularism.

  Blake would later maintain that his change in attitude to all things Russian in this period was not accompanied by any switch in his political outlook. He continued to be as resolutely hostile to Communism as before, and that feeling was shared by his teacher. Having been forced to flee her homeland in 1917, Elizabeth Hill remained a fierce critic of the regime and its ideology, which attracted so many converts at Cambridge in the 1930s.

  The infamous Cambridge spies – Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean – had all been before her time at the University, although she did have fleeting encounters with two of them. She had given Burgess a Russian lesson in 1935 while at London University, and afterwards Burgess’s case officer Alexander Orlov, the KGB rezident in London, reported back to Moscow: ‘The University luckily sent him to Hill, who gave him one lesson privately. The next step will be for him to ask her to put him in a group or pair him with other pupils so he may get a better ear for pronunciation and to make lessons livelier. Thus we count on approaching other pupils, since MÄDCHEN [Burgess’s codename] knows how to make friends.’ The hope – unfulfilled – was that Burgess would be able to befriend and then ‘turn’ other SIS officers also thought (almost certainly incorrectly) to be learning Russian in the Slavonic Studies department.

  As for Blunt, Hill recalled attending a lecture at Cambridge: ‘Blunt seemed to me very tall, elegant, effete really, and he gave a beautiful talk on some art subject which everybody applauded vigorously.’

  Blunt and Burgess were not the only ones to have lost faith in capitalism in the 1930s and, at Cambridge, such was the disillusionment that nearly everyone with intellectual pretensions was gravitating to the left – or, increasingly, the extreme left. ‘Aside from the politics lecturers, there were the economics people who were much more left-wing, then there were people like Roy Pascal, in the German literature department, who were absolutely bright red in their beliefs,’ Hill remembered. ‘Then there were the concealed Communists, who we only found out about later. I was invited to dinner by all these various people – and then dropped by them very quickly.’

  One of Blake’s fellow students was Major G.W.A. (‘Darby’) Courtice, who during the war had led a heroic effort by the 85 Royal Marines to try and defend the ancient citadel in the centre of Calais. He was eventually captured and imprisoned at Colditz. ‘I’m not sure anybody had quite made their minds up about Russia in 1947,’ he recalled. ‘There was, though, a feeling that the Russian language was going to be terribly important and anyone who didn’t speak Russian would be left in the sidings, as it were.’

  When he arrived in Cambridge in October 1947, Blake was attached to Downing College and, in his first term, he took rooms in the town. This was to be no clandestine education: the service officers were expected to live the life of the undergraduate, wear the gown and follow the curriculum of the faculty of Slavonic Studies, albeit with extra tuition. Consumed by his studies, Blake found the busy social scene around the University distracting, eventually choosing to move out to the rural community of Madingley, about four miles away.

  Madingley was an attractive village set amid farm and woodland, with a splendid church, St Mary Magdalene, dating back to Norman times. Madingley Hall, the stylish country house built in 1543, had gardens designed by Capability Brown, and was rented by Queen Victoria in 1860 for her son – the future Edward VII – while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  In the heart of the village Blake found spacious accommodation in a wing of a large house owned by an elderly lady, the widow of a vicar. She cooked him good meals, and so he spent much of his time studying in his sitting room, venturing out only to cycle into college to attend lectures, and receive extra coaching from Dr Hill.

  ‘I would say to him, why do you live in Madingley, away from the other officers? It seems very odd to me. He’d merely say that he liked the exercise,’ she recalled. ‘I would spend many hours – two hours of a free afternoon, or when there was a window in the timetable – practising his verbs with him. I was happy to spend a lot of time with him because I thought he was extremely diligent, very shrewd and very intelligent.’

  Like so many others, Dr Hill was unaware of Blake’s somewhat exotic background: ‘Now I never, for one single moment, thought that he was anything but British – though there was a slight greasy look about him, which gave me the idea that he might perhaps have some Jewish blood in him, or perhaps Oriental . . . But it just passed over because we are great mixtures in the world and these types appear. Besides, he had such an English name, George Blake, and I was fool enough not to realise that Blake is the name of an Admiral, you see, and it was his pseudonym.’

  At Easter 1948, Blake’s group sat their final exams, overseen by Dr Hill and a gifted young academic from Trinity College called Dimitri Oblensky, who hailed from an ancient aristocratic Russian family and was an acclaimed expert in the poetry of Pushkin. Blake passed both oral and written exams comfortably enough, although he was not among the three students who earned a distinction in the former category. He had enjoyed the intellectual challenge and poured his energies into his work, but had also found time to reflect further on his own political and religious views, which were now starting to change quite markedly.

  It took five kings of England, from the austere and pious Plantagenet Henry VI in 1446 to the indulgent and ostentatious Henry VIII of the House of Tudor in 1515, to build King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, but what a majestic achievement it was. Once inside the huge Gothic structure, the visitor steps into a gravity-defying hall of light, truly entering the realms of the celestial. High above the head is the largest single span of medieval arched roof anywhere in Christendom, two thousand tons of remarkable fan vaulting, a huge forest of carving and tracery. To the side lies a spectacular picture gallery of twenty-six Renaissance-painted stained glass windows, animating stories from the Old to the New Testament from East to West. All around on the walls are the giant coats-of-arms and beautiful fleurs-de-lis, highlighting the power and majesty of the Tudors.

  George Blake was drawn to this place. ‘I used to stay behind after the service when the candles were extinguished, but the organ went on playing, the sound filling every space . . . Sitting there in the darkness it was as if I no longer existed but had become one with the sound of the music. It was a mystical experience.’ Despite these moving moments in an extraordinary spiritual house, he was by now starting to seriously question his religious beliefs. With time to meditate in quiet surroundings like King’s College Chapel and his sitting room at Madingley, he had – he would later say – worked out from his own theological standpoint that he no longer believed in the central tenet of the Christian faith.

  He believed in the doctrine of predestination, in which all good and evil proceed from God and every person is allocated a place in heaven and hell, and nothing they can do will affect this destiny.

  From this it
follows that He being just, cannot hold us responsible and require our punishment for sins of which He himself is the author . . . If there is no sin and no punishment then there is also no need for atonement and justification through Christ’s sacrifice. Would God play an elaborate game with Himself and having implanted sin in man and using it to work out His eternal purposes, find it necessary to come into the world Himself and be crucified to atone for this sin?

  From this reasoning, I was led to the inescapable conclusion, however reluctant I was to face it, that Christ was not God, that he had not by his sacrifice atoned for our sins and, indeed, there was no need for any atonement . . .

  However much I might continue to respect and admire the person of Christ as a human being . . . I found I had argued myself out of the Christian religion and could no longer call myself a Christian.

  Was he perhaps now a deist, or simply a fatalist? Or was there a yawning chasm in his belief system waiting to be filled by something else, religious or political? Years later, his wife, Gillian, would observe:

  ‘He always does like to strive after something. He liked, I think, to have an ideal. And once inspired by an ideal, was utterly dedicated to it.’

  Blake had been back at his desk in Broadway no more than a couple of weeks when the first major crisis of the developing Cold War broke out.

  The ‘Berlin Blockade’ had its immediate origins at the end of March 1948 when the Soviet Union began putting restrictions on traffic to the city from the Western Zones. This included making US personnel travelling through the Soviet Zone present evidence of identity, dictating that shipments from Berlin to Western Zones had to be cleared through Soviet check points and insisting on baggage inspections.

  The Western powers responded by restricting vital exports to the Soviet Zone, and then declaring their own common currency, the Deutschmark. Two days later, in an immediate tit-for-tat, the Soviet Union announced it too had launched a currency.

  Then, just before midnight on 23 June, the Soviets cut the power to West Berlin and began a full-scale blockade of the city. All rail, road and water access from the Western Zones to Berlin was halted. The Berlin Airlift – or ‘Operation Plainfare’, as the British called it – began two days later, with eighty tons of provisions delivered to Tempelhof airport by American C-47 aircraft.

  In both rhetoric and action Stalin and his puppets were adopting an increasingly hard line. Early in July, the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau, the international organisation of Communist parties) urged the people of Yugoslavia to overthrow their defiantly independent leader, Josef Tito. He was accused of ‘Trotskyism, leanings towards capitalist states, inordinate ambition and grandeeism’.

  Meanwhile, a second front in the Cold War was developing in Asia, brought about by the rapid turn of events in the Chinese Civil War. By June 1948, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies were in retreat, while Mao Zedong’s Communists had three million troops and were in control of 168 million inhabitants.

  Perceptive policy-makers in the Foreign Office and in SIS realised that the impending Communist triumph in China would have weighty strategic implications in the region, and could also signal a fundamental change in the whole nature and positioning of the Cold War. A Joint Intelligence Committee report at the time, ‘Communism in the Far East’, was in no doubt which way the wind was blowing: ‘The end of the war in 1945 found the Far East more vulnerable to communist influence than ever before’. The JIC observed that, during 1947, there was clear evidence of Russia’s increasing interest in the region, noting that ‘large quantities of Marxist literature were exported from Moscow at heavy discount rates and the Chinese Communist propaganda organisation was expanded’.

  SIS sought to make changes to its operations in the region to meet the demands of this changing world order. In China, there were stations at Hong Kong, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking and Urumchi, but SIS had been reliant on the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang in these areas for its intelligence and, with the rapid advance of Mao’s armies, information became extremely scarce, and life increasingly restricted for both Foreign Office and SIS staff.

  Blake was originally told he would be sent to Urumchi, near the border with Soviet Kazakhstan, but in light of transformed circumstances, SIS’s Chief Controller Pacific, Dick Ellis, changed his mind. Instead, it was decided Blake should open a new outpost in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, along with an assistant, Norman Owen. His cover for the mission would be as vice-consul at the legation.

  Still only 25 years old, to be chosen to head up a new SIS station – albeit a small one – was quite an achievement. Blake, however, was disappointed. He had been hoping to win a posting in Central Asia, preferably Afghanistan, a country he had always wanted to visit after hearing so many colourful stories from his cousin Raoul, who travelled there frequently.

  As he moved into the Far Eastern Department in London in the summer of 1948, Blake began to realise the crucial importance of his task. After Washington and Moscow had divided Korea along the line of the 38th parallel in 1945, the stated hope was that this was merely a pause in the nation’s history, pending the creation of a single Korean government and the consequent withdrawal of the respective occupying forces. The American and Soviet armies did pull out during 1948 and 1949, but with no agreement about who would run the country, South and North effectively remained client states of the two superpowers.

  On 15 August 1948, elections sanctioned by the United Nations were held in the American-supported South, and Syngman Rhee was proclaimed the first president of the new Republic in Korea. Very quickly, on 9 September, the Soviet-backed North responded by declaring the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with Kim Il-Sung as leader.

  During July and August, Blake prepared for his mission to Seoul. He sat down with the outgoing consul-general, Derwent Kermode, for an up-to-date briefing on the politics of Korea, and was given books and papers to read. Among them was one that would have a profound effect on his political sympathies. It was The Theory and Practice of Communism by Robert Nigel Carew Hunt – more familiarly ‘Bob’ to his colleagues in the Foreign Office and SIS. Carew Hunt was the son of a priest, Oxford-educated, and a veteran of the First World War. By 1948 he had established himself as the senior SIS scholar on Marxism. In characteristically dry, caustic fashion, Kim Philby said of him: ‘He had the advantage of being literate, if not articulate . . . at a later date, he told me that he had intended dedicating to me his first book on the subject, The Theory and Practice of Communism, but he had decided that such a tribute might embarrass me. Indeed, it would have given me grave embarrassment for a number of reasons.’

  For Blake, the book was a revelation. Until then, he had been little exposed to Marxism itself, and what he had read was largely critical. His conclusion on turning the final page of Carew-Hunt’s book was a dramatic one: ‘I was left with the feeling that the theory of Communism sounded convincing, that its explanation of history made sense and that its objectives seemed wholly desirable and did not differ all that much from Christian ideals – even though the methods to attain them did . . . I began to ask myself whether Communism was really the terrible evil it was made out to be.’

  SIS issued the book on the principle, espoused by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in The Art of War: ‘If you know your enemies and yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles.’ The irony was the book revealed to Blake that he had not, up until then, actually known himself. In clear, objective language, Carew Hunt’s text set out to explain to the reader the philosophical, political and economic underpinnings of Marxism. For Blake there was nothing off-putting or dangerous about this ideology. Quite the opposite, in fact: it seemed to marry snugly with his own system of values and beliefs.

  As he read the general introduction to the book, Blake might have paused and reflected on Carew-Hunt’s premise that, in the last analysis, Communism was a ‘body of ideas which has filled the vacuum created by the breakdown of organised religion�
�. He would certainly have been attracted to his comparison of religion and Marxism in the following paragraph: ‘For its devotees communism has the value of a religion in so far as it is felt to provide a complete explanation of reality and of man as part of reality, and at the same time to give to life, as does religion, a sense of purpose’. Blake had just lost his ‘explanation of reality’ with his rejection of Christianity. Here was something to replace it.

  Carew-Hunt’s view was that ‘the only intelligible attitude towards the riddle of existence is agnosticism . . . there is nothing outside ourselves and the products of our mind by which the final truth can ever be tested’, but he went on:

  As neither communism nor religion is content to rest in this position, each is ultimately driven to appeal to certain propositions which have to be accepted by faith, but from which, once accepted, whatever else it is desired to prove logically follows.

  Only while religion frankly accepts this, communism maintains that its fundamental dogmas are guaranteed by science, which they are certainly not, since one and all are very disputable.

  Carew-Hunt used religious terms and analogies throughout, describing Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin as the ‘four apostles’ of Communism. Discussing one of Marx’s most famous dictums – that ‘All philosophies have sought to explain the world; the point, however, is to change it’ – he said: ‘Marxists have always insisted that theory and action are one. A theory of which the truth is not confirmed by action is sterile, while action which is divorced from theory is purposeless. The two stand in much the same relation to one another as do faith and works in Christian theology.’

  Dick White, Chief of SIS at the time when Blake’s treachery was eventually unmasked, would later observe: ‘Christianity is an extremist movement, Marxism is another. It’s perhaps not so difficult to move from one to another, to make the journey between these two worlds . . . Marxist theory accounts for everything, and you can subordinate the interests of life for it, and believe yourself to be on the side of history.’