The Greatest Traitor Read online

  In his questioning state, Blake started to equate the early Christians’ struggle for acceptance with the battles fought by Marxism, a young ‘faith’, in the twentieth century. He began to believe that there was no real difference in the social and economic ends that Communists professed and Christians sought. When he now considered the words from Chapter Two of ‘Acts of the Apostles’, he read them as merely an early version of the Communist creed: ‘And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need’.

  Put simply, if God is replaced by the State, Communism aligns neatly with Calvinism. Just as God plans everything beforehand, so the State under Communism is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-controlling. Comparisons continued beyond theology: dissent in Calvin’s Geneva often led to humiliation and public abasement and, four centuries later, in Stalin’s Russia, serious opposition to the regime meant a show trial and a forced ‘confession’.

  So, it was in a somewhat restless mood that Blake departed for Seoul at the end of October. He was not allowed the luxury of a leisurely journey, and the voyage by seaplane, via Japan, took just a week. He did, however, manage a stopover in Cairo, where he visited his Uncle Daniel and Aunt Zephira.

  The creation of the state of Israel in May had destroyed the previous harmony between Jews and Arabs in the city, and Blake found the Curiels had fallen on hard times and were in poor health. Their telephone had been cut off and they were burdened by all manner of restriction and degradation. As for Henri and Raoul, the former was in prison as a Communist and the latter was living abroad. ‘They were glad to see me,’ he recalled, ‘but it was a sad reunion. I left at midnight as I had to resume my journey early in the morning. With a heavy heart I said goodbye to these aged and lonely people who had done so much for me.’

  Blake finally arrived in Seoul on Saturday, 6 November. On that same day, the largest operation of the Chinese Civil War, the Huaihi Campaign, commenced. Under General Su Yu, the People’s Liberation Army was heading towards Xuzhou with the intention of killing or capturing over half a million Kuomingtang soldiers.

  The new vice-consul had arrived in the region at a turbulent time. Just how turbulent, would soon become apparent.

  7

  Captive in Korea

  George Blake began his intelligence mission in Seoul in a discontented frame of mind. Not only had he abandoned his Christian faith and was now harbouring serious, unsettling thoughts about the merits of Communism, but he also felt dismayed at the scale of the tasks SIS had set him in Korea.

  His assignments were three-fold. The main undertaking was to establish agent networks in the Soviet Far Eastern ‘Maritime’ Provinces, the principal city of which was Vladivostok, naval base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Secondly, given the onward march of Mao’s Red Army, he was asked to try and build contacts of any kind in China’s north-eastern provinces, chiefly Manchuria.

  The third part of Blake’s brief was never made explicit. He was given to understand that his superiors at Broadway thought war in Korea was more likely than not, with the chief scenario being an invasion of the South by the North, backed by Chinese troops. If such an occupation took place, Britain would retain ‘non-belligerent’ status and its consulate-general would be allowed to remain. Blake and his colleague, Norman Owen, would then be able to act as an effective covert ‘listening post’, monitoring and reporting back on any new Communist regime.

  Blake felt that to ask him to spy on the Russians in Vladivostok, some 450 miles away from Seoul with no worthwhile communications of any sort – no political links, no trade links, nothing – was utterly impractical: ‘As the crow flies, Seoul was the nearest place to build an SIS station. But I thought that giving me such unrealistic tasks, which were based not on any real assessments but merely a look at a map, was just not very professional . . . I just had to put up with it – but my attitude towards SIS was less enthusiastic than it had been before.’

  After staying in the legation compound for a few weeks, he found much more spacious living quarters – a Japanese-style house in the commercial district of Seoul. There, he was joined by Norman Owen and a newfound friend, Jean Meadmore, the French Vice-Consul.

  Aged thirty-two, Owen was ‘an easy-going young Englishman with an equable temper and warm friendliness’. He had served in the RAF in an intelligence unit in Iraq during the Second World War before joining Marconi when civilian life resumed. Having then moved back to the intelligence world, and SIS, Korea was his first overseas appointment.

  Meadmore, aged thirty-four, struck up a particularly close friendship with Blake. The Frenchman had already gained diplomatic experience in Asia, having served in China before being assigned to Seoul. Like Blake, he was a natural linguist and had mastered the Chinese language as well as eagerly absorbing its culture. A courteous, likeable man, he was also something of a bon viveur. His handsome looks meant he didn’t want for female company. ‘We were both bachelors, so of course we enjoyed the friendship of women. George too had some relationships with some very charming Korean girls,’ he recalled.

  Gradually Blake’s mood began to lift and as he travelled in and around the capital, he found himself entranced by the country’s wild landscape. Together with Meadmore and others he would journey by jeep for a picnic in some secluded spot, more often than not by the banks of a stream on the Bukhansan Mountain, or near the site of an old Buddhist temple.

  The other person who helped ease his path into Korean life was his diplomatic superior at the legation, the Minister Captain Vyvyan Holt. At first, their relationship was remote, with Holt displaying the innate Foreign Office distrust of SIS and its officers. Behind his reserved and rather taciturn manner lay a generous spirit, however, and he was definitely a man after Blake’s heart – multilingual, an Arabist, traveller and a lover of the desert. Soon the suspicion evaporated and Holt took Blake under his wing, leading him on long walks through the city, introducing him all the while to the customs and culture of the local people.

  The tall, thin, bald, slightly stooping and weather-beaten Holt had ‘rather sharp bird-like features’ that gave him the appearance of a taller Mahatma Gandhi. The resemblance only increased when he wore the rimless glasses needed for long periods of reading. He was a man of great charm and possessed of a dry sense of humour, but also unconventional behaviour and habits. His ascetic tastes included a preference for boiled vegetables, fruit and curds over hot meals – a difficult diet to maintain with the obligations of diplomatic dinners, something he loathed.

  Holt’s cultural and political instincts were entirely antithetical to America. Nonetheless, in his annual review of Korea for Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in January 1950, he was under no illusion about the ideological influence Washington exerted – even after the withdrawal of all American troops by the end of June 1949: ‘The cinemas for the most part show American films, the “Voice of America” is picked up on radio sets in thousands of homes, and the children everywhere play volleyball, basketball and baseball . . . it is not surprising that Korean Government and its people (other than the Communists) should regard the United States as the most prosperous, the most democratic and the most glorious country in the world.’

  If Holt reluctantly accepted the onward march of the American way of life, Blake saw little but ill in it. In the case of South Korea, he believed it was having an unhealthy effect on the character, morals and manners of the people: ‘Close and prolonged contact with the American way of life causes Orientals, to lose entirely their inborn dignity and refinement, which often distinguishes them favourably from the white man, and turns [them] into loud-mouthed go-getters.’

  Worst of all, as far as he was concerned, were the Korean former émigrés who had returned to administer the country. He witnessed a small community of rich businessmen lining their pockets with aid the Americans poured into the country, while the majority of the population remained extremely
poor. As swanky American cars pulled up in front of large, plush Chinese restaurants, the nearby streets and alleyways of Seoul played host to desperate poverty, crammed full of thousands of vagrants in filthy clothes with festering sores and maimed limbs.

  One particular incident lodged vividly in Blake’s memory, and he described it in the style of one of those Old Testament stories he had read as a boy:

  I had wined and dined in the overheated house of an American friend and I decided to walk home. It was a very cold night. As I passed the doorway of a building I heard a whimpering cry and saw a figure huddled under a rice sack. It was one of the many homeless beggar boys who filled the streets of Seoul.

  Like the priest and the Levite in the Bible I passed on, but that pitiful whimper remained on my conscience for a long time. If I had taken him to my house, as perhaps I should have done, I would still have come across others, and if I had taken them in until my house was full and my resources exhausted, there would still be others huddling in doorways and whimpering from cold and pain.

  I realised then that private charity could never solve this problem but only a system which resolutely tackled poverty and eradicated it.

  That system, to Blake’s mind, was Communism.

  His views were further coloured by observing the manifest corruption of the American-backed Syngman Rhee government, which ruled by dictatorial methods and brooked no opposition. Elections were rigged and political opponents – whose views might be equated to no more than that of a moderate liberal in Britain – were branded Communists and frequently tortured, even murdered. From time to time, Blake would have to call on the education minister in the Rhee government, An Ho Sang. Educated at Oxford, Sang was at one time a Professor at Seoul University. He had a photograph of Hitler on the wall of his office and was eager to copy Nazi ideas about youth organisations.

  Captain Holt made sure Bevin was under no illusion about the nature of the Rhee regime. In his annual review of 1950, he noted that the regular use of torture was ‘disgusting and antagonising many elements of the public, constantly making new converts to the Communist cause’. Holt observed that bands of Communist guerrillas – most of them trained in the North – were active in many parts of South Korea. The mountainous and thickly wooded terrain offered them ideal cover in the countryside, but they were also present in the towns and the police repeatedly claimed to have unmasked subversive plots.

  Given his increasing loathing for the Rhee regime and the unhealthy influence he felt the Americans wielded over it, Blake had begun to admire the efforts of these bands of Communist partisans. He likened them to the resistance fighters in Holland and the rest of Europe during the Second World War, and considered they were stirred ‘by the same noble motives’.

  As for his espionage mission, he was making little headway. One of his duties in his cover role as vice-consul was to issue visas for Hong Kong, and this enabled him to meet prominent members of the South Korean business community, but this proved of little use as they rarely ventured into areas of Soviet influence. Nor were hopes that his links with the missionary community might yield useful contacts and intelligence ever fulfilled.

  It was an increasingly frustrated Blake who prepared to report to the head of the Singapore Station (the regional hub for SIS) in the spring of 1950, eighteen months into his posting. Maurice Murrowood Firth was the officer who came to Seoul to receive his briefing, and for Blake it proved to be a deeply unpleasant encounter. He received the ‘mother of all dressing-downs’ for his failure to establish any worthwhile agent networks around Vladivostok, or in North Korea. Moreover, Firth told Blake’s colleagues: ‘He doesn’t belong in the Service.’

  Such criticism can only have added to Blake’s mutinous mood. Already contemptuous of the demands placed upon him, appalled at the nature of the Rhee regime, and increasingly sympathetic to Communism, the allegiances he had sworn to the Service and his country were starting to wear thin.

  He pondered on his situation throughout the spring and early summer of 1950, while at the same time in Pyongyang, the young, energetic North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung was busy laying the groundwork for an invasion of the South.

  As the Americans had continued to render vital assistance to the government of Syngman Rhee throughout 1949 and 1950, so Stalin and his cohorts proved equally attentive to Kim’s North Korea, building up its army and organising its economy. Throughout 1949, Stalin remained extremely wary as Kim relentlessly pressed him for his backing for an invasion. The Soviet leader was preoccupied with the crisis in Berlin, and in any case he didn’t believe the North Koreans yet possessed the required military strength; he also fretted about a possible attack from the South.

  Mao’s victories in China in the latter months of the year encouraged Kim to increase the pressure on Russia and, by January 1950, Stalin was slowly, reluctantly, prepared to offer his support, at least in principle. Mao himself, in the early months of 1950, was still extinguishing the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance, and his energies were focused on reshaping China according to his own particular vision of Communism. Nevertheless, when Kim visited him in Beijing on 13 May for secret talks, Mao said he would give his support provided the war was quick and decisive. He promised too that China would send troops if the United States entered the war to defend the South.

  When the telephone rang at his home in Independence, Missouri, just after 9.15 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, 24 June 1950, President Harry Truman had been enjoying a rare weekend’s rest. On the other end of the line was Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State. ‘Mr President, I have some very serious news,’ Acheson informed him. ‘The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.’ There was a fourteen-hour time difference between Seoul and Washington, so the armies of North Korea had actually swept across the 38th parallel shortly before dawn on Sunday, 25 June.

  Truman set off for Kansas City airport to return to Washington and take charge of the crisis. There was little doubt as to how he would react, with his personal physician, General Wallace Graham, telling reporters: ‘Northern or Communist China is marching on South Korea and we are going to fight. The boss is going to hit these fellows hard.’

  If the strategists and politicians were caught unawares, so too were the citizens of South Korea. Despite warning signs in recent months, they had developed a certain sense of complacency over any impending conflict.

  That morning, Larry Zellers, a young, newly married Methodist minister from Texas, was sleeping soundly alone in his bed at 292 Man Wul Dong in the border town of Kaesong. He was woken by the sound of small arms and artillery fire soon after 4.30 a.m.: ‘I then did something foolish: I decided that it was simply another border skirmish between North and South. I even turned over in bed and tried to go back to sleep. In my two years in Kaesong, I had learned that most such outbreaks of fighting across the 38th parallel took place during the early morning hours, and like many people all over the world who live with danger, I got used to it.’

  In fact, some time during the night, just two miles from where he lay, the North Korean Army had slipped across the 38th parallel and re-laid the torn-up section of railway running north out of Kaesong. Then, in a brilliant manoeuvre, they had packed a train full of soldiers and driven it boldly into the town’s station. Effectively, this was the start of the war.

  Some fifty miles south, in the capital of Seoul, George Blake was clearing up after a party at his house to celebrate the ‘name day’ of his friend Jean Meadmore – the feast of St John the Baptist. He grabbed a few hours sleep before waking at around 9 a.m., then made the short walk to the Anglican Cathedral where it was his custom to attend morning service in the crypt. Before the service began, a hasty, whispered conversation between an American officer and some members of his Embassy alerted him to the fact that something out of the ordinary had happened, but Blake ignored the chatter and took his place in the pews, remaining there throughout the ceremony alongside Captain Holt. Afterwards, the wife of an American colonel ex
citedly informed the congregation that her husband had been called away because North Korean troops had crossed the 38th parallel and heavy fighting had broken out all along the line.

  It was clear by late afternoon that the North Koreans were advancing rapidly towards the capital. The crisis required Blake to perform consular duties and he jumped into his jeep, criss-crossing the city to warn British families of the impending danger, urging them if at all possible to leave.

  The diplomats, and a group of missionaries who had stayed behind hunkered down in the legation compound and waited for the invaders to arrive. On the following morning, their numbers were bolstered by the arrival of Jean Meadmore and his colleagues from the French consulate. Most of the American contingent had left the capital.

  Holt had sent a message to London via the Cable & Wireless Company (the legation didn’t have its own wireless station) asking for instructions, but he didn’t expect a reply until Wednesday at the earliest. The latest information suggested the marauding North Koreans would reach the capital by nightfall on Tuesday.

  On Monday evening the group gathered to decide on a plan of action. Holt told his colleagues that strictly speaking, according to the terms of his mission, he should follow the South Korean Government, to which he was accredited, wherever they went. But of course they had already fled en masse, telling no one of their destination, so he felt free from any such obligation. All his instincts urged him to remain; he felt it was both his diplomatic and moral duty. Paul Garbler, a young American naval intelligence officer, recalls him picking up a sword that he kept over his mantelpiece, brandishing it and saying: ‘I’m not leaving; this is my legation and British soil. If I have to, I’ll fight them with my sword.’