The Greatest Traitor Page 15

  Among the more outlandish claims of Dr Johnson – ‘The Red Dean’ as he was known, for his slavish devotion to the Communist Party and, in particular, Stalin – was that the United States was waging a deliberate policy of germ warfare on the North Korean people. His pamphlet on the subject, I Appeal, was distributed among the captives.

  Blake and his colleagues had now been in captivity for eight months. The propaganda material flowing from these two colourful characters was just a first, small step, a taster of the attempts at political indoctrination that both the Chinese and the Russians would gradually make on them once they were settled in Moo Yong Nee.

  This was the first modern military conflict in which one side attempted to systematically convert prisoners of the other to their own ideology. In April 1951, Padre S.J. Davies and his colleagues in the Gloucestershire Regiment were warned by their captor, a high-ranking Chinese officer: ‘You are hirelings of the barbarous Rhee puppet government, but you will be given the chance to learn the truth through study and to correct your mistakes.’ Soon, Davies and his fellow prisoners would be put through the Chinese ‘Lenient Policy’. This was something of a misnomer: if they refused to undertake ‘re-education’ in Marxism-Leninism, they might face the withdrawal of rations of food and cigarettes, beatings or even solitary confinement. As a Chinese officer famously snarled at one group of prisoners: ‘We will keep you here ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years if necessary, until you learn the truth, and if you still won’t learn it, we will bury you so deep that you won’t even stink.’

  Blake, Deane, Holt, Meadmore and the others were a completely different proposition from the ordinary soldiers. These were not just diplomats, intelligence officers, or journalists – all of them had an unusual depth of learning that qualified them as intellectuals.

  As they began to accustom themselves to a more benign existence in the farmhouse, there was an increase in the efforts to lure them into an ideological conversion. After receiving the outpourings of Felton and Johnson, they were then given the Communist classics to help while away the long hours of captivity – Marx’s Das Kapital, Lenin’s The State and the Revolution, Stalin’s Questions of Leninism as well as writings from the likes of Engels. In addition, they were supplied with contemporary Russian magazines and newspapers, in which the faults of a ‘corrupt’ Western civilisation were relentlessly analysed and magnified. One of the books described England as being like ‘a pond of stagnant, fetid water where nothing lived, where all was stifled by the green slime on the surface’. America, recalled Deane, ‘was America as seen by one who searched only for horror, soullessness and filth. France, as painted by Ilya Ehrenburg, was a decadent caricature of her great past.’

  This was not like an indoctrination session with an interrogator and Deane felt this wealth of propaganda material had far more insidious dangers. ‘The absurd and constant assertion began to leave its mark . . . I felt my thinking processes getting tangled, my critical faculties getting blunted. I could not think and I was afraid,’ Deane remembered. ‘It does not matter what the thought is, its quality is beside the point. If you cannot think, it frightens you by its immense repetition.’

  Relief arrived in an unusual form. In one delivery of books there was a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – a mistake, perhaps, or did the propagandists hope it would be seen as an allegory on capitalist profit? It enabled the captives to leap back into the straightforward, alluring world of a child’s imagination, with good old-fashioned storytelling featuring adventures with drunken sailors, pirates, parrots and buried gold. They drew lots to see who would read it first, and then they all read it over again. ‘It made us light-hearted, so we started dancing lessons,’ recalled Deane. ‘Those of us who could dance taught those who couldn’t. Music was homemade – singing and beating a box to keep time.’

  Blake enjoyed Treasure Island well enough but, unlike Deane, he also found succour in The State and Revolution and, in particular, Das Kapital.

  The captives’ living conditions were not comfortable by Western standards. Nevertheless, life at the farmhouse in Moo Yong Nee was far removed from the adversity and constant threat of disease and death at the camp in Hanjang-Ni. The Chinese seemed to have taken a conscious decision not to allow their prisoners to die at the alarming rate of previous months and circumstances for both civilians and POWs alike in all the camps along the Yalu River began to significantly improve. Whether it was because of gathering hopes of a ceasefire that summer and they did not wish to have their reputation sullied by accusations of prisoner neglect, or because they wanted as many converts as possible coming out of their ‘political study sessions’, remains unclear.

  Blake and his colleagues were given padded clothing to see them through the rest of the winter, and the food – although lacking in variety – was a good deal better than the previous starvation rations. The building they lived in had four rooms and a kitchen with a hearth – and the rare luxury of a warm fire. The electricity supply was eventually restored in May.

  As winter turned to spring, Blake and Holt would wander out into the field behind the farmhouse and sit on low green mounds in a small family graveyard, where the two of them would read and talk. Holt’s eyesight was very poor and had deteriorated further because of malnutrition. Worse, he had lost his glasses while dashing for cover when American fighter columns attacked targets close to the column of prisoners on the Death March. He asked Blake to read to him, and together they embarked on Das Kapital. In the weeks that followed, the book provoked much discussion between them as to the merits of a socialist society.

  Holt had at one stage considered stepping down from the Foreign Office to pursue a political career, but was unsure as to which party he would join. Because of his background and upbringing he would have been a natural candidate for the Conservatives, but Blake inferred from their dialogue that Holt’s sympathies lay more on the left of British politics. He enjoyed listening to the older man’s advanced and occasionally unorthodox views, and admired his detached and objective approach to world affairs: ‘For example, he believed the British Empire was in terminal decline, and he was convinced that humanity was entering a new stage – that of communism. He didn’t welcome it because he was too much of an individualist to enjoy living in a communist society but he certainly had admiration for what the Soviets had achieved in Central Asia, in raising the living standards of those in former colonial territories. He compared that achievement to what the British did in India.’

  Holt’s cogent expression of his ideas was inadvertently helping to dismantle the final barriers in Blake’s mind on his road to full conversion to Communism and, from there, to ultimate betrayal. But it seemed to Blake that when Holt and other prisoners criticised Communism, it was always about the form it took, and never about its real spirit.

  In the autumn of 1951 that form was still the dominant figure of Joseph Stalin, who was starting to ponder a new, dangerous theory that fitted in well with his increasingly virulent anti-Semitism: that a group of Jewish doctors was plotting to murder Kremlin leaders. Not a whisper of this latest expression of his paranoia would be heard by the outside world for many years. The prevailing view in the West was that the ailing dictator was a dangerous adversary, but an admirable leader of his people, despite his flaws. Clues to the real nature of his regime were still mostly well hidden.

  Blake was perturbed by the cult of personality in the Soviet Union. He later acknowledged that many of the manifestations of Communism were repellent, and accepted great crimes were committed in its name:

  But these were not an essential part of its creed, which itself represented the noblest aims of humanity and in many respects sought to put into practice the virtues preached by Christianity.

  I felt that if a movement was motivated by such aims it was more likely to achieve them than if it had no aims at all, or very vague ones, and that therefore in the long run, in spite of stumbling and backsliding, Communism was likely to esta
blish a more just and humane society than Capitalism.

  In this written justification he made for his treachery to the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, nine years later, Blake made it sound, in the semi-religious language he tended to deploy, as if he had embarked on a path of repentance and then sacrifice.

  I had become profoundly aware of the frailty of human life and I had reflected much on what I had done with my life up to that point.

  I felt that it had lacked aim and had been filled mostly with the pursuit of pleasure and personal ambitions . . . I then decided to devote the rest of my life to what I considered a worthwhile cause, to sacrifice to it not only possibly my life and liberty, but more so my honour and the affection and esteem of my friends and relatives, to live no more for myself but only for this purpose.

  His final decision to embrace Communism and then act upon it may well have been taken after reading Das Kapital in a cemetery in Korea, but the reality was that this was just the last step on a long journey along the road to treachery, which had begun many years before.

  Everything he was about to do he would later justify on the grounds of belief alone, but even the purest of ideological spies have other reasons. Blake’s were contempt for the British class system of which, on occasion, he had been a victim, a dislike of the competitive society, virulent anti-Americanism and a deep religious conviction that blended well with Marxism. In addition, a fascination with the secret world had grown in him since childhood, and since his teenage years he had been leading a double life, in one form of intelligence or another, playing a part, deceiving others, living his life – bluntly – as a professional liar.

  Besides, what was there to hold him back? The bonds of allegiance to his country had inevitably been weak, despite his father’s loyalty and passion for a distant Britain. Blake had spent just three years of his life on English soil, and viewed his nationality with a degree of detachment. In later life he would explain that ‘I feel above nationality. I don’t approve of national feelings. Loyalty to humanity, loyalty to a human cause, loyalty to religion is higher than loyalty to country.’

  And there was something more – a certain quirk of personality – a desire to be in control. ‘He was a secret man, it was not easy to know what he was thinking. But I had the strong sense that he liked to exercise power, not just be passive and subservient,’ was Jean Meadmore’s later assessment. Blake’s first wife Gillian would put it even more succinctly: ‘I think George liked to be the power behind the scenes. He didn’t want power for himself, for his own sake, he didn’t want people to say “That’s George Blake”. He wanted to manipulate the strings and know what was going on.’

  Gillian Blake, for her part, believed her husband’s ideological switch came some time before Korea: ‘I don’t think his conversion to communism was really in the camp. It was there before . . . I think it was the result of a mixture of a latent feeling he had always had of wanting to better things, and a lack of the substantial background that people have, of family and schools and all that sort of thing, which makes them able to sink back when they see that sort of thing . . . I don’t know, but I don’t think that he’d be switched over in camp like that.’

  If the conversion had come much earlier, his experiences in the war acted as a catalyst in a mind now fixated against his country and Western aggression: ‘I remembered how in Holland, during the war, when I heard at night the heavy drone of RAF planes overhead on their way to bomb Germany, the sound had been like a song to me . . . Now, when I saw the enormous grey hulks of the American bombers sweeping low to drop their deadly load over the small, defenceless, Korean villages huddled against the mountainside, when I saw the villagers, mostly women and children and old people – for the men were all at the front – being machine-gunned as they fled to seek shelter in the fields, I felt nothing but shame and anger.’

  Beyond the walls of his farmhouse compound, seismic political and military events were taking place. President Truman and his commanders faced up to the last, great battle for territory in the war – the Chinese ‘Fifth Phase’ or ‘Spring Offensive’. It lasted from 22 April through to 20 May 1951, with three field armies of 700,000 men aiming to encircle and annihilate UN forces in the West. Despite early successes in ferocious battles at Imjin River and Kapyong, the Chinese assault was repulsed by a determined and coordinated rearguard action by troops under the command of General Ridgway, who had replaced MacArthur in April 1951. The Communists were eventually thrown back with appalling casualties and the UN forces recaptured the ‘Kansas-Wyoming Line’, just north of the 38th parallel. A long stalemate now developed which would last until the armistice, two years later. Mao, viewing the huge losses his armies had suffered since the beginning of the year, accepted that the UN forces could not be decisively beaten. Stalin too, watching from the sidelines, had come to much the same conclusion.

  Low-level peace talks, ‘strictly military’, with no political content, began between the two delegations at Kaesong on 10 July. Meanwhile in the air, the first ‘Jet War’ was now underway – the one occasion in the Cold War where American and Soviet military forces regularly engaged each other in battle, with the US Sabres and Russian MIG-15s locked in fierce combat.

  In August, Blake and his colleagues’ hopes of release were raised when an official from the North Korean Ministry for Foreign Affairs arrived at the farmhouse in Moo Yong Nee. He told them that a message had been received from their families, that they were well and thinking of them. Frustratingly, he had no specific words or details. He then urged the captives to write short messages to their relatives in no more than twenty words and assured them that they would be passed on, via the International Red Cross. Blake tried to cram in as much reassurance about his health and his hopes for a speedy reunion.

  For some time the Foreign Office had been making concerted efforts to discover the whereabouts of the captured British nationals and request their release. The quest began in earnest when Sir David Kelly, British Ambassador to Moscow, demanded a meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. Gromyko’s manner was evasive. He told Kelly that, in the first instance, the British Government would be advised to approach the North Koreans directly. In February 1951, Ernest Davies, junior minister at the Foreign Office, somewhat overstated his department’s progress when he reassured the House of Commons: ‘We approached the Chinese Government and the Soviet Government, asking them to use their good offices, and I am glad to say that the Soviet Government are doing so.’

  In reality the Soviet Government would make little effort for many months. It did eventually indicate a willingness to play a role as a ‘post box’, transmitting messages to and from Captain Holt and his group, but the reliability of service was poor. Messages went out from the camp, but there’s no evidence that the prisoners actually received any letters from their families.

  It is as clear as it reasonably can be that it was in the autumn of 1951 that Blake took the irrevocable step towards which he had been heading, and began actively to betray his country. What remains a matter of contention is how that step was taken – was he actively recruited by the KGB (then known as the MGB), or did he readily offer his services, and choose treachery of his own free will? There are two versions of the story.

  In Blake’s account, he made the first move late one evening when everyone else had gone to bed. He went out to relieve himself in the field behind the farmhouse and, on his way back, he stopped off in the guards’ room, where a light was still showing. On opening the door he came across a familiar scene – Commander ‘Fatso’ giving one of his regular, evening political lectures to a group of colleagues: ‘I put my fingers to my lips as I handed him a folded note. He looked at me somewhat surprised, but took it without saying anything. I closed the door and went back to bed.’ Blake says he wrote the note in Russian, and addressed it to the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang. In it, he stated he had ‘something important to communicate which they might find of intere
st’.

  For six weeks Blake says he heard nothing. His note, he claims, sent the Soviet officials in the North Korean capital scurrying to confer with their KGB colleagues in Vladivostok, who then swiftly reported back to Moscow. Then a ‘young, fair Russian, with pleasant, open features’ arrived in Manpo, along with an older man: ‘the chief’, who was clearly his superior. Blake attaches names to neither of them. His account has him interrogated by the older of the two: ‘He was a big, burly man of about forty or forty-five with a pale complexion. What was most remarkable about him was that he was completely bald, so that he looked very like the film actor, Erich von Stroheim, and that, for reasons best known to himself, he wore no socks.’

  On that first day, the officer had Blake’s note spread out before him on the table and asked him to explain what information he had to offer. Blake told him that he wanted to offer his services to the Soviet authorities. He explained that although ostensibly a diplomat, a vice-consul at the British legation, in reality he was a spy. ‘I had no indication that they knew I was an SIS officer,’ he recalled. For some time his offer was regarded with the automatic suspicion that all intelligence agencies view ‘walk-ins’. As Blake tells it, his interviews with ‘the chief’ carried on for several months. Finally, he was told his vetting process was over and that he had been accepted as a Soviet agent. When the right time came, they would activate him.

  Blake’s version of events fits neatly into the legend he created for himself and, though it may well be true, appears to bear the tell-tale signs of a KGB propaganda job: the disillusioned Western intelligence operative, scales lifted from his eyes, brought willingly to the Marxist cause by a mixture of personal experience and ideological conviction. There are those in Russia, however, who have always maintained that Soviet intelligence, in the person of 25-year-old Nikolai Andreyevich Loenko, made the decisive move to bring Blake into the KGB ranks, and there are reliable sources which support that view.