The Greatest Traitor Read online

  In the early 1950s, Moscow Centre was in need of new recruits within the British establishment after its successful Cambridge spy ring had been broken up. Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess – the former knowing he was about to be brought in for questioning by MI5 – had hurriedly left the country on a boat from Southampton on 25 May 1951, subsequently making their way across Europe to the sanctuary of Moscow. The ‘Third Man’ in the group, Kim Philby, was incommunicado as growing suspicion mounted over his allegiances. Indeed, during the autumn, MI5 had formally told him that his relationship with Burgess made him a prime suspect for treachery.

  A solution for filling these gaps was proffered to the strategists in the Lubyanka by Loenko, an up-and-coming intelligence officer in Vladivostok. Loenko had joined the KGB in 1944, and naturally concentrated his early intelligence work in neighbouring China and North Korea. Despite his youth, his talent was recognised right from the start; he was part of a Soviet delegation that met Kim Il-Sung and his cabinet in 1948, and he would eventually earn the sobriquet, ‘Lawrence of the Far East’. Ironically, he would have been one of those Soviet officials that Blake had been tasked to ‘turn’ when he first arrived in Seoul. In 1951, the boot would be very firmly on the other foot.

  Possessed of a rustic charm and a good sense of humour, young Loenko was not cut from the usual cloth of the Soviet apparatchik: his skills also included a facility for languages, including English. Loenko had become aware of the group of British diplomats, journalists and missionaries being shunted around from camp to camp near the Yalu River. He also knew that the Chinese and North Koreans who ran the camps had offered Soviet intelligence operatives like himself unfettered access to the Western prisoners. He suggested to his masters in Moscow that now was the time for an approach.

  Loenko arrived in Manpo under the guise of an ordinary army officer, assuming the name of ‘Grigori Kuzmich’. One by one, the captives, starting with Captain Holt, were asked to accompany their camp commander, ‘Fatso’, on the forty-five minute walk from the farmhouse to the small office Loenko had established in one of the few remaining houses in Manpo. Initially, he probed gently about their views on the war, gave them some propaganda material to read, and asked, very politely, if they would sign a statement condemning the conduct of the United Nations.

  As Loenko began to win Blake’s trust, the SIS officer gradually confided in him his revulsion at the Rhee administration, his opposition to the UN action and, in particular, the brutal American military tactics, his growing disillusionment with capitalist society and newfound enthusiasm, via The Theory of Communism and Das Kapital, for Marxism. The young intelligence officer showed a keen understanding of Blake’s belief system, rooted in his former religious convictions, and offered him an interpretation of the Soviet Union as a country whose goals were not dissimilar to those of Christianity. Paradise on earth instead of paradise in heaven.

  Blake may have been ripe for the picking, but it took many meetings over a series of weeks before Loenko felt confident he had his man. Meanwhile the young officer’s superiors back in Moscow remained wary of Blake. They suspected the charming, clever Captain Holt of masterminding a ploy against them and grew extremely cautious once they learned of Blake’s activities in Hamburg in 1946. He just seemed too good to be true.

  Once Blake had, at last, pledged his future to the KGB, he was at great pains to emphasise that he did not want any personal advantages in return for his work; in particular, he made it clear he wanted no money as a reward for his spying on their behalf: ‘I was doing it for a cause.’ While he remained in captivity, he insisted he should have no privileges of any kind, none that would set him aside from his fellow prisoners. This was not just a matter of principle – any extra benefits he received might well alert the suspicions of his companions at the farmhouse.

  He told his interlocutors that he would supply all the information he could on SIS operations directed against the Soviet Union, and indeed, the rest of the world Communist movement: ‘My sole aim in all this was to assist in preventing espionage operations from harming the Communist bloc and, more especially, the Soviet Union.’ Over the course of the next few months, the KGB men asked Loenko to put Blake to the test: they wanted the Briton to provide them with full details of the structure and organisation of SIS. Of course they already had this information, thanks to Kim Philby and others, which made it an effective way of proving his sincerity. Eventually, the KGB was satisfied it had a bona fide British intelligence officer on its books. In the absence of Burgess and Maclean, and with Philby’s usefulness coming to an end, Blake was a welcome addition to the Soviets’ roster of moles.

  Loenko died in a car crash on 20 September 1976 at the age of fifty. In October 1999 Blake travelled to Vladivostok at the invitation of the Governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko, and the FSB Head, Major-General Sergei Verevkin-Rahalskogo. Older KGB officers often referred to him as ‘Blake’s godfather’, and Blake made a point of visiting the Morskoye cemetery to lay flowers at Loenko’s grave.

  Whatever the exact truth of Blake’s recruitment, his acceptance into the Communist fold proved to be a moment of enormous relief for him, though it was also one of sharp realisation: there was no turning back. He was embarking on a lifelong road of deception and treachery: ‘I fully realised I was betraying the trust put in me: I was betraying the allegiance that I owed to Britain, I was betraying my colleagues and friends . . . But I felt it would be wrong to forgo the opportunity of making such a valuable contribution and that was a guilt I should take upon me.’

  He slipped effortlessly into this ‘atmosphere of illegality’. Albeit now darker and deeper, such shadowlands had been his natural environment ever since he had worked as a courier in the Dutch underground. More than that, though, spying for the Soviet Union gave him his vocation: ‘It gave a complete sense to life. Having this very important task put every other problem in my life in perspective. Many of the other problems that concern people – marital problems, day-to-day concerns – they didn’t worry me, because they were nothing compared to what I was doing.’

  There would no glimmer of an indication in his behaviour as to the change that had taken place. He made sure his fellow captives had no inkling of his very different conversations with Loenko, and he carefully ensured his accounts of discussions with the young officer tallied with theirs.

  Another young KGB officer appeared on the scene a few weeks later to aid Loenko – Vasily Alekseevich Dozhdalev, aged thirty, who had just started working out of the London office. Loenko had done all the spadework, but Dozhdalev would ultimately be the one to enjoy a long and fruitful acquaintance with Blake.

  In early 1952, the peace talks at Panmunjom looked to be close to securing agreement, but the dispute over the return of prisoners of war remained a major obstacle and the conflict continued – a slow, grinding affair of low-level attrition on the ground.

  Back at the farmhouse, in March, Blake and his companions were able to leave the courtyard for the first time in over a year to take supervised walks in the countryside. Little else had changed, however. Norman Owen kept a diary on the wall and, in the first six months of 1952, there were just fifteen entries: eight of them read ‘barber came’, while four said ‘cigarettes issued’.

  In those long, uneventful months when the conversations drifted away from history, philosophy and art, they invariably moved on to food. They had enough to eat now, but remained obsessed by the subject. ‘We were also frequently plagued by frustrating food dreams,’ Blake recalled. ‘We would find ourselves in a pastry shop with all kinds of delicious cakes, or a restaurant with tables piled high with food. All this disappeared just when we had great difficulty making up our minds what we were going to have, and were ready to start eating.’

  The relationships with the villagers who came to the farmhouse grew closer. The guards believed servants should be kept in their place and treated the prisoners’ cook and her little daughter particularly badly. The woman and her child, a 3-year-ol
d girl named Yong Sukee, were made to take their meals in a draughty, freezing outhouse. As the weather worsened in the winter of 1952, the child grew increasingly unhappy. The captives therefore ‘adopted’ Yong Sukee, taking her into the house, making her clothes and keeping her warm. ‘Owen, an expert father, was in charge during emergencies, when soothing or restraining was needed,’ recalled Deane. ‘At other times she played with the rest of us, especially with Blake, who was the most patient and who she regarded as her father. She learnt a few words of English, gave us nicknames, and dominated much of our existence.’

  Owen’s wall chart for the year contained just two more entries in the final five months. The captives had now been together for over two years, and, even in this group of compelling conversationalists, the stories were starting to dry up. Fragmentary news about the war suggested peace was still a long way off and provided little reason for optimism that the monotony would end soon.

  It took changes at the top in Washington and Moscow to start to break the deadlock. In November 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe in World War II, won the American presidency after a landslide election victory over the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower made it clear his first priority as President would be to end the war but he was determined not to do so from any position that could be construed as weak. To that end, the successful testing in January of the first surface-to-surface rocket for carrying nuclear weapons – dubbed ‘Honest John’ – gave the US the upper hand. The Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that ‘the timely use of atomic weapons should be considered against military targets affecting operations in Korea’.

  Equally crucial for the prospect of peace was the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. The dictator had continually placed impediments on negotiations, believing the inevitable compromise would damage Communist standing and free the West from the huge burden on its resources that the war had entailed. The first sign that things might be about to change in the camp was when Stalin’s picture, which had taken pride of place in the guardroom, quickly disappeared a day or so after the announcement of his death.

  On the morning of Friday, 20 March, while the captives were talking their usual morning walk round the courtyard, the British inmates were ushered back into the farmhouse and told to get their belongings together. Soon afterwards, they were in the back of an open lorry and on their way to Pyongyang. They were taking their first steps to freedom, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the new Conservative Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.

  Eden had been ‘greatly troubled’ by the continued imprisonment of Holt and his party. Ever since coming into office in October 1951, he had tried all manner of means to secure their release, including approaches to more sympathetic Communist powers, all to no avail. One weekend in February he decided to make another attempt through the Soviet Ambassador, Andrei Gromyko. Eden thought he detected indications from the Soviet government that, with the departure of Stalin, they were interested in developing better relations. ‘This might be turned to good account, but I was not sanguine,’ he reflected. Gromyko was called to the Foreign Office, where Eden charmed and cajoled him in equal measure.

  I gave him an aide-memoire setting out the facts and pointed out that these people, who were civilians, had been detained for a very long time.

  Though the Soviet Government had maintained that this was not a matter of direct concern to them, they had been good enough on one or two occasions to transmit messages and I appealed to Mr Gromyko to do what he could to secure the release of these unfortunate people.

  At first, Gromyko stuck to the standard position: his Government ‘had no responsibility in this matter’ and, as far as he knew, nothing had changed. But Eden’s argument that he could – and should – exert more pressure on the North Koreans eventually drew a pledge from Gromyko that he would talk to his government in Moscow and see what he could do.

  Six weeks later, to Eden’s surprise and delight, ‘the oracle worked’. The Soviet authorities in Moscow came back with a complete list of the captured British subjects. It was the first time for many months that their existence, let alone their well-being, had been confirmed. Just days later, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires, in the absence of Gromyko, gave Eden’s junior minister Selwyn Lloyd an assurance that the prisoners would shortly be freed.

  In Pyongyang, the captives were put up in a mountain cave for several days to shelter from American air attacks, which were still taking place several times a day. There, confirmation of their new status came in the form of a sumptuous breakfast served to them by no less than a brigadier. As they tucked into caviar, butter, ham, eggs, spaghetti and petit-beurre biscuits, they reflected on the time when a mere sergeant had beaten them with the butt of a rifle. The VIP treatment continued as they were shaved, given fresh underclothes and newly laundered shirts, and, before long, visited by a tailor, who measured them for suits and overcoats. A cinema operator even appeared with a selection of films for them to watch, including such socialist realist classics as Knight of the Golden Star, Glinka and Happy Market, as well as some delightful sequences of the prima ballerina Galina Ulanova.

  The representative of the Labour Journal, the Pravda of North Korea, came to interview them on the evening of Friday, 7 April, in a final, unsuccessful effort to extract some propaganda value. Diplomats and journalists alike played a straight bat to a barrage of questions.

  The following morning they were finally on their way, climbing onto a lorry together with two officers and four soldiers before being driven along the Pyongyang-Antung road to the Chinese frontier.

  Deane had been worried that the North Korean customs officers would take away the notes he had made while in captivity, so he had sown the valuable papers into pads, which he then strapped around his calves. As a diversionary tactic, he kept a much larger body of material to which he was not especially attached on plain view in his bag. When the customs men said they were confiscating it, he made a great play of being furious and insisting that it should eventually be posted on to his home in England. The tactic worked, and he crossed the Korean-Manchurian border on 9 April with all his writings intact, ready to be turned into a vivid account of his captivity.

  ‘King Paul of Greece was right,’ Blake reminded Deane of a dream the journalist had had, as they finally left Korea after thirty-four months as prisoners. ‘You’ve been freed before the tenth.’

  10

  Hero

  On their first night of freedom in a hotel in the Chinese border town of Antung, Blake and his colleagues celebrated in a communal bath with lusty renditions of hymns and nursery rhymes. The privations of the past three years were forgotten as they revelled in the everyday pleasures of scented soap and freshly laundered towels.

  The conditions of luxury continued the next day as their Trans-Manchurian Express train progressed steadily towards the Soviet border. In their special carriage, attentive waiters served them chicken and caviar, and they slept in huge, beautifully decorated cabins. Once they had arrived at Mukden (now Shenyang) and were settled in the best establishment in the city, they were allocated rooms with private bathrooms, and, in the panelled private dining room, the chef offered to cook any kind of food they wanted.

  On Monday, 13 April 1953, the party arrived at the Soviet border town of Otpor (now Zabaikalsk). Here, Blake had business to conduct: he was to meet up with a new KGB contact, who would also be on the train that would take his group on the 6,500-mile final leg of their journey, to Moscow. As in Manpo, the meeting was carefully planned so that none of Blake’s companions would suspect anything untoward. One by one, the former captives were taken to the customs house at Otpor, where they were met by officials, asked a few cursory questions, and then made to fill in a form. When it was Blake’s turn, he was escorted to a small room at the back of the building, where he met his new case officer, Nikolai Borisovich Rodin, an experienced intelligence operative who was just completing his
term as KGB rezident at the Soviet Embassy in London.

  Blake’s recollection is that it was a business-like, rather brusque meeting: ‘He didn’t introduce himself, but simply said that in future we would be working together. Without losing any time he began to discuss plans for our first clandestine meeting.’ The two men agreed upon a time and a place in July, in The Hague. The venue was Blake’s suggestion. He told Rodin he would feel more confident on home turf, and far better placed to react if anything went wrong. Both would carry a copy of the previous day’s Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant under their arm, as a sign that all was well. With that settled, Rodin allowed Blake to rejoin his colleagues. He told him that he would be occupying a compartment three doors along, and that if Blake had the chance to slip away without raising any suspicions, they could talk again. Moreover, he instructed him not to take any risks.

  In the event, although Blake and Rodin passed each other in the corridor from time to time, they did not have a further meeting. The week that followed was spent mainly in the restaurant car, where abundant quantities of caviar and vodka were thrust upon the former prisoners. Finally, dazed, overfed and astounded at the turnaround in their fortunes, they arrived in the Soviet capital on Monday, 20 April. They were greeted on arrival at Kazan station by the British Ambassador, Sir Alvary Trench-Gascoigne, and his staff, who later royally entertained them over dinner.

  The following morning, an RAF Hastings plane flew them to Gatow airfield in West Berlin. There, they were greeted by Major General Charles Coleman, Commandant of the British Sector in the city; various embassy staff and other officials, and a large contingent of press correspondents and photographers.