The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Blake and his colleagues had been instructed to be extremely cautious in their dealings with a naturally eager and curious media. They were told to say as little as possible about the conditions in which they had been kept in North Korea because criticism might endanger the position of other internees yet to be released. The reporters noted that the men were all shabbily dressed, in ill-fitting clothes that had clearly been given to them just before their release. ‘All were sunburned and looked relatively well, although the faces of some bore the marks of their suffering,’ observed the man from The Times.

  Among the press corps was none other than Charles Wheeler, Blake’s colleague back in Hamburg in the spring of 1946. Now Wheeler was employed by the BBC, as a correspondent for the Corporation’s German language service. His encounter with his old colleague that day left him perplexed: ‘I went to meet the incoming internees at the airport – it was a good story, obviously. In the midst of this large welcoming party I walked up to George, who had his back to me, and I said, “Hello George”. He turned round and saw me, and jumped about a foot in the air and went pale . . . I told him I was now living and working in Berlin, and asked him to come and have a drink with me in the evening. “I shan’t have time, I shan’t have time,” he replied hurriedly, and I was surprised at this, because although we were never close friends, I must have been the only person in Berlin he knew.’

  In later years, as events unfolded, Wheeler reflected on Blake’s behaviour that day; ‘He certainly wasn’t pleased to see me. He didn’t know I was a journalist – perhaps he thought I was a security man.’

  Captain Holt and Bishop Cooper spent the night at Commandant Coleman’s residence, whereas Blake and the rest bedded down in the officers’ mess at Gatow. The following morning, Wednesday, 22 April, they boarded the De Havilland Hastings aircraft once more for the return to British soil.

  Finally, on a glorious spring morning, Blake and his companions touched down at the Abingdon RAF station in Oxfordshire. A Salvation Army band, led by Commissioner John Allan, struck up the well-known doxology ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’ as the internees appeared on the gangway. First down the steps was Holt, quickly followed by Owen, Lord and then Blake. The Pathé News commentary of the event refers to ‘George Blake, of the Seoul legation staff’, and then – less forgivably – says he was greeted by his wife. In fact, it was his mother Catherine, right at the front of the crowd, who hugged and kissed him the moment he left the steps.

  The ragged attire that reporters had noticed at Gatow had been replaced by smarter sets of clothes. Holt’s light suit still looked too small for him, but Blake was tidily dressed in light slacks and pullover, with a dark tie and blazer. The younger man’s beard was neatly trimmed in his now-familiar Elizabethan style. The two men, staunch, intimate companions in the camps, stood side by side facing a battery of cameras and a host of questions from the TV and newspapermen.

  Holt did most of the talking. Looking gaunt with hollow cheeks, and suffering from a dry cough, he was, as ever, the consummate diplomat: ‘It’s very nice to be back, and I’m very happy to have been brought back by the RAF, which always gets you out of a jam.’ The reporters may have wanted tales of starvation and torture, but Holt remained circumspect: ‘Well, we have both pleasant, and unpleasant, memories of our treatment. When the country itself was in difficulties, of course it was not possible for them to treat us with the same consideration as later.’

  Blake stonewalled in similar fashion. He shifted from side to side, smiling uncomfortably for the camera, as the reporter conducted a particularly anodyne interview.

  Reporter:

  How did you find the food out there, Mr Blake?

  Blake:

  Well, the food was adequate but very monotonous.

  Reporter:

  It was monotonous, was it?

  Blake:

  Very monotonous.

  Reporter:

  Anything special? I mean, any odd things they gave you to eat or anything?

  Blake:

  No, just rice and turnips mainly.

  Reporter:

  Pretty impressive diet, isn’t it?

  Blake:

  Three times a day.

  Commissioner Lord was equally unwilling to condemn his captors: ‘We lived in a Korean house and our food was, I think, probably greater in quantity and better in quality than the great majority of ordinary Korean people were getting by then.’

  After an official welcome from senior members of the Foreign Office, Blake later received another, quieter approach. He remembered, ‘an elegantly dressed, elderly man, whom I had never met before, and who introduced himself as the personal representative of the Chief of the Secret [Intelligence] Service.’ This emissary brought greetings from the Chief, an envelope with some money, and an instruction to call at Room 070 in the War Office the following Wednesday.

  After saying moving goodbyes with the companions who had shared his bitter experiences over the past thirty-four months, Blake was bundled into his mother’s car and was driven off to her home in Reigate. ‘That evening,’ he remembered, ‘we had a quiet supper together in her small but comfortable flat and went to bed early, tired from the many emotions of the day.’

  Blake and his party were the first prisoners to return from the Korean War, and fortunate to have made it. Of the more than 700 GIs who had accompanied Blake and the others on the Death March, only 250 survived to make it back to the United States after the final ceasefire in July 1953.

  This so-called ‘limited’ war on the Asian peninsula had wrought terrible havoc, leaving in its wake an estimated four million military and civilian casualties, including 33,600 American, 16,000 UN allied, 415,000 South Korean, and 520,000 North Korean dead. There were also an estimated 900,000 Chinese casualties. Half of Korea’s industry had been destroyed and a third of all homes. Moreover, for all the lives lost and the bitter sacrifices made, the century’s ‘nastiest’ conflict had resolved little, if anything. The Cold War continued apace. In his nationwide radio and television address on 26 July, President Eisenhower warned the American people: ‘We have won an armistice on a single battlefield, not peace in our world. We may not now relax nor cease our quest.’

  Blake’s debriefing at the War Office, on 29 April, a week after his triumphant return to England was, with the benefit of hindsight, perfunctory and utterly inadequate. After having his credentials checked by the frock-coated head porter in his gold-braided hat at the front entrance, he made his way into the imposing building, with its seven floors and a thousand rooms, and headed for Room 070 on the ground floor. It was allocated to SIS just as Room 050 along the corridor was available to MI5 (the Security Service) and provided a place to conduct interviews on ‘neutral’ ground before deciding whether to allow individuals access to Head Office on Broadway.

  In the first morning’s debriefing, the two interrogators ranged over the circumstances of Blake’s initial arrest – his transportation to the prison camp, conditions on the notorious Death March, and then, most critically, his interrogation by his North Korean captors. Blake’s answers appeared to satisfy the SIS officers. They were especially gratified that he and his junior, Norman Owen, had managed to destroy all secret documents and codes at the embassy in Seoul before they were led away by soldiers.

  The following morning he returned to Room 070 for the second round of questioning and this time, his inquisitors were keen to establish what intelligence material Blake had managed to obtain during his time in captivity, or on his way back to freedom on the Trans-Siberian railway, connecting Russia, China and Korea. They bemoaned the fact that Blake had not thought to bring back a small sample of Siberian soil. Had he done so, they told him, they might have been able to ascertain whether the Russians had carried out any atomic tests in the area. Blake had offered the two men his shoes, in case any soil had remained on the soles, but they told him that would not be necessary.

  After just four hours of questioning over two
days, Blake’s interviewers felt nothing was untoward and their job was done. He was told to report at Head Office on the following Monday.

  The laxity of Blake’s debriefing seems all the more surprising because, after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, there had been a great deal of pressure, especially from the Americans, for the UK government to tighten up its security and vetting procedures. In October 1951, the Attlee Cabinet accepted the idea of ‘positive vetting’ in principle and, when Winston Churchill was returned to power, his administration quickly introduced it, in January 1952. The task of the new PV (Positive Vetting) section was not just to stringently evaluate new recruits to SIS, but also to undertake periodical checks on existing members. Blake had spent nearly three years in the hands of the Koreans and the Chinese, with the Russians’ interrogators suspected to be never far away. Was four hours of relatively gentle probing really long enough to discover whether or not he was beholden to his former captors?

  Sir James ‘Jack’ Easton, a former Air Commodore in the RAF, was Vice Chief of SIS in that period. ‘I don’t think at the time that anyone really thought there would have been efforts to turn people [in the camps],’ he recalled. ‘If it had been an Iron Curtain country it would have different, but we used to regard North Korea as a bit primitive and unsophisticated, if you like, and one wouldn’t have suspected them of doing anything.’

  On his first day back at Head Office, Blake was ushered straight up to the ‘holy of holies’, C’s office on the fourth floor of the cramped old building with its rabbit warren of corridors and rooms. C, the Chief of the Service, was Major-General John Alexander Sinclair, former Director of Military Intelligence in the Second World War, who had only recently taken up the reins at Broadway. Blake had previously met Sinclair just once, in August 1948, on the eve of his departure for Korea. On the strength of that brief meeting he had formed a good impression of the tall, commanding figure with a pleasant, thoughtful manner, and known to his staff as ‘Sinbad’.

  On this occasion, Sinclair listened sympathetically while Blake elaborated on some of the more harrowing moments of his time in Korea. He assured the young officer that he would shortly be found a new post but that, this time, it would be at home, at Head Office. In the meantime he was told he could take several months’ compassionate leave in order to put the Korean ordeal behind him.

  Jack Easton also felt he should commiserate with the young officer over his gruelling ordeal, and asked him to come up to his office for a chat a few days after his formal debriefing. It was the first and only time he met Blake:

  I remember a bearded young man coming in through the door, and I noticed a slight accent in his voice, which made me think he didn’t sound like someone of British origin.

  It made me have a further discussion about the policy of recruiting people like Blake, who I thought might have a doubtful background.

  I had always thought – and I had expressed this to my colleagues, so this isn’t entirely in retrospect – that it wasn’t good policy to bring in from the ‘outside’ a person who might make an excellent agent away from the office, but who should never, if his background allegiance to Britain was in any doubt, have been allowed in as a member of staff.

  Whatever doubts Easton may have harboured about Blake, he did not act on them. Indeed, he would have been going against the grain of opinion at Broadway where Blake was fêted as a hero. Here was a man, even if he was not ‘one of their own’, who had stoically and courageously withstood the worst the Communists could throw at him.

  With compassionate leave to enjoy, Blake spent some of his accumulated salary on a Ford Anglia car and set off on a series of trips around Europe. First, he took his mother, his sister Elizabeth and her new husband on a three-week holiday to Spain. Then the party headed for Holland, where they prepared to spend some time with Aunt Truss in Rotterdam. Blake, however, had more pressing matters to attend to: the time had arrived for that crucial meeting with his Russian handler.

  The two men met on the morning of Saturday, 11 July, in the tranquil setting of a small park not far from the classically elegant eighteenth-century mansions that dominated the street of Lann van Meerdervoort, in The Hague. Blake, new to the business of betrayal, was nervous, but the Russian approached the meeting with a degree of sanguinity: he was a veteran of such clandestine encounters, an experienced Cold War operator.

  Nikolai Borisovich Rodin, a 45-year-old Muscovite, was better known to SIS by his pseudonym Korovin. He was certain – or as certain as you ever could be in the espionage business – that he had not been followed on the way to the park. His colleagues would often bemoan his lackadaisical approach to tradecraft, borne out of natural arrogance and a certain complacency after years in the job, but on this occasion he had taken the utmost care to ensure that his arrival in the Dutch city had gone unnoticed. The Russian had to be careful: SIS and MI5 had him in their sights because of his years serving under diplomatic cover in London, and his role in the flight of Burgess and Maclean on the SS Falaise in 1950. Outward appearance and behaviour may have marked him down as the stereotypical, ruthless Russian apparatchik, but behind the imperiousness he could be charming, when required. On this occasion, he knew he needed to be patient and considerate to cement the deal with this new recruit.

  Blake was, at least, on territory he knew well, having lived with his family at the nearby seaside resort of Scheveningen in the 1930s. As he took his place on the bench beside the KGB officer, families from the affluent, somewhat sedate neighbourhood in adjoining streets had yet to emerge in force for the weekend’s tasks and pleasures. One or two customary walkers passed by the two spies and, on the other side of the square, two young mothers kept watch over their children, who were playing on the grass. If anyone had cast more than just a cursory glance towards the two men, they would have noticed that they both appeared preoccupied by copies of the previous day’s edition of the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, one of Holland’s leading daily newspapers. The headline in black type across the front-page lead story read ‘Beria afgezet en uit de partij gestoten’ – ‘Beria deposed and expelled from the party’.

  Putting aside any concerns about the power struggle underway in Moscow, the KGB officer was keen to establish a modus operandi with his new recruit for their clandestine meetings once they were both back in London. He also wanted to hear what sort of information Blake thought he could realistically provide about the counter-espionage activities of SIS. Rodin was greatly encouraged by Blake’s account of what had happened since April, relieved at how easily his new agent had survived the debriefing and encouraged by his meeting with C. It gave him every reason to believe that he now had a committed and capable mole in place for the long-term. He was especially interested in one particular piece of information Blake was able to impart.

  In the years after the war, with the drawing down of the Iron Curtain, SIS had found it increasingly difficult to penetrate the Soviet Union and its satellite states by means of agents on the ground. The focus had increasingly shifted to more technical methods of intelligence gathering, in particular the tapping of telephone landlines in Soviet territory. A new department had been created: Section Y, where the material obtained could be better stored and where an army of translators could sit and decipher it. It had been indicated to Blake that a post for him in Section Y was one of the options likely to be discussed while he was away on leave. It would put him right at the centre of the Service’s newest line of work and he was sure that would suit his KGB masters. Rodin was similarly enthused.

  The two men agreed to meet again in early October, by which time Blake would have been back at work for a month and would have been able to assess the possibilities. This time, though, Rodin advised him that their meeting would have to be in London. To convene again in Holland would entail both of them taking two days away from England, which might alert serious suspicion if Rodin was successfully tracked. London might appear the more dangerous terrain, but Rodin knew the capital intimately
and was confident he could evade any watchers and set up a secure rendezvous. They fixed the day and the place – Belsize Park underground station. Rodin left the park to make his way back circuitously through the country and on to the ferry bound for England.

  Blake also took every precaution on the trip back to his Ford Anglia, walking further down the lengthy Lann van Meerdervoort, past shops, offices and houses, before turning down some side streets to reclaim his vehicle. When leaving the city, he maintained this vigilance deciding not to return to Rotterdam by the motorway route and instead taking a trip down memory lane by taking Delftweg, the road by the canal on which he had cycled many times as a boy.

  He was mightily relieved. Doubts about the momentous step he was taking still remained, as they always would. It was the nature of betrayal never to rest easy, always to be dogged by that feeling of guilt, but his path of duplicity was now firmly plotted, and the sense of adventure he had always craved would permanently accompany him in the weeks and months to come.

  Later in the summer, Blake invited his fellow captive Jean Meadmore to stay with him in Radlett for a week before the two of them embarked on a journey through the ‘Garden of France’, the Loire Valley, where they visited the vineyards and toured a selection of the hundreds of stunning châteaux that adorn the region. Throughout, he was in good spirits, betraying no sign of the momentous step he had taken in Korea. ‘He was the same old George,’ remembered Meadmore.

  Then, on 1 September, it was back to work for SIS, and the beginning of his traitorous activities for the Soviet foreign intelligence service: ‘I still viewed my SIS colleagues as fellow workers but my thought processes now worked on two levels – the level of normal human contact, but also the other, impersonal level, where I was out to frustrate any operations directed against the Soviet Union.’