The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Blake moved out of the cramped offices of Broadway and across St James’s Park into more spacious accommodation in the stately, John Nash-inspired Georgian house at No. 2 Carlton Gardens, just round the corner from the Foreign Secretary at No. 1. The SIS building was the former home of Lord Kitchener and had been seriously damaged in 1940 as a result of a fire caused by an incendiary bomb that fell in the garden, and the house became uninhabitable for several years. When Blake walked in through the imposing green double doors to start work in Section Y, he found faded elegance. Despite the war damage, the ‘monumental’ interior, with its chandeliered marble entrance hall and majestically curving staircase with wrought-iron gilded banisters remained largely intact and still cast its spell on any visitor.

  It was soon clear to Blake that Section Y was the gleaming new weapon in SIS’s intelligence-gathering armoury, with a crucial, technical role. It was borne out of necessity because, by the early 1950s, options for gleaning information about the intentions of the enemy had significantly narrowed. Moscow’s tight grip on all the territory behind the Iron Curtain made the job of running agents more difficult, while defectors were becoming less frequent. Secret photoreconnaissance flights by high-altitude British and American planes over Soviet satellite countries had started, but were technically hazardous and still felt to be too politically risky. In addition to all this, Moscow had carried out radical reforms of its communications following intelligence gathered in late 1948 from one of its US moles.

  William Weisband worked at the heart of America’s code-breaking facility as a cipher clerk in the Army Security Agency. Among other things, Weisband had informed his KGB masters about Venona, the West’s single most important intelligence gathering activity against the Soviet Union. It was the Venona intercepts that revealed the network of Soviet atomic spies, some of whom had infiltrated the Manhattan Project. After Weisband’s information, Moscow reformed its coding practices and changed its radio-operating procedures to make Western interception more difficult. They made one further alteration which frustrated US and British intelligence: to make their signals more secure, they moved the vast majority from wireless to landline, both above and below ground.

  While adopting these defensive measures, Soviet technical experts continued to innovate and explore all manner of new ways to spy on their Western adversaries. Bugging devices of a new, unfamiliar type were found in the American Embassy in Moscow in January and September 1952, which caused great consternation in Downing Street. Churchill, fearful that Britain would be the next target, urged his Defence Minister, Earl Alexander of Tunis: ‘Pray take all necessary action with MI5 and “C” and please keep me informed.’ Five days later on 14 October, having been briefed in more detail, he wrote again to his minister, saying: ‘This is most important. It shows how far the Soviets have got in this complex sphere. Please keep me constantly informed.’

  Churchill always took a great interest in intelligence gathering and its methods, and had no hesitation in pursuing whatever means it took to get on level terms with, and ahead of, the enemy. He listened carefully to advice from senior SIS officers, who convinced him that the future of espionage lay in the technical field, and promptly sanctioned the development of offensive bugging equipment for the United Kingdom’s own use.

  By the time Blake began work in Carlton Gardens, Section Y was a hive of activity, already overcoming the obstacle of the Soviets’ move to the landline telephone and telegraph cables. The man behind the section’s burgeoning workload was a bright and creative young intelligence officer named Peter Lunn. He was a slim, quietly spoken man with a pronounced lisp, whose grey, receding hair made him appear older than thirty-eight, but there was nothing hesitant about the attitude or approach of a man whose athleticism and courage won him the captaincy of the British Winter Olympic skiing team in 1936. Blake, who would remain in his orbit for the next five years, greatly respected the Old Etonian: ‘He was a zealot by nature, as he proved by everything he tackled . . . [he was] an extremely effective, hard-working and successful intelligence officer.’

  In 1949, Lunn had been SIS’s Head of Station in Vienna. One day, while combing through a sheaf of reports from a source in the Austrian Telegraphs and Telephone Administration, he noted a number of cables requisitioned by the Soviet Army and, linking their HQ to important establishments in their zone of occupation, actually ran through the British and French sectors of the city. He resolved to tap them, believing it would equip his political and military masters with crucial information, the sort requested by the likes of US Defence Secretary General George Marshall, who pleaded around that time: ‘I don’t care what it takes, all I want is twenty-four hours’ notice of a Soviet attack.’ After winning approval from his seniors in Broadway for his scheme, Lunn recruited a team of experts to build tunnels to enable him to tap into these underground cables.

  This eavesdropping exercise, Operation Conflict, was a huge success, as were two more that followed – Operation Sugar and Operation Lord, the latter run from a villa in Vienna’s suburbs occupied by a British Army major. Conflict had run its course by the time Blake arrived in Y section, but the voluminous material it had gathered about Soviet operations throughout Eastern Europe was still being translated and analysed. Sugar and Lord remained active and would continue to do so until British and Russian forces left the city in 1955, when Austria finally regained its sovereignty. From the winter of 1953, however, the value of these tapping exercises would be rapidly diminished – that is, once Blake got hold of their findings and began passing them straight to his Soviet controllers.

  The group of characters assembled in No. 2 Carlton Gardens to transcribe, translate, interpret and administer the material pouring in from the Vienna phone taps was eclectic, not to say eccentric.

  Head of Section Y was Colonel Tom Gimson, a lifelong Army man, formerly commanding officer of the Irish Guards. In those days, he was just one of a number of senior military figures who were welcomed into SIS when their careers in the Armed Forces drew naturally to a close. Gimson was highly regarded by Blake and his colleagues. Tall, handsome, and always elegantly dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, he was a man of great tact and charm. He particularly needed those qualities when dealing with his diverse, often volatile group of transcribers.

  These Russian speakers were drawn from a variety of backgrounds. They might be the bi-lingual descendants of merchants and industrialists who had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution; the daughters of more recent Russian émigrés, often women of high rank, who had married Englishmen; or ex-Polish army officers, former members of their country’s intelligence service which during the war had operated from London under SIS control. ‘The “crazy Slavs”, as we called them, were quite temperamental and the nature of the job – which required great patience, listening to sometimes indistinct passages of speech over and over again – put great strain on them,’ recalled one of Blake’s Y colleagues. ‘Tom was very good at smoothing down feathers that Blake and I might have ruffled among the Slavs. He was a very good man, really excellent in every way.’

  The other crucial figure in the office was Gimson’s personal assistant, Pamela ‘Pam’ Peniakoff. A tall, elegant woman, she was the widow of Vladimir Peniakoff, alias ‘Popski’, the Belgian-born son of Russian parents who formed his own private army in the war to carry out daring commando raids on Rommel’s army in the Western Desert. Still a formidable figure, with a sharp but witty tongue, Pam organised the office highly efficiently. ‘Tom Gimson, a man of gentle nature himself, was, I think, a little afraid of her,’ recalled Blake. ‘But she was good fun and together with the three younger secretaries we formed a small working team which got on very well together.’

  One of those secretaries was 20-year-old Gillian Forsyth Allan, who had joined SIS shortly after completing a secretarial course in Weybridge, Surrey, close to where she lived. She had been working in Y section for a few months before Blake appeared. Gillian, tall, dark and attractive, came from a conv
entional, middle-class, Home Counties family. After grammar school, she went to a domestic science college before completing her education at a finishing school in Switzerland.

  She immediately observed how Korea had taken its toll on Blake. ‘He was in a wild and woolly state when he got back,’ she recalled. ‘He seemed pretty restless. He found it difficult to settle down, liked to wander round, liked to take his shoes off, hated wearing a collar, went to sleep in the afternoons – all that sort of thing which goes with having been a prisoner. I think he found it all a little alien [in the office] at first.’ Gillian and her colleagues, noticing that wearing shoes was a strain, bought Blake a pair of slippers. They also showed similar understanding towards his unusual need for sleep in the daytime.

  In Korea, boredom and the need for warmth had led to Blake and his fellow prisoners sleeping for substantial parts of the day. Consequently at work in Carlton Gardens, he found it well-nigh impossible to keep his eyes open after lunch. In the storeroom next to his office, there was a bath covered over by boards. When Blake felt the urge to sleep, he would lock himself in the room, and lie down on the boards with a pile of stationery under his head as a pillow. Gillian or one of the other girls would wake him up half an hour later.

  Gillian observed other curious behaviour: ‘He had a nervous habit, which I learned he’d had from a child, of twisting off his sleeve buttons while he was talking. You would see him talking at a meeting, and watch as one button after another went into his pocket. It used to infuriate me, but it got much better.’

  Despite Blake’s odd habits, Gillian warmed to him: ‘He was very charming, very nice and very considerate and very easy to work for. He took life very easily, it seemed to me; probably after being in prison for so long he didn’t take it as seriously as someone else might have done. He was amusing and entertaining.’

  After a few months, Blake asked Gillian out, and they would go for dinner or to the occasional play: ‘I liked her a great deal and, as the feeling was mutual, our friendship, gradually and insensibly, developed into a steady relationship.’

  It helped the relationship that Gillian’s father and older sister also worked for ‘The Firm’. Colonel Arthur Allan was a Russian expert and spoke the language fluently. He had served with the British Expeditionary Force in Russia in 1918, fighting to support the Tsarists against the Bolsheviks. Their mutual interest in Russia, allied to Blake’s charm, meant that Colonel Allan approved of his daughter’s liaison and her suitor became a regular guest at the family home, ‘The Warren’, in Weybridge.

  Blake’s private and professional lives were starting to take shape. So, too, was his ‘other’ life, because he had wasted no time in passing every secret he could lay his hands on to his new Soviet controller.

  On a dank, misty evening at the end of October, Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev walked in circumspect fashion through residential streets a few minutes’ north of Belsize Park underground station in North London. These were nervous moments for the 30-year-old KGB operative. With only two years experience in the Soviet foreign intelligence directorate, he had been asked to take over the running of one of Moscow Centre’s prize assets – Agent Diomid, alias George Blake.

  The man from Zagorsk had only arrived in London for the first time a couple of weeks earlier. His diplomatic cover was that of First Secretary responsible for cultural relations, which could mean anything from acquiring tickets for VIPs, to arranging the tour of the renowned violinist David Oistrakh. Moscow Centre had made the decision to make Kondrashev Blake’s controller. Nikolai Borisovich Rodin, the man who had met him in Otpor and then at the follow-up meeting in The Hague in July, was too well known to British counterintelligence, and KGB bosses were keen to protect their valuable new source as best they could. Kondrashev, an unknown, was a safer bet. He had spent the weeks before coming to England poring over the Diomid file, being briefed on British surveillance techniques, and studying street maps of London. Everything was now in place for the first meeting with his charge.

  Blake had left Carlton Gardens at 6 p.m. and then headed for the West End, where he walked through Soho before reaching Oxford Street. There, he stepped into one of the ubiquitous ABC teashops – that ‘sinister strand in English catering’, in the words of George Orwell – where he was comforted by the sheer ordinariness of his surroundings. ‘I had plenty of time . . . I drank a cup of tea and ate a cake. It did not taste particularly nice, but then I didn’t have much of an appetite,’ was the spy’s recollection. ‘All the time I was watching to see if I was being followed, though there was no particular reason why I should be. I felt in my inside pocket if the folded paper I was going to hand over was still there.’ Blake then left the café and walked three-quarters of a mile south to Charing Cross underground station. The precautions continued; he waited until everyone had got on before catching the train at the last minute. Then, at the next stop – Leicester Square – he jumped off just as the doors were closing, let two more trains pass, and finally caught the third, all the while searching around him for anyone who looked dubious.

  At Belsize Park, as he walked away from the station and left the crowds behind, the tension eased. ‘The further I went, the quieter it became. A man came slowly out of the fog walking towards me, also carrying a newspaper in his left hand.’ Anyone seeing Blake emerge slowly from the enveloping gloom and approaching Kondrashev would have been reminded of a scene from The Third Man. Kondrashev greeted Blake warmly, and they then walked up the near-deserted street a short distance before Blake handed him the folded piece of paper, which the Russian slipped into his pocket. On it were the first fruits of his betrayal. It contained a preparatory list of all the telephone tapping operations SIS was conducting in Vienna, as well as details of microphones installed in Soviet and Eastern Bloc buildings across Western Europe.

  If his meeting with Rodin in The Hague three months earlier had been akin to passing an initiation ceremony, this one, for Blake, felt like the definitive moment of commitment: ‘Strangely enough, this gave me a feeling of relief very much like the experience of landing safely after my first parachute jump. An exhilarated feeling of achievement which comes whenever one has overcome fears and apprehensions.’

  Blake briefly explained the contents of the paper to Kondrashev as they walked through the streets of Hampstead, before they turned around and headed back towards the main road. For the young Russian spy, there was a growing sense of relief. He had been reassured that Blake was a genuine mole, but it was still possible that his informant was a deliberate plant by SIS, and that the material was ‘chicken feed’. Blake’s attitude and words convinced the young Russian and, by the end of their encounter, he felt far less anxious. After fifteen to twenty minutes, they parted company after arranging to meet again in a month’s time, in another part of London, and also deciding on alternative dates and places in case of emergency.

  Blake headed back to the flat in Charleville Mansions, close to Baron’s Court tube station, that he shared with his mother. Over a meal and a glass of wine he relaxed and felt the satisfaction of a job well done: ‘My mother is a very good cook and this supper remained in my memory, not only because I liked the food, but mostly because the room seemed particularly cosy and secure after the damp, foggy night outside and the dangers of the clandestine meeting I had just lived through.’

  He and Kondrashev would continue to meet every three or four weeks, usually close to an underground station in the suburbs. At their next meeting, the Russian provided him with a Minox camera, a bulky device that he nonetheless kept in his back pocket at all times while in the office. It enabled him to work more easily, photographing vital documents rather than attempting to smuggle sheaves of paper out of the building. He would usually wait until lunchtime, lock the door of his office, and then set to work: ‘It became automatic. I was almost reduced to a mystical state, when I was the eye and the finger.’

  Every three weeks, Y section compiled a lengthy bulletin of its activities, usual
ly amounting to thirty or forty typewritten pages. This paper was graded top security and distributed to the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, the Foreign Office and the CIA in Washington. Blake now made sure a copy also went to the KGB via Kondrashev.

  In only their second or third meeting, in early December 1952, Blake handed over a hugely damaging Minox film of a ninety-page report entitled ‘Banner 54/1’, which contained a compilation of the tapped calls between Austria and Hungary, obtained via the tunnels in Vienna.

  Blake’s Soviet masters were delighted. He had settled comfortably into the routine of treachery, passing on every document of interest that came across his desk, and though the secrets of the Vienna tunnels were an impressive breakthrough for Moscow Centre, Agent Diomid was soon to deliver a far bigger prize.

  11

  Secrets of the Tunnel

  In December 1953, Tom Gimson’s office at No. 2 Carlton Gardens was the venue for a four-day conference hosted by SIS with the joint participation of the CIA. Gimson’s deputy, George Blake, was the secretary and minute-taker, as intelligence officers and their technical advisers – nine from SIS, five from the CIA – sought to put the finishing touches to an audacious eavesdropping scheme, which surely embodied the spirit of those SOE operations Churchill had so relished in World War Two.

  It was codenamed Operation Stopwatch or Gold (the British gave it the former title, the Americans the latter). Its purpose was nothing less than to dig a secret tunnel in a Berlin suburb that would run from the American sector into the Soviet Zone, enabling the Western intelligence agencies to tap the underground cables through which the Soviet military command in Germany communicated with Moscow and all points east. It would clearly build on the work done and lessons learned in Vienna, but this subterranean passage was on an altogether different scale to the short digs from house to street in the Austrian capital.