The Greatest Traitor Read online

  George Young, Vice-Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, as reported by George Blake

  ‘Blake asserted he had yielded to no material pressure or advantages but had been genuinely “converted to Communism while a prisoner of war in Korea”. With the ideological spy, we were faced with a phenomenon such as had hardly appeared in these islands for some four hundred years.’

  Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day: 1961–63

  Prologue

  Central Criminal Court, London, 11.40 a.m., Wednesday, 3 May 1961

  For more than half a century, No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey had been the Grand Theatre of Crime, the stage on which the worst of humanity took a bow. Few who stepped into the dock in this intimate oak-panelled room, representing the fearsome infallibility of English justice, could dare to contemplate freedom when the curtain came down at the end of their inquisition. Its many famous players had included the likes of patent medicine salesman Dr Harvey Crippen, who poisoned his wife and buried her in the coal cellar, and John Reginald Christie, the clerk who strangled at least eight women at 10 Rillington Place.

  But in the Cold War, intelligence became the most dangerous weapon, and the court found itself dealing with a different kind of criminal – the betrayers of the nation’s secrets. Klaus Fuchs, the theoretical physicist who gave the Soviets comprehensive plans for the atomic bomb, was one of the first of this new breed, convicted in March 1950 and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment. Just two months previously, Court No. 1 had played host to the Portland Spy Ring – Gordon Lonsdale, Henry Houghton, Ethel Gee and Peter and Helen Kroger – who had all been handed substantial jail terms for passing details of Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet across the Iron Curtain.

  Never in anyone’s memory, however, had such strict security measures been imposed on a criminal trial in peacetime as were put in place at the Old Bailey on 3 May 1961. Outside, dozens of police cordoned off the pavement, allowing no one near the building.

  Inside, a 38-year-old ‘Government official’ who had already confessed to his crimes listened intently as the judge, Lord Chief Justice Lord Parker, brought his summing-up to a conclusion and prepared to pass sentence. George Blake, a handsome man of dark complexion, with his brown hair fashionably long, was dressed smartly in a grey suit, checked shirt and blue silk tie with red dots. His hands gripped the ledge of the dock.

  Little had been known about Blake before he entered the courtroom that May morning. A number of brief appearances in magistrates’ court had disclosed something of the gravity of the charges facing him, but details of exactly who he was and what he had done remained scant and obscure. The newspaper reporters in court learned precious little more. The details of his profession were skirted around in open session, and the prosecuting counsel, Attorney-General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, merely referred to the fact that until his arrest Blake had been ‘employed in the Government’s service both in this country and overseas’. Fleeting mention was made of his five-year service in the Royal Navy. Although those present with sharp memories might have recalled that, back in April 1953, he had been one of the first prisoners set free by the Communists towards the end of the Korean War. They might also have remembered the sight of he and his fellow captives arriving to a heroes’ welcome in front of the TV cameras at Brize Norton airfield.

  At 10.40 a.m., the court had gone into closed session, and Lord Parker had ordered No. 1 Court to be locked and the shutters to be put up on the glass-panelled doors. What there was to know about George Blake – his life story, the details of his career – was laid out by his defence in private, only adding to the air of mystery surrounding him.

  The court had been open for the prosecution speech and was re-opened for the Judge’s summing-up. Of the detail of his offences, there was only the broadest outline but, in Blake’s own words, the enormity of his crimes was made abundantly clear. Manningham-Buller had quoted the heart of Blake’s confession back at him: ‘I must freely admit there was not an official document of any importance to which I had access which was not passed to my Soviet contact.’

  Lord Parker’s opening remarks in his summing-up offered little comfort: ‘It is clear your case is akin to treason. Indeed, it is one of the worst that can be envisaged other than in a time of war . . . your conduct in many other countries would undoubtedly carry the death penalty. In our law, however, I have no option but to sentence you to imprisonment, and for your traitorous conduct extending over so many years there must be a very heavy sentence.’

  Blake feared the worst – fourteen years in prison, as had been handed down to Fuchs. He fervently hoped it might be ten, perhaps eleven, but he had few grounds for optimism. Throughout the trial to that point, he had felt more like a spectator, or a filmgoer, content to sit and watch as others played out another man’s drama. Now, though, Parker’s ominous words demanded his attention: ‘The court cannot, even if so minded, give you a sentence of life imprisonment . . . there are, however, five counts to which you have pleaded guilty, each dealing with separate periods in your life during which you were betraying your country, and the court will impose upon you a sentence of fourteen years imprisonment on each of those counts.’

  Even then, Blake and everyone else in No.1 Court had no reason to expect what was to come. In the natural order of these matters, surely the sentences would run concurrently, meaning he would serve fourteen years. Parker delivered the hammer blow: ‘Those in respects of counts one, two and three being consecutive, those in respect of counts four and five concurrent. Accordingly, the total sentence upon you is one of forty-two years imprisonment.’

  A communal gasp sounded from the spectators in the gallery, followed by a moment of shocked silence. As they glanced towards the prisoner in the dock for his reaction, they noticed a flicker of a smile play across his lips as he stood still, uncomprehending, gazing directly at Lord Parker. After some seven or eight seconds, Blake turned around slowly, taking in the faces around the court, first those on the press bench, then those on the solicitors’ table, and finally those with a professional interest who gazed down from the prime seats in the gallery.

  Then, escorted by a warder, Blake hesitantly crossed the wooden floor of the dock. He leaned over and whispered courteously to his defence team: ‘Thank you.’ He then disappeared from view, descending to the cells below.

  Forty-two years in jail: a record. The previous longest consecutive sentence in British criminal history dated from 1887 when a man was jailed for twenty-nine years for demanding money with menaces and robbery with violence. The severity of the punishment led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to reflect in his diary: ‘The Lord Chief Justice has passed a savage sentence – forty-two years in prison! Naturally, we can say nothing.’

  Forty-two years, and almost no one knew exactly what Blake had done to deserve it.

  Among the friends and colleagues with whom he had endured the miseries of the Korean prison camps, there was disbelief. To them, he had been the epitome of bravery and defiance; a man worthy of implicit trust. Commissioner Herbert Lord of the Salvation Army told the Daily Mirror’s reporter: ‘I find it almost impossible to believe that the George Blake I saw kneel nonchalantly in the snow as a North Korean guard beat him with a rifle butt could have turned into a traitor . . . For that was only one of many times the young vice-consul, who was my fellow prisoner for thirty-four months, showed contempt for the Communists.’

  Yet as reporters began to uncover the other side of George Blake, the quietly brave, charming man beyond the headlines screaming ‘TRAITOR’, one or two of the testimonials hinted at something else. Philip Deane, the Greek-born Observer journalist, who, like Herbert Lord, had suffered side by side with Blake in North Korea, said his friend ‘had Walter Mitty dreams, always seeing himself knighted or consecrated bishop for some service to the state or God’. Was this daydreaming merely a harmless, introspective habit, indulged during the long hours suffered in the hothouse psychology of the prison camp? O
r had it developed into something more than a dream? A temptation to play the great spy in the secret power play of the Cold War?

  Clues as to what had driven Blake’s treachery could be found in Jeremy Hutchinson’s eloquent speech of mitigation, though, at the time, neither the Press or the public were allowed to hear it. His client’s life, the QC said, had been almost wholly forged in the conflicts and upheavals of the twentieth century. From the age of sixteen Blake had known little else but constant clandestine activity, since he immersed himself in ‘war, deprivation, murder and suchlike’. Hutchinson had told the closed court Blake’s extraordinary life story – a story that, to all intents and purposes, was now at an end.

  Blake, however, had a final chapter in mind. As he left the Old Bailey that afternoon for Wormwood Scrubs, handcuffed to two prison officers in the back of a small van, he peered out of the window and saw the newspaper vendors carrying placards emblazoned with his photograph and sentence, and he made a vow to himself: he wouldn’t stay in prison until 2003, when he would be 80 years old, whatever it took. Fourteen years he could have accepted, but forty-two appeared vengeful. To paraphrase Marx, he had nothing to lose but his chains.

  He would escape.

  1

  A Question of Identity

  George Blake was born George Behar, in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. His mother Catherine Gertrui (née Beijderwellen) gave birth on 11 November 1922, at 3 p.m. In a life that would be shaped by confused identity and shifting loyalty, what happened next was surely a portent of things to come.

  His mother and father discussed what to call their son and had reached an easy decision: two grandfathers on either side of the family were called Jacob, so the baby boy would carry that name in memory of both. But, on leaving his wife and infant son that afternoon to walk to the town hall in Rotterdam to declare the birth, Albert William Behar had time to think, free of family constraints.

  It was Armistice Day, just four years after the end of The Great War in which he had fought. Despite his own rather mysterious origins, Albert was then a patriotic Briton: he decided there could be no more appropriate name on that auspicious day than George, in honour of king (George V) and country. The registrar was duly informed.

  It was an uncommon name for a Dutch boy, and Albert quickly discovered that his impulsive act was scorned by little George’s conservative and parodial relatives: instead, they would always prefer to call him by his Dutch nickname, Poek.

  A few years later as little George started to read, the first book with which he was presented was the illustrated Children’s Bible. Heroes like Abraham and Isaac, David and Saul, and Samson stirred his imagination. But above all, the character he enjoyed most, and with whom he most closely identified, was Jacob – the biblical source of his intended name.

  The Behar family home was at 104, Gedempte Botersloot, in Rotterdam, one of the city’s oldest and wealthiest streets. By the time Albert and his family took up residence there it had undergone major development, but without losing its air of affluence. The year after George’s birth the Behars moved into the vacant house next door, No. 102, where there was more space. Their second child, Adele Gertrud, was born there in June 1924, and the family moved soon afterwards to an even bigger residence at 40c Spengensekade, an equally respectable address. There, Catherine gave birth to their second daughter, Elizabeth, in August 1925.

  It seemed an entirely conventional middle-class life, but their road to this destination had been a rocky one, and their union was anything but commonplace.

  Both sets of parents had frowned upon the relationship. The Beijderwellens were very reluctant to see their daughter marrying a somewhat exotic man whose past seemed cloaked in mystery, however charming he might have been: a Dutchman with solid bourgeois credentials would have been their preference. And the wealthy Behar family, for reasons that would only become clear many years later, warned Albert, quite straightforwardly, that if he married this Dutch girl he would be cut off without a penny.

  Catherine Beijderwellen was 26 at the time of her marriage – tall, fair-haired, and vivacious. She came from a conventional, well-established Rotterdam family with deep Protestant roots, although they were actually members of the minority Remonstrant Church. She knew little about her fiancée. She thought Behar was an English surname and understood that Albert was British, though she knew he had been born in Cairo, and that his family still lived there. His origins did not matter: she was under the spell of this dark, handsome man whose romantic image was only enhanced by shrapnel wounds on his face sustained in the First World War. An unreliable outsider in one light, he was undoubtedly a heroic figure in another.

  Albert had constructed a stirring narrative of the life he had lived before meeting Catherine. He claimed to have studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, to have served in the French Foreign Legion, and then, in the First World War, to have won the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Other accounts of his life have even had him serving on Field Marshal Haig’s Intelligence Staff.

  Although a good deal of this story had the ring of truth, certain parts were undoubtedly embroidered, and one or two others would later fail to stand up to examination. It only becomes possible to clearly separate fact from fiction in Albert’s life when looking at what he did in the First World War, where his full service record reveals the less glamorous, though no less heroic, experience of an ‘ordinary’ soldier.

  Enlisting in France in 1915, he served as a driver and motorcycle despatch rider on the Western Front. He was, indeed, seriously wounded, sustaining a fractured back and skull and contusions to his face and hands. Such injuries certainly resemble the damage that might have been caused by an exploding shell, but his service notes include the word ‘acc’, suggesting that the words were accidentally incurred. Either way, he was evacuated to England for treatment on 25 May 1918. While recovering in hospital in London, he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for gallantry and commendable war service.

  Albert’s last posting with what was by then called the Royal Army Service Corps was to Rotterdam, in December 1918. It was early in the following year, as he helped the British Expeditionary Force wind down its wartime operations, that he met Catherine.

  Despite unanswered questions about his background and her family’s disapproval, the marriage went ahead. Given their strength of purpose, Albert and Catherine felt they had little choice but to elope and so headed for London, a city Albert knew well after spending time there recuperating after his wartime exploits. The wedding ceremony took place at Chelsea Registry Office on Monday, 16 January 1922. The certificate shows that they both listed 11 Markham Square – just 300 yards away – as their residence at the time of the marriage. Two men named G. Challis and A.J. Grimes – Army colleagues of Albert – were noted as the witnesses.

  The Behars’ opposition to that marriage would remain total. They would have little or no contact with their son and his growing family for the next thirteen years. The Beijderwellens, however, were gradually worn down. They were reconciled with Catherine and accepted Albert before George was born.

  The new arrival quickly became the subject of great attention from his many aunts and uncles. His favourite companion was Aunt Truss, his mother’s unmarried youngest sister, who held a good job with an established Dutch bank. On long weekend walks, she would regale him with interesting tales of her workplace, skilfully imitating the speech and mannerisms of her colleagues and keeping young George endlessly amused.

  Albert, meanwhile, had a secret and meant to keep it. The battle he had fought to persuade Catherine’s parents to accept him was difficult enough, and he felt – almost certainly correctly – that to disclose the nature of his true self to them would still have disastrous consequences. Having listed his religion as Roman Catholic for the British Army, he now promptly declared he was Evangelical Lutheran when registering for citizenship in Rotterdam.

  Initially Albert relied on two sources of income to provide a comfortable lif
e for his family. One was his Army pension, but the other – more significant – came from his Turkish railway bonds. Those were rendered worthless, however, when Kemal Atatürk’s government nationalised the railway industry in 1927. For several years, Albert ran a store selling leather and sports goods down in the Leuvenhaven, one of Rotterdam’s oldest harbours. Then, in 1928, he decided to open a small factory – from the ground floor of his house – making leather gloves for the longshoremen in the port. That venture was barely underway when it was hit hard by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the subsequent worldwide recession. Little work was taking place in the shipyards, and the widespread laying off of workers had a perilous knock-on effect for small businesses like Albert’s.

  George’s aunt’s husband, who was a grain dealer, went bankrupt at this time. ‘Like several other ruined and embittered middle-class people my aunt and uncle began to look towards National Socialism for salvation,’ Blake recalled. ‘At home the daily conversation centred around the ups and downs of business, the difficulties of paying creditors, how many people and who should be sacked and kept on, whether there were signs that things were getting better or, on the contrary, worse.’

  Albert’s business struggled on even as his health began to deteriorate. He was having difficulties with his lungs, perhaps related to the effects of mustard gas from the battlefields of the First World War. Whatever the reason, the family doctor advised that a move away from smoky, grimy Rotterdam to an environment with cleaner, fresher air might do the patient some good. When, in 1933, an opportunity arose to move to Scheveningen, a pleasant seaside resort not far from The Hague, the Behars eagerly grasped it, settling into a villa at No. 4 Maasstraat, close to the impressive Kurhaus, the luxury hotel and concert venue.