The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Blake was, in fact, one of those who made his way to the Swiss city, where high-level talks on securing the future of Korea and ending the war between the French and the Communist Viet Minh in Indochina were taking place. He was not there as an accredited delegate but at the invitation of SIS’s Head of Station in Berne, who wanted Blake and his colleagues from Y section to bug the phones of the Soviet and Chinese delegations.

  Their mission was a technical success, but it was completely unproductive in terms of the intelligence produced. The conversations of the political leaders were surprisingly discreet on the matters that counted, so the spies were unable to offer British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden any additional leverage in his negotiations. Instead, the Chinese delegates and Soviet leaders spent most of the time on the phone talking to their wives and children. Blake, listening in to the conversations of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, discovered him to be far removed from the stern, obdurate caricature painted of him in the West: ‘He discussed with his wife the difficulties which their married daughter had in feeding her new baby, in which matter he sometimes tendered practical advice. He also had long talks with his 6-year-old grandson, listening patiently to his detailed accounts of what he had been doing.’

  Despite the lack of useful covert knowledge, Eden concluded that Geneva was, by and large, a success: ‘We had stopped an eight-year war and reduced international tension at a point of instant danger to world peace.’ But he and his fellow diplomats had also stored up trouble for the future. Vietnam was granted its independence and elections promised within two years; but in a worrying echo of Korea, the country was divided in two – this time at the seventeenth parallel, with a Communist regime (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) in the North led by Ho Chi Minh, and the southern ‘nation’ (Republic of Vietnam) led by the Catholic Ngo Ding Diem. When Ngo – supported by Eisenhower – refused to authorise the agreed-upon elections to reunify Vietnam in 1956, his decision led to a resumption of the war. This time, the Americans took the place of the French – and their involvement would prove to be a political, military and humanitarian disaster which continues to trouble the American conscience to this very day.

  As the interest over the Petrov case diminished and the hunt for the truth about Burgess and Maclean and ‘The Third Man’ died down for the moment, George Blake’s double life continued. For relaxation he attended a weekly evening Arabic language class at London University. A male colleague from Y section had also joined the course, and after the lecture finished the two would have coffee together in a snack bar near Russell Square, or go back to Charleville Mansions, where Blake’s mother would cook them dinner.

  His personal life, meanwhile, was dominated by his relationship with Gillian, which was now developing apace: ‘After my absence in Geneva, it became clear we were both in love and that the natural thing for us to do was to get married.’ Natural perhaps, but Blake, living a most abnormal kind of existence, now found himself faced with a crucial dilemma. The unselfish option would have been to break off the relationship, however much hurt that might cause. The odds on his eventual discovery were high. Irrespective of the stresses and strains that his double life would put on a marriage, the ultimate unmasking, when it came, would have devastating emotional and social consequences for Gillian.

  Blake agonised over what course of action to take: ‘I made some feeble attempts to put her off by telling her that I was half-Jewish and that her father, who was the kind of Englishman who had little time for Jews, blacks and dagos, would not like this.’ But Blake’s antecedents did not remotely concern Gillian:

  He told me all about his background, that his father wasn’t English, all the ‘off-putting’ side, as much as to say ‘Do you still want to marry me?’ It didn’t bother me . . . My parents liked George very much. He was very charming and got on very well with my father. I had brought George home and they had seen a lot of him, but thought it was nothing in particular.

  So I think [at first] they were rather alarmed, actually to find out it was something after all – so was I, actually. But they never tried to dissuade me at all. My mother suggested that perhaps I was a little young but she was fond of George too. My father had no objections at all.

  With no obstacles in his way to seize upon, Blake squared his conscience through moral contortionism: ‘I was really in no different position from a soldier during the war who got married before he was sent to the front, and consoled myself that it would all work out in the end, and nothing terrible would happen to me.’

  The wedding happened in something of a hurry. In August, Blake was told he was being posted to Berlin in the November. So the couple became engaged in September and set the big day for Saturday, 23 October. The marriage certificate lists the occupations of both bride and groom as ‘Government Official (Foreign Office)’. The witnesses were Gillian’s father (another ‘Government Official’ – Foreign Office) and Blake’s mother Catherine. The bride wore traditional white, while Blake looked somewhat uncomfortable in a morning suit. The Allan family, from Weybridge and beyond, filled the aisles comfortably on their side. Apart from his mother, Blake’s sisters Adele and Elizabeth (with her husband) were present, as were his uncle Anthony Beijderwellen and his wife from Holland, and his old mentor in SIS, Commander Douglas Child.

  ‘We were married in church because I wanted it,’ Gillian recalled. ‘I wouldn’t have been happy if we hadn’t. Then I was very conventional like that. I went to church when I could, but George was not a churchgoer in the religious sense. He loved services, but he would far rather go to a Catholic church than anywhere else for the spectacle alone . . . The best man at the wedding was my brother. This again showed that besides Jean Meadmore, who was a Catholic and anyway was in New Zealand at the time, he really had no friends, though he knew a lot of people and liked a lot of people. So my brother was really “hauled in”, though he and George got on very well.’

  The couple spent their honeymoon in the South of France. In the event, the wedding need not have been rushed because Blake’s switch to Berlin was delayed for five months. He had been lobbying for a move abroad for some time. To his ‘official’ employers, the reason he gave was one of ambition, wanting to gain fresh experience at the epicentre of the intelligence war but, in truth, for his real masters he had done all he usefully could from his position in Y section. In any case, the department was being reorganised and an American was to assume Blake’s pivotal position as Tom Gimson’s deputy.

  Kondrashev and his superiors in the Kremlin were entirely content that Blake would be moving to Berlin. There, he would join SIS’s biggest station, where the scope for undermining British intelligence would be even greater. The move also suited his personal circumstances; George and Gillian had moved into his mother’s flat in Baron’s Court after their return from honeymoon, but were yet to find a permanent home of their own.

  On the world stage, as Blake prepared to leave for Germany, tensions between East and West remained as great as ever. At the end of March 1953, there was a brief flurry of optimism when Churchill learned that the new Soviet Prime Minister, Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, might be willing to participate in Four Power talks. On 29 March, Churchill told the Queen that he was seriously considering putting off his planned resignation if such face-to-face discussions took place. The following day, however, it became clear through diplomatic channels that Bulganin was not willing to commit to negotiations, and, in any case, President Eisenhower still remained implacably opposed to them. Churchill’s resignation went ahead as planned on 5 April. Meanwhile, Bulganin was in fact putting the finishing touches to a treaty called the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defence organisation between the Soviet Union and its seven satellite countries in Eastern Europe. It was a direct if belated response to the West’s alliance, NATO, and could only increase the tensions in Berlin and, indeed, the rest of Europe.

  It was into this heightened atmosphere that Blake flew on Thursday, 14 April. He was entering the playground of Cold War espi
onage, and would find there all manner of new opportunities for treachery.

  12

  Berlin

  In Berlin in 1955, it seemed as if everyone was a spy, and the spies were spying for everyone. They all gathered together to practise their trade in this strangest of cities, where the Western sector – the ‘Trojan Horse’ of democracy – was isolated deep in the Communist heartland, menacingly encircled by 450,000 Red Army troops. At this epicentre of the Cold War, where the clash of ideology and culture was at its sharpest, the perpetual fear that a spark of trouble could lead to a conflagration hung heavy over everyone. It made for an edgy, frantic environment where suspicion, if not full-blown paranoia, was the primary emotion.

  Ten years after the devastation wrought by the Russians, Blake observed that the scars were slowly healing, at least on one side of the city. West Berlin was still full of empty spaces where the ruins and rubble – ‘Hitler’s Mountains’ – had been cleared, but starting to fill the gaps where grand, classical buildings had once stood were flat, square, functional office blocks and apartments, a remorseless tide of concrete boxes to some, but vital components of the city’s new infrastructure for most.

  The Tiergarten, the 600-acre park that had been the lungs of the city, retained a desolate look after its trees were chopped down and lawns dug up in 1945 by a freezing and starving population. But in 1955, the local council had just started to restore it to its former glory and a new generation of trees, shrubs and plants was taking their place.

  At the end of the Kurfürstendamm, the Gedachtniskirche, with its steeple snapped off like a rotten stump, remained a potent symbol of the destruction of the city. But up and down the two and a quarter miles of the street, cafés, restaurants, cinemas and theatres throbbed with life as they had done in the 1920s, and to the pleasure seekers in the smart shops who came from the East, ‘the shiny treasures in their glass cases, jewellery and handbags and shoes, seemed liked loot from a recent battle’.

  This was six years before the Wall sliced through the city, and freedom of movement between East and West was still relatively straightforward. Family and friends on opposite sides of the city could visit each other, students came over to attend schools and universities, and many people crossed the border for concerts and sporting fixtures. It was not all one-way traffic from East to West, either: Berliners from the West took advantage of the extra spending power their currency offered them in the East, and would travel there for less expensive clothes, haircuts and other goods and services.

  If the Western sector of Berlin was reaping the rewards of Marshall Aid and the free-market policies of the government of Konrad Adenauer, Blake could see that the Eastern sector remained a grim environment. It had been ruthlessly asset-stripped by the Soviets, who removed factories, rolling stock and generators to replace losses back home. This was still a ruined-looking landscape, with many buildings displaying gutted interiors and lacking roofs. Piles of rubble littered the streets, and the apartment blocks that survived remained pockmarked, with holes drilled by small arms fire evident around the doors and windows. These dismal streets were a world away from the shining shops on the ‘Ku-damm’. ‘The Russian authorities were well aware of the dangers lurking behind the bright lights of West Berlin,’ Blake recalled. ‘They therefore discouraged their citizens from crossing the sector boundary in every possible way, though they could not physically prevent them from doing so.’

  In the wider battle between East and West, there had been a period of relative calm since the end of the Korean War, though the West’s defence alliance, NATO, and the East’s newly-created military shield, the Warsaw Pact, both possessed nuclear weapons of an increasingly sophisticated nature, so the prospect of Armageddon never seemed too far away. The nervous politicians and generals were constantly urging their spymasters to gather every last scrap of information that would give them an advantage, should the Cold War suddenly get hot.

  An increasing amount of Britain’s insight into the intentions of the Soviets was coming through signals and electronics intelligence, but the human variety still had a vital role to play, as long as the spy had suitable terrain on which to operate. Berlin was that ground. On to its streets swarmed both the rich and the poor of the espionage profession, perhaps as many as 10,000 ‘intelligence gatherers’ in all. Professional practitioners from SIS and the CIA toured the streets in their smart Volkswagen cars, making their way to clandestine meetings on street corners, or more discreet assignations in safe flats. Meanwhile, hundreds of amateur, freelance agents loitered around in coffeehouses, clubs and night dives with secrets to sell that might just shed some light on the intentions of those in the Kremlin or Downing Street. The going rate for a scrap of negotiable information could fall to as low as a couple of dollars over whispered conversations in alcoves in cafés, which operated like stock exchanges for secrets. The more resourceful Berliners became double, or even triple agents, incautiously selling their wares to all sides.

  Outside, in the alleyways and streets next to homes and offices, even grubbier work was taking place. Operation Tamarisk, for example, was an SIS scheme that involved nothing more than rooting through Communist waste-paper baskets and garbage bins to dig out promising scraps. It even included examining the Red Army’s used toilet paper, when the soldiers were forced to employ official documents for that purpose as the Allies had deliberately starved the Soviets of the real thing.

  Kidnappings were not uncommon, especially of important East Germans who had defected to the West. It has been estimated that the Stasi (East German state security service) carried out over a hundred of these operations in the 1950s.

  Markus Wolf, a bright young officer who was about to head up the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), calculated that as many as eighty secret service agencies with their various branches and front organisations were operating in the city: ‘Masquerading as everything from plumbing companies and jam exporters to academic and research bureaux, sat whole groups of case officers recruiting and running their respective agents, who could easily travel between the sectors of Berlin and the two halves of Germany.’

  The porous nature of the borders between East and West encouraged the flight of migrants, keen to escape the dour, socialist side of the city for the perceived capitalist Mecca in the West. Those numbers only increased after the ruthless crackdown that followed the June 1953 uprising. By the time George Blake arrived, anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 migrants were arriving in West Berlin every year.

  All of this created opportunities, and dangers, for the CIA, SIS, and the recently formed West German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Those who came over, many of them young and educated, provided these Western intelligence services with vital information about friends and colleagues left behind who worked in the main Government ministries, the Armed Forces, key factories and scientific institutions. The refugees would identify the fiercely anti-Communist among those who stayed and the spies would then coax them over to West Berlin, by letter or courier, and invite them to become agents. The Americans and British had a fair measure of success with this recruitment strategy and a large number of networks were in place in crucial organisations in East Germany.

  On the other hand, as Wolf observed, the flow of refugees also worked to the advantage of the GDR, once its own, embryonic intelligence service had found its feet: ‘It was not very difficult for our agents to swim along in the stream. They were usually young, convinced Communists, and they laid the cornerstone for many of our later successes.’ As well as telling their CIA or SIS interviewer in the camp that they had come over from the West to join relatives, an East German agent’s secondary cover story might be that he was trying to conceal his former membership of the Nazi party or the SS, or even that he had made negative comments about government policies and was likely to be severely punished.

  SIS commanded a place right at the centre of this vast web of espionage. The ambitious n
ature of its operation suited the expansive offices it had inherited close to the Olympiastadion, the massive sports arena built by the Nazis for the 1936 Summer Games. SIS had settled to the north-east of the complex and George Blake’s office was on the second floor, overlooking the entrance. From his window he commanded a view of the imposing sculptures of two Reich golden eagles perched atop massive concrete pylons in front of his building, beyond which he was able to gaze upon the monumental stadium – a rather imperious position.

  SIS did not use its normal diplomatic cover in Berlin. Instead, it operated under the guise of the British Control Commission for Germany, or the Army, both also ensconced at the Olympic Stadium, which meant Blake and his colleagues could blend in more easily among the large personnel of both organisations.

  Money was no object. The whole SIS budget was paid for out of continuing occupation costs, shouldered by the German taxpayer. So it was that Berlin Station had a total of around a hundred officers, secretaries and auxiliary staff, in four groups. One dealt with technical operations like the Berlin tunnel, another with scientific intelligence (both sides were then developing the hydrogen bomb) and a third aimed to gather material on the Soviet and East German Armed Forces. Blake was attached to a fourth group, responsible for collecting political intelligence and attempting to penetrate the Soviet headquarters at Karlshorst, a suburb in the south-east of the city: ‘In this framework, I had the special task of trying to establish contact with Russian personnel in East Berlin, and, in particular, with members of the Soviet Intelligence Services with a view to their ultimate recruitment as SIS agents.’ Of course he had a head start: as an agent of Soviet intelligence, penetrating Karlshorst required only a knock on the door.