The Greatest Traitor Read online

  In general SIS officers, the keepers of state secrets, were cautioned against visiting East Berlin, but Blake was provided with a false German identity card which he could present to the passport control at the border if stopped and asked for his papers. It was supposed to give him freedom of movement in his quest to recruit agents but, of course, enabled him to conduct his business with the KGB more easily.

  Blake quickly devised a successful routine for meeting his handlers. He would board a U-Bahn (underground) train a couple of stops from the boundary of the British sector, and then get out at the second or third station in East Berlin, more often than not at Spittelmarkt, at the eastern end of Leipziger Strasse. He would then walk for a short distance before a black BMW limousine with drawn curtains would pull up alongside him, whereupon the door would be thrown open. He would jump in and then be driven to a safe flat in the vicinity of the Karlshorst headquarters. There, he would hand over Minox film of the documents he had photographed in the SIS office and, over a light supper and a glass of Tsimlyansk sparkling wine, would explain their significance. After an hour or so, he would be handed some fresh film and then dropped off in the vicinity of a U-Bahn station. A few minutes later, he would be back in West Berlin.

  On other occasions, to be completely secure, there would be no human contact. He would merely use the spy’s age-old device of the ‘dead letter drop’ to leave packages at a pre-arranged spot.

  Blake found the conditions for plying his trade of treachery much less dangerous, and far more comfortable, in Berlin than in London. He also felt he had much more freedom of action as an agent, which surprised him: ‘This seemed to me quite at variance with what I had heard was the common Soviet practice of never taking a decision without express sanction by higher authority . . . I can only explain the departure from this principle . . . by the fact that they felt I was quite capable of judging what was the best course to take in any given situation.’

  The experienced Nikolai Rodin travelled to Berlin to introduce Blake to the men who would be his handlers there. His principal new contact was Nikolai Sergeevich Miakotnykh, an experienced intelligence officer in his fifties whose codename was ‘Dick’. Blake warmed to him immediately: ‘He was a thick-set man with a pale complexion and a friendly twinkle in his eyes behind thick, horn-rimmed spectacles. His manner was quiet and fatherly. In the course of five years of regular monthly meetings, I got to like him a great deal and felt truly sad when, at the end of my term, I had to say goodbye to him.’

  The scale of the material Blake amassed for his Soviet controllers during this time is staggering, although at first his mission looked tricky: he shared an office and struggled to find time alone to photograph the documents he wanted. In cases of great urgency, he would be forced to take a risk, sometimes locking the door – a move that would have aroused great suspicion, had he been discovered. But, every six weeks, it was his turn to act as night duty officer. Astonishingly, in an organisation marked by such secrecy and paranoia, he would be left alone in the building, not only with the keys but also the combinations to all the safes. It was during these shifts that he did his most damaging work.

  He was ruthlessly efficient: ‘I passed a great deal of information on the structure of the Berlin station, on the aims of the Berlin station, on the make-up of the “order of battle” of the Berlin station. I also gave them a lot of information on what the Service wanted to know politically, militarily, economically, about East Germany, about the Soviet Union as a whole. They got a good inside view of how it operated.’ But he was wary not to tread in areas that were not his territory: ‘Of the [agent] networks, as far as I had access to them I was careful; I made a point never to ask questions, not to concern myself with what was not my business.’

  He was also unsentimental. Peter Lunn, the Head of Station, had developed a card index for all the agents SIS employed in Germany. Blake handed over scores of names to his contacts in Karlshorst.

  Even Vasily Dozhdalev, who had been one of Blake’s case officers in Korea and was now stationed in Berlin, was startled by the detail he supplied: ‘I remember this document that showed the staff list and structure of SIS – who, which department, which geographical region they oversaw, and who specifically was in the charge in that department. I remember this document specifically for the following reason, because it contained the surname of who was responsible for intelligence in the Antarctic. So someone wrote in the margins, “Ah, ha. Our man in Antarctic!” That stuck in my memory.’

  SIS general policy directives, reports and instructions all went straight to the KGB. These were intelligence documents, but they also gave the Russian strategists a clear idea of the political decision-making in Whitehall that lay behind them. One CIA report would later calculate – after briefings from SIS – that Blake furnished the Soviets with 4,720 pages of documentary material during his eight years of treachery.

  Is it possible to identify the true cost of his betrayal? What happened to those agents and other individuals whose identities he so readily handed to the KGB?

  In 1955, Erich Mielke, who would later become the feared head of the Stasi, was deputy state security chief to Ernst Wollweber, and responsible for directing Grosaktionen (Major Operations) against Western spies then successfully infiltrating government offices, armed forces, factories, and research laboratories. He was struggling to contain the penetration of SIS and CIA agents into East Germany, and may have had good cause to feel grateful to Blake. The KGB, for which both Blake and a mole in the BND, Heinz Felfe, were working, gave Mielke vital assistance in tracking down and neutering many of these spies. This help enabled him to tell the Party’s Central Committee in April 1955 that through Aktion Blitz (Operation Lightning) 521 agents had been arrested – 188 from the ‘American secret service’, 105 agents of the ‘British secret service’ and about 100 agents of the West German service. Then, in Aktion Wespennest (Operation Wasps’ Nest) in the last three months of 1955, Mielke announced that a further 251 spies had been detained, including some reporting to a CIA scientific intelligence team. If 1955 was the high watermark of his operations, his efforts did not let up in 1956 (679 spies arrested) and 1957 (582).

  In many of these cases, Blake’s plundering of Lunn’s card index was surely crucial. An idea of the extent of the damage that Blake may have inflicted on SIS agents is given in a paper from the counter-intelligence section of the Stasi, published some years later, with names blacked out:

  Blake’s work substantially laid the foundations for the liquidation of networks of British secret service agents in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]. So it was possible from 1956 to 1961 to identify around 100 spies working in the GDR (17 in telecommunications).

  Among them were dangerous agents, such as [ ] stenographer at the GDR Council of Ministers; [ ] Colonel of the NVA (National People’s Army); [ ] Member of the State Planning Commission; [ ] Senior Advisor at the Ministry for heavy machinery; [ ] Department head in the Ministry for Trade; [ ] Employee in the building committee in Potsdam.

  At his trial, it was neither alleged nor proven that Blake was responsible for the deaths of agents. For his part, Blake has always maintained that he sought specific assurances from his Soviet controllers that no harm would come to those he betrayed. In April 1961, in his written statement for his defence team, he explained his ‘agreement’ in a section entitled Reporting of Names of Agents to Russians:

  I was very reluctant to do this, but when posted to Berlin in 1955 when my work consisted of controlling agents, I had no good excuse for not passing the names to the Russians. I was by then so involved with the Russian Intelligence Service that I could not avoid this.

  I stipulated however, and repeated this every time I passed a name, that these agents should not be arrested and that the only use the Russians should make of this information was to protect themselves from the activities of these agents by denying them access to information which they, the Russians, thought valuable.

  The Rus
sians agreed to this, but said that if the East Germans independently obtained evidence of the activities of these agents, they could not prevent them taking action.

  In every case when an agent whose name I had passed on was arrested, I raised the matter with the Russian Controllers Officer, and in every case he assured me that the action had been taken by the East Germans on their own evidence and without information having been passed on to them by the Russians.

  I had every reason to believe the sincerity of the Russians in this matter, bearing in mind the attitude they adopted in the matter of the tunnelling operation.

  Either Blake was completely naïve in this matter, or entirely cold and calculating. Even if taken at his word, it strains credulity to believe that there would not have been some co-operation between the KGB and the Stasi over his information. At that time, those organisations were led by such ruthless Stalinists as Ivan Serov, known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ by the British media for his role in mass deportations and suspected genocide in the Second World War; and Mielke, who had trained in Moscow. It seems implausible that these men would have held back from their usual, brutal approach for Blake’s sake. Oleg Kalugin, the KGB’s head of foreign counter-intelligence in the 1970s, got to know Blake in later years in Moscow: ‘He didn’t want to know that many people he betrayed were executed. I think we even discussed this subject at one point, and he wouldn’t believe it – he would say, “Well, I was told this would not happen.” It did happen; he was not told.’

  To justify what he had done, Blake returned to the notion that he was a soldier in an ideological war, where it was kill or be killed, and the battlefield was strewn with casualties: ‘I have no conscience because they were in exactly the same circumstances as myself. They were working against their governments, for reasons best known to themselves, and they were doing that work knowingly and willingly, passing information to the other side. They were betrayed – and in the end, I was betrayed. I was in no better position than they were.’

  In the heavily redacted prosecution file for Blake’s trial in May 1961, SIS Officer B states that he had investigated the cases of a number of agents controlled by the Berlin office from 1955 to 1959, who were in fact ‘either arrested by the Russians, or disappeared without trace, or became known to the Russian Intelligence Service as our agents’. Several blacked-out pages follow. His understated concluding summary of the havoc he believed Blake had wrought says simply: ‘The disclosure of agents will have resulted in loss of individual liberty.’

  How many might have been executed in total is impossible to say, but there are those who claim there is circumstantial evidence to link Blake with the death of a specific individual – a former Communist who had become one of the West’s most important friends. Robert Bialek came over to the West in August 1953, his disillusionment with the East German regime of Walter Ulbricht complete after the brutal repression of the East Berlin rising. He was certainly no ordinary defector: he had been first a courageous opponent of the Nazis, then a high-ranking Communist who rose to become Inspector-General in the Volkspolizei (‘People’s Police’), before being finally expelled from the Party in 1952. Charismatic, articulate and a powerful orator, he used all those attributes every Saturday night on a hugely popular BBC German language radio show called Wir Sprechen Zur Zone (‘We speak to the Zone’), promoting the virtues of life in the West while railing against the deficiencies of the country he had fled.

  In the British sector, Bialek worked undercover for the East Bureau of the Social Democratic Party, with the codename Bruno Wallmann. The British authorities took on a duty of care for Bialek, looking after his security by fitting automatic locks to the doors of his flat, steel shutters to the windows and connecting a special alarm system to a British security office. They knew his broadcasts and his writings infuriated the GDR and Soviet high command, and Erich Mielke himself bore a personal grudge towards Bialek dating back to 1948 when the two men drew guns on each other after an argument.

  On the evening of 4 February 1956, Bialek made his way to a flat at 21 Jenaer Strasse in the Wilmersdorf district for what he believed was to be an informal birthday party with a fellow refugee from the East, Paul Drzewiecki. In fact he had walked into a trap of Mielke’s making. Drzewiecki was an undercover Stasi agent, as was his colleague in the flat, Herbert Hellweg. The two conspirators were aided in their work by a young woman later identified as Drzewiecki’s niece. They spiked Bialek’s drink. Realising he had been drugged, he staggered to the bathroom in the hall of the building, locking the door behind him. Another tenant arrived, discovered Bialek was unconscious, and unwittingly delivered him back into the arms of his ‘friends’, who said they would take him to hospital. Instead they threw Bialek into a black limousine, drove him over the border and delivered him to Hohenschönhausen prison. There the trail runs cold, but there are few who doubt that he was tortured and executed by Mielke’s men.

  The British were mortified by Bialek’s kidnapping as it was immediately clear what had happened. The British Commandant Robert Cottrell-Hill wrote to his Soviet counterpart on 8 February, more in hope than expectation, asking him to make inquiries. Questions were asked in both Houses of Parliament. Lord Vansittart urged pressure to be brought to bear on Moscow ahead of the visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin in April. The junior Foreign Office minister, the Marquess of Reading, said they should wait to establish the facts before contemplating any further steps. Lord Vansittart replied despondently, though with prescience: ‘My Lords, my fear is that we shall never hear anything further.’

  Blake has strenuously denied having anything to do with Bialek’s kidnapping and, in a court of law, the prosecution would be extremely hard pressed to win a conviction against him. Nonetheless, SIS did know all about Bialek, and the Service was one of the first on the scene after his defection, finding out what he knew and how he might be able to assist it. Although he never became one of its agents, SIS would have been aware of the arrangements for his security and his movements. Blake and Bialek would not necessarily have crossed each other’s paths on Platanenalle, where they both lived for a month in the spring of 1955, but it seems inconceivable that Blake would not have taken an interest in this highest of high-profile defectors. Nor is it unlikely that his masters at Karlshorst would have asked him for some information on their target, with the intention of passing it to the Stasi. Charles Wheeler, who knew Bialek and the BBC producers who worked with him, always suspected that intelligence supplied by Blake may have led the defector’s kidnappers to him.

  Aside from the human casualties of his treachery, and the Berlin tunnel, Blake also betrayed various other technical operations in which SIS and the CIA were engaged. He alerted his Soviet handlers to the eavesdropping on the Yugoslav military mission, and the bugging of their Polish equivalent.

  Ted Shackley, the CIA’s Chief of Satellite Operations in Berlin, recalled how the agency was keen to listen in when a new man, Wūadysūaw Tykocinski, an experienced Polish Foreign Service officer, arrived to take up his post. The opportunity arose because the Polish mission was looking to move to a new building. CIA officers got in touch with Berlin estate agents and brokers to make sure that the Poles were steered towards buying a spacious villa in the Charlottenburg district. Before they could move in, the CIA had bugged it from top to bottom. When Tykocinski settled in, senior politicians paid court, as did Poles who came to East Berlin on business. ‘All of them talked, and Tykocinski himself talked the most, making a point of briefing his staff on developments at home and the substance of the cable traffic that was coming in from Moscow. It was a goldmine,’ was Shackley’s assessment. Then, a few weeks later, a counter-intelligence sweep team were heard looking for, and finding, hidden microphones. The game was up.

  Shackley knew there had been a leak and later discovered who was to blame: ‘It was Blake who had closed our goldmine. Apparently he had overheard two SIS staffers chatting about it in their Berlin headquarters and had picked up just enough of
their conversation to enable him to tell his Soviet handler that an operation was in progress against an unidentified Polish installation in West Berlin.’

  Blake had clearly performed well for the KGB in Berlin, but he also managed to keep his official employers satisfied at the same time. Running a major Soviet agent, someone in a position of real clout in the political or economic sphere, had proved well nigh impossible for most of his colleagues but, somehow, Blake managed to reel in a top catch. His source in the upper echelons of Soviet government was ‘Boris’, an economist working for Comecon, the economic organisation that linked all the Communist countries. He also happened to be a senior interpreter at all top-level Soviet negotiations on economic matters, so he would routinely accompany senior Kremlin personnel and pick up much sensitive political information. Blake recalled SIS’s delight: ‘They thought he represented a source of great promise and should be carefully cultivated. Though he was not “our man in the Kremlin” yet, there was a good prospect that he might become one.’

  Boris was, of course, a plant, put in place by Blake’s KGB masters to impress SIS and the CIA and enhance his growing reputation.

  The recruitment of Boris was carefully staged. One of Blake’s regular agents, Horst Eitner, otherwise known as ‘Mickey’, had secured a job as an assistant in a clothes shop called Semel on Badstrasse, in the Wedding district of West Berlin. This traditional working-class area lay in the French Sector, close to the sector boundary, and was known as ‘Red Wedding’ because of its Communist sympathies in the 1920s and 30s. It had been heavily bombed in the war and much of its housing destroyed and, in the wake of that devastation, a business community arose that veered from the vibrant to the seamy, with hard-working local traders being joined by spivs, prostitutes and chancers of every kind in one big, teeming settlement of shops and shacks.