The Greatest Traitor Read online

  George, although irritated at having his actions and motives pored over, confronted the situation with relative equanimity. He spent three days answering detailed questions from a young Army intelligence officer, who was particularly interested in the minutiae of his escape from enemy territory. On the fourth day, he was interrupted while watching a showing of The Great Dictator starring Charlie Chaplin and told there was someone on the telephone for him. When he picked it up, he heard his mother’s voice for the first time in over two and a half years. He was to be released.

  With half a crown for his train fare, he set off for the London suburb of Northwood, where Catherine now lived along with his sisters, Adele and Elizabeth. An hour later, in the rain and the dark of a winter’s night, mother and son were overjoyed, finally, to be reunited.

  4

  Secret Intelligence Service

  After the heady adventure of the preceding three years, George settled into a very different rhythm of life. While his mother worked as housekeeper and companion to an elderly lady in Northwood, and his sisters were usefully employed as nurses in central London hospitals, he took time to explore his new environment.

  He was impressed by what he observed of England at war. In his eyes, the virtues of duty, solidarity, forbearance and courage under enemy attack were all clearly visible. He watched and admired the ‘quiet discipline’ of his neighbours, evident in their uncomplaining attitude when queuing for scarce foodstuffs, and also their strict observance of blackout regulations and civil defence measures.

  Such stoicism no doubt reaffirmed his own desire to return to the fray and re-join Holland’s war effort, but that proved far from easy. No letter arrived on his doorstep inviting him to enlist – notwithstanding the role he had performed in the Resistance, and despite all the connections he had made along his escape route – and he was extremely disappointed.

  Onto the scene stepped Commander Douglas William Child, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer and a family friend of the Behars from Holland days. He was to play a vital part in George’s life during the war years and beyond.

  Child was an unlikely recruit to British intelligence, simply because of his humble origins. A fisherman’s son from Deal, in Kent, he left home at fifteen to join the Merchant Navy, eventually winning his master’s certificate in his twenties. In the early 1930s, as the worldwide Depression took hold, he nonetheless managed to make a decent living as the skipper of private yachts, transporting the wealthy owners up and down the Rhine and along the Dutch waterways. In 1936, as the threat of war loomed larger, he decided to join the Royal Navy Volunteer Supplementary Reserve, but his obvious potential as an intelligence officer, together with his experience of Germany and the Low Countries, saw him installed in SIS’s station at The Hague at the beginning of the war. His cover was that of a lieutenant commander in the Naval Attaché’s office.

  When the invasion came Child stayed on, but was captured and badly wounded when German parachutists attacked his car. He had a leg amputated, and after his recovery he was imprisoned along with other British diplomats in a hotel in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany. There, he remained for more than two years before an exchange deal was struck to bring him and his colleagues back to England. Various German diplomats had been stranded in different parts of the British Empire at the start of the war and then interned; they were returned to Berlin, and Child and his colleagues to London.

  When George met up with his old friend in the spring of 1943, Child was back at Broadway working in the P8 (Dutch Section) of SIS. Whatever his experience and his connections, he was not yet able to engineer a Secret Service position for George. Instead, he suggested that he should join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and qualify to be an officer, just as he himself had done seven years earlier. George duly did so, successfully passing written examinations and then impressing in an interview. Not long afterwards he received a letter welcoming him into the Royal Navy, and informing him that in ‘due course’ he would be given instructions on where to report for duty.

  While he waited, through connections his mother had with the Government-in-exile, he found a temporary clerical post at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, based at Arlington House, St James’s. But he didn’t relish the life of a commuting civil servant, and soon realised he was ill-suited to a regular nine-to-five job.

  In the autumn the exiled Behar family decided to change their name by deed poll. ‘It was my mother’s decision – I took no part in the consultations as I was away from home by then,’ George recalled. ‘She lived with an old lady whose name was Drake, and had thoughts of taking that name. But she eventually decided it would be better to take the fresh name, Blake.’

  By then, George had received his navy call-up papers and had reported to HMS Collingwood – not a ship but the Navy’s principal shore-based training centre. For a fit, adaptable man, the ten weeks of mainly physical work were tiring but not over-demanding. From there, it was on to the Firth of Forth in Rosyth, Scotland, for a more gruelling six weeks aboard the cruiser Diomede, the aim being to give the new recruits as realistic an introduction to life at sea as possible.

  Finally, in March, the enlisted men made the fifteen-mile journey to their last training institution, HMS King Alfred in Hove. Named after the ninth-century King of Wessex – considered the ‘father’ of the Royal Navy as the first monarch to use ships in the defence of the realm – HMS King Alfred’s aim when it opened its doors in September 1939 was to promote a new kind of officer to enlarge the ranks of the expanding Navy. These HO (‘Hostilities Only’) officers, such as George Blake, would be bright, assertive young men, commissioned into the RNVR as temporary appointments; at the end of the war they would return to their civilian lives. In fact, by the end of hostilities, nearly 80 per cent of the officers on active duty with the Royal Navy were from the RNVR.

  Once more Blake applied himself well to the complicated system of weekly tests and examinations. Failure in any one of them would have meant immediate dismissal from the course, but he consistently achieved impressive marks and, in April 1943, ‘passed out’ successfully as a sub-lieutenant.

  It was an achievement of which he could feel proud, but he still hankered after a Secret Intelligence role. The opportunity appeared to present itself when, after a few day’s leave back in Northwood to celebrate his commission, he returned to HMS King Alfred for a further two weeks for postgraduate training. ‘A man came down from the Admiralty to lecture to us on the various branches of naval service open to us,’ recalled Blake. ‘Right at the end of his talk, he added: “There is one other branch which I should mention. It is called ‘Special Service’, and I cannot tell you very much about it because it is secret and, as far as we are concerned, the people who join it vanish.”’ This was music to Blake’s ears: ‘Special Service, secret, people not heard of again. It must be intelligence work, the landing of agents on the enemy coast . . . I wanted to be a real member of the Dutch underground, I wanted to be dropped into Holland to do secret, important work and I thought the Special Service would provide this opportunity.’

  He was to be sadly disabused of that notion when he received a letter a month later requesting him to report to HMS Dolphin, headquarters of the Royal Navy Submarine Service at Fort Blockhouse in Gosport. What the ‘secret’ work actually entailed was training to be a diver for midget (two-man) submarines. Though disconcerted by this turn of events, he had signed up to the course and felt duty-bound to see it through. It turned out to be even more of a disaster than he had anticipated.

  Physically fit he may have been, but he didn’t relish the long hours spent under water and the particular kind of stamina needed to cope with those conditions. More seriously, he soon discovered he had an allergy to the altered oxygen containers the divers carried. So much so that, when put to the test on one of the midgets off an island on the West Coast of Scotland, he actually fell unconscious in the water and had to be swiftly dragged back to the surface. His ears suffered
severe, albeit temporary, damage.

  While his superiors pondered what to do with him, Blake was taken off the course and given the job of officer of the watch on HMS Dolphin. A few weeks later, the captain of the establishment, who had taken a liking to the young man and had made some enquiries on his behalf, summoned Blake to his office: ‘He asked me if I would be interested in fast boats and plenty of action. This was just the sort of thing that appealed to me. I was therefore told I was to go to London early the next day and report to an address in Palace Street, just off Victoria Street.’ What Blake was about to discover was that ‘fast boats’ and ‘plenty of action’ was euphemistic language. He was, in fact, about to take the first steps towards realising his dream of becoming a Secret Intelligence Officer.

  Arriving in the City of Westminster the following morning, Blake was introduced to a Royal Navy captain who questioned him about his background, his resistance work and his escape from Holland. He was then told to write down his life story, including as much detail as possible. What he didn’t immediately realise was that, in spite of the presence of the naval officer, he was now within the precincts of the British Secret Intelligence Service. The office in Palace Street was one of SIS’s many London outposts, habitually used for training in ‘tradecraft’.

  After lunch the captain escorted him on a ten-minute walk to a scruffy-looking place just opposite the entrance to St James’s Park underground station. One of its occupants, a counter-intelligence officer about to take charge of a new anti-Soviet unit (Section IX), would later describe the interior and its most important inhabitant:

  Broadway was a dingy building, a warren of wooden partitions and frosted-glass windows. It had eight floors serviced by an ancient lift.

  On one of my early visits, I got in to the lift with a colleague whom the liftman treated with obtrusive deference. The stranger gave me a swift glance and looked away. He was well-built and well-dressed, but what struck me most was his pallor: pale face, pale eyes, silvery blond hair thinning on top – the whole an impression of pepper-and-salt.

  When I got out at the fourth floor, I asked the liftman who he was. ‘Why, sir, that’s the Chief,’ he answered in some surprise.

  Blake had arrived at 54 Broadway, also known as Broadway Buildings, the headquarters of SIS. The writer providing the description of its somewhat dilapidated state was Kim Philby. The ‘Chief’ – or ‘C’, as he was known in government circles – was the then head of SIS, Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies.

  In Broadway, the staff worked in ‘gloomy rooms where the floors were covered in worn lino, quite dangerous in places, [where] walls were a mucky grey/white/cream, and the rooms were lit with bare light bulbs; only senior personnel were allowed to have desk lamps’. Pigeons were housed in a loft in the roof; no one quite knew why, or who looked after them. Perhaps they would be vital messengers in the event of a calamity. Down in the basement there was an inhospitable bar, effectively a club for Service ‘insiders’, and those who stumbled into it unknowingly would be met by quizzical glances or frosty stares.

  The fourth floor was clearly a cut above the rest of the building. One corridor, near the Chief’s office and the main boardroom, was covered in thick red carpet, with Chippendale armchairs sat alongside a slim mahogany table. Those who had a personal appointment with the Chief would sit and gaze up at two lamps above his office door as they waited: one red and one green. Once the red light went off and the green one came on, they could then advance into the inner sanctum, provided they could get beyond the praetorian guard of secretaries.

  On that day in August 1944, however, Blake did not move in such exalted circles, but was ushered up to a much smaller room with an attic window on the top floor. There, he was introduced to a man who remained anonymous then, but whom he would later know as Major Charles Seymour, head of SIS’s Dutch Section. Blake was interviewed by Seymour, in Dutch, mainly about his work in the Resistance, before being led down to the first floor, sat at a desk and asked to fill in another questionnaire.

  At this stage he remained unclear about what sort of job he was being considered for. Given his background in the RNVR, he wondered whether he was going to be offered employment on Motor Torpedo Boats, which were used by the Secret Services to land agents on the enemy coast. Or perhaps he might be being tested for a post in Naval Intelligence, or for liaison work with other allied navies? He left 54 Broadway no clearer.

  A week later he was called back, and this time, in the boardroom on the fourth floor, he was interviewed in front of a five-man committee. Calmly and methodically, he answered all the questions fired at him, seemingly at random, by the different members of the board, still unable to fathom what role they might have in mind. A few minutes after he had been sent out of the room, the naval captain came out and tapped him on the shoulder. The news was good: he had been accepted into the Service and should report back at 10 a.m. the following Monday.

  On 14 August, the mystery was finally solved. Blake returned to the eighth floor at Broadway Buildings, was greeted once more by Major Seymour and, after formal introductions, was led down the corridor to a large room. There, he met a ‘short thick-set man, with pale blue eyes and a bristle moustache’, who walked with a limp and addressed him in a brusque, military manner.

  Colonel John ‘Bill’ Cordeaux’s bark was worse than his bite. He was Major Seymour’s superior, Controller of the Northern Areas (CNA), with the Low Countries and Scandinavia making up his sphere of influence. He gave Blake the momentous news that he was now on attachment as an officer of the British Secret Service and that he would be working there, at headquarters, in the organisation’s Dutch Section. While Cordeaux impressed upon him what an honour it was to be chosen, and outlined his future responsibilities, the young recruit’s mind whirled with excitement.

  In fact, I could hardly believe it was true. I had of late suspected and hoped that job for which I was being interviewed had something to do with ‘Intelligence’. But that I would actually become an officer in the British Secret Service, this legendary centre of hidden power, commonly believed to have a decisive influence on the great events of this world, was something that far exceeded my wildest expectations.

  Two days later, Blake formally signed the Official Secrets Act. In his buoyant mood, he would have cast his eyes only fleetingly over its characteristically bureaucratic, understated language, including Paragraph 1(a), which read: ‘[If any person] communicates the code word, pass word, sketch, plan, model, article, note, document or information to any person, other than a person to whom he is authorised to communicate it, or a person to whom it is in the interest of the state his duty to communicate it . . . that person shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.’

  All he could think of was getting straight down to work, serving his new country and, through that, helping the country of his birth to turn the tide against its German invaders.

  Still highly collegiate in its structure and elitist in both its membership and attitude, SIS could be an intimidating organisation, especially for those who hadn’t come from Eton, Winchester, Oxbridge, the Guards or the Royal Navy. It was staffed by very many fair-minded men and women with a strong sense of patriotism and a keen work ethic, but snobbish and patronising behaviour undoubtedly persisted in certain quarters. In wartime, however, this club (or tribe, perhaps?) opened its doors and loosened its attitudes just a little. Exceptional circumstances forced it to bring in useful outsiders like Blake. Even so, those beyond the Dutch Section who took notice of him often referred to Blake as ‘some Dutch fellow’ or ‘that funny foreigner’.

  Not that it mattered much. SIS’s hermetically sealed departments meant that he generally mixed only with colleagues in P8. Blake had, in fact, started his career in Intelligence in exactly the right place. The Dutch Section wasn’t a typical SIS department, and he fitted in well with a mixed bunch of characters under the considerate leadership of Charles Seymour. Though very much the office junior, Seymour valued him greatly for a nu
mber of reasons: ‘He brought us a lot of useful addresses for safe houses in Holland, from his time in the underground. He was very good at decoding messages, scrambled or badly sent, as we were getting more and more information from our agents . . . But he’d also been a brave young man, from his experiences fleeing through Europe, and he was a good influence on the young agents we were sending over there. He was of great value in helping prepare them for their missions.’

  For Blake, it was a seamless progression from the clandestine life he had been leading for the last four years. ‘I came very naturally into this atmosphere of illegality,’ he later observed. ‘I liked being an Intelligence Officer – I loved the romantic side of the job.’

  Colonel Cordeaux and Major Seymour had worked skilfully and effectively to repair the damage to SIS’s operations in the Netherlands, which originated with the disastrous Venlo incident. Soon after the start of the war, on 9 November 1939, at a town on the Dutch-German border, two SIS officers and a Dutch intelligence agent were captured by the counter-espionage section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in a clever sting which led to the destruction of much of the agent network in the Netherlands, and quite possibly damaged SIS’s entire espionage operation in Western Europe. From mid-1942 onwards, Cordeaux and Seymour had an intelligence operation in Holland up and running once again, with SIS and the newly-created Dutch Secret Service, Bureau Inlichtingen (BI), working effectively together – the Dutch supplying the agents, and the British training and equipping them. By the time Blake joined P8 in 1944, the section was running five networks reporting through thirty wireless sets.

  The famed Dutch secret agent, Pierre Louis Baron d’Aulnis de Bourouill, one of those dropped over Netherlands in 1943, testified to the work of P8: ‘I for one have always felt that the spirit of co-operation and personal friendship from Charles Seymour, sitting there, with his crew of Dutch section, were of very great importance to our success.’