The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Blake worked hand in glove with his mentor Douglas Child, who had overall responsibility for the training of agents. The two men shared a flat in Petty France, a short walk away from the office. Child provided the technical, wireless training for the new recruits, after which Blake would accompany them to the Parachute Training Centre at RAF Ringway, near Manchester.

  Blake had come to realise that his ambition to return undercover to his native land would never be fulfilled. An agreement between SIS and BI meant that no British nationals were to be dropped into Holland as agents. Nonetheless, while at RAF Ringway, he took the opportunity to undertake the training alongside his charges, and experienced a taste of the adventure awaiting them when he joined them for a trial jump. It was exhilarating: ‘I felt myself gently rocking in the air. The relief that the parachute had opened, the light, floating feeling as if I was without weight . . . I thought this is what angels must feel like when they fly through the heavens.’

  Blake’s real role, however, was to add psychological comfort, accompanying the nervous agents to the airfield on the night of a dropping operation. He found this a difficult but rewarding experience.

  On the way we would stop, first for tea and then for drinks in some cosy old pub. Myself, a girl from the Women’s Services and the agent did our best to keep the mood carefree and usually succeeded in this . . . Just before departure the agent changed into clothes of Dutch origin and I had to check carefully that he had no English coins, letters, bus or cinema tickets, or anything else on his person, which might give him away . . . Then I gave him his false Dutch identity documents, his money, his codes and his transmitting schedules and – if he wished – a lethal pill.

  But Blake’s major asset was his facility with languages. By now the Allies were pushing on through Europe following the D-Day landings, and had reached the estuary of the Rhine and Meuse, which separates the Northern from the Southern Netherlands. P8 had taken advantage of this advance to set up a field station in the liberated part of Holland, and a vast amount of material came pouring in from agents, often about German troop dispositions, the locations of headquarters and all manner of other military information. These telegrams were sent in code, and even when they had been deciphered at Bletchley Park, the text was often still badly mangled, with whole strings of words missing. With his thorough knowledge of Dutch, Blake’s task was to go through and ‘stitch’ them together.

  SIS and BI continued to develop agent networks and began working effectively with the Dutch Resistance. But Holland’s liberation efforts still faced major setbacks along the way, none more so than ‘Operation Market Garden’, the bold Allied plan to drop 30,000 British and American airborne troops behind enemy lines to capture the eight bridges spanning the Dutch-German border, and from there to drive on into the industrial heartland of Germany.

  Blake played a minor role in that fateful operation. He was on duty in the office at Broadway on the first day, Sunday, 17 September, waiting on tenterhooks for a telephone call from SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). Once it came, he was able to successfully despatch a series of telegrams to SIS’s underground organisations in the Arnhem-Nijmegen area, which enabled them to give assistance to the troops of the British 1st Airborne Division, who were about to land. As he recalled: ‘It was a tense afternoon . . . I realised an important operation was afoot, which, if successful, would bring about the liberation of Holland within a matter of days. Then the call came and I at once sent off the telegrams. I felt as if a spring had been released inside me.’ But it wasn’t to be the decisive moment in this campaign. Indeed, it ended up a catastrophe. Thousands of lives were lost, and as a consequence the people of the Netherlands faced their harshest winter yet at the hands of an occupier bent on retribution.

  Those who worked with Blake in this period were still unsure if this capable, serious-minded young man had all the required qualities to make a good intelligence officer. ‘I think he was a bit of a dreamer. He was certainly not technically equipped to be a spy – he couldn’t even drive a car properly,’ was the opinion of Hazel Seymour, Charles’s wife, who worked in another section of the Service. ‘But with his intellectual skills, he would have made a brilliant codist – he had that sort of brain. He also wrote very good, very intelligible reports.’

  The Seymours took Blake under their wing. Hazel Seymour was only a couple of years older than him, but was married and expecting a baby, and he felt comfortable in her presence: ‘I had lots of conversations with him. He was fatherless, and he’d been missing his mother; he seemed a little bit lost. He was a very good listener, and always interested in other people . . . He was just a very pleasant, unassuming, quiet, gentle young man. He was someone we liked to have around. I didn’t think he would stay in SIS after the war – I thought perhaps he might have settled down to become a very respectable family man, with a job as a lecturer, perhaps.’

  Although he didn’t know it at the time, in April 1945 Blake accompanied to the airfield the last agent to be dropped over Holland. It was a mission that had an unhappy ending: ‘He was a nice, fair boy, just turned eighteen, who was going to one of our groups in the Amsterdam area as a wireless operator. Just before take-off there was a last-minute hitch. But, after a longish wait, the aircraft took off after all . . . Two days later we received a telegram from the group to which the young man had been dropped. He was dead.’ The agent had been unable to free his harness as he came down over a large lake, close to the dropping site. There was a strong wind that night and his parachute dragged him under. His body was discovered the following day.

  As events moved rapidly in the spring of 1945, P8’s office gradually emptied. Major Seymour headed off to The Hague, to re-open the SIS station there, while Commander Child, with no more agents to train, was given a new intelligence job at Naval Headquarters in Germany. When VE Day came on 8 May, Blake was the sole officer on duty.

  With little left to do, he wandered out into the excited crowds to soak up the atmosphere of that momentous day: ‘I found myself pushed in the direction of Buckingham Palace, where a surging mass of people kept on chanting: “We want the King! We want the King!” And then, when he and the Royal Family came out on the balcony, started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. The war was over, we had won.’

  5

  Cold War

  In the week after the unalloyed excitement and relief of the VE-Day celebrations, the reality of the austere future stretching ahead for many years to come began to dawn on the British people. Widespread wartime restrictions remained and would only get harsher as American wartime aid dried up. Meat, butter, sugar, tea, jam, eggs – there were severe shortages of them all. Clothes were also rationed, and the salutary advice continued to be ‘make do and mend’.

  The national hangover was duly reflected in the corridors of power. Jock Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary, recorded in his diary for Monday, 14 May: ‘At No. 10 I found everybody rather strained after a week of violent rejoicing and tumult . . . Victory has brought no respite. The PM looks tired and has to fight for the energy to deal with the problems confronting him. These include the settlement of Europe, the last round of war in the East, an election on the way, and the dark cloud of Russian imponderability.’

  A couple of days later George Blake escaped the bleak mood of an exhausted nation when he set out to join Major Seymour and his team in The Hague, to assist with the task of winding down wartime affairs and reconstituting the SIS station. He would be engaged in delicate work, well suited to his ability to listen patiently and sympathetically to the problems of others. Agents had to be paid off; the fate of those who had disappeared must be investigated; and their widows and orphans taken care of. In collaboration with officers from the Bureau Inlichtingen, the Dutch Secret Service, he also had to make tricky decisions about who should be recommended for awards and decorations, and then write citations.

  Blake himself, and the rest of his colleagues in the Dutch Section,
all received the Order of Orange-Nassau (equivalent to Britain’s OBE) for their work during the war.

  In all, the SIS team in The Hague comprised five officers and three secretaries, all of whom lived and worked in a couple of large villas in Wassenaar, an affluent garden suburb of the Dutch city. The larger of the two houses had previously belonged to a Dutch Nazi. Just a fortnight earlier, he had been arrested and taken to a prison camp awaiting trial. The smaller building was used as an office.

  Away from Wassenaar, in the wider Dutch population, the privations of war had been far worse than for the British, as George discovered when he went to visit his Aunt Truss in Rotterdam. He borrowed a bicycle with wooden wheels and cycled out to her home, which was some distance from the port: ‘She had become very thin, but otherwise was well. It was a tearful reunion and we talked deep into the night when I had to get back to my ship . . . The next time I came, I drove up in my requisitioned car and brought with me ample supplies of food. My aunt needed these badly after the winter of famine she had just lived through.’

  There was really not enough work to do at The Hague to keep the group of SIS officers busy. As Major Seymour recalled: ‘I didn’t really need him [Blake], but I brought him over with me to give him something to do.’ George’s light duties left him with plenty of free time. Still only twenty-two, for the last six years his day-to-day existence had been fraught and highly pressured. Now he was cast into a hectic social scene with a seemingly never-ending diet of high living. From the largesse of the military powers flowed the best accommodation in luxury hotels and picturesque country houses, rich food in expensive restaurants, and apparently never-ending stocks of champagne and brandy once greedily hoarded by the German Army.

  In this bacchanalian-like setting even the quiet, serious-minded Blake threw off his shackles: ‘I too found myself irresistibly drawn into this maelstrom of pleasure. In the words of the well-known hymn, “the world, the flesh and Satan dwelt around the path I trod” . . . It seemed to me that the whole of Europe went mad in that first summer after the war. We had cars, we went to parties, nightclubs, drinking sessions – we were young and we enjoyed life to the full.’

  One of the SIS secretaries was a tall, fair-haired, attractive 21-year-old former debutante named Iris Irene Adele Peake, the daughter of Conservative MP Osbert Peake, then Financial Secretary to the Cabinet in Churchill’s post-war caretaker government. Iris had previously worked in a different section of SIS to George but now the two were thrown together and, in the more intimate environment of the villa in Wassenaar, began to develop a close relationship.

  Hazel Seymour, who was in The Hague with her husband Charles, observed the couple at close quarters: ‘The two of them were very fond of each other. Despite their very different backgrounds, they seemed to find something in each other that just clicked.’

  Blake observed that SIS secretaries in those days more often than not belonged to the higher echelons of the Establishment. ‘Though often scatter-brained, they worked hard because they were very conscious of their patriotic duty, instinctively equating the interests of England with their own class,’ he noted a little disdainfully. ‘They were very pretty, some very beautiful, but inclined to be vague and incompetent in varying degrees, though to this there were exceptions.’ Clearly Iris was in the latter category, combining both good looks and intelligence.

  She was also decidedly upper-class. Her mother was Lady Joan Capell, daughter of the Earl of Essex. Her father had travelled along the well-established route of Eton, Sandhurst, the Coldstream Guards in the First World War, and Christ Church College, Oxford. The Peakes also had many connections at Court and, in 1945, Iris was actually living in St James’s Palace, sharing an apartment with her best friend, Diana Legh, also a secretary at SIS, whose father – Sir Piers – was Master of the King’s Household.

  George and Iris were, then, ‘from different sides of the tracks’. She moved effortlessly in the highest social circles and, while he may have worked in an Establishment organisation, he was clearly a ‘foreigner’ – an outsider effectively, in his own words, ‘a man of no class’. Though The Hague, away from the constraints of English society, offered an opportunity for this unconventional relationship to flourish, it was not to last. When the relationship petered out – under what circumstances remains unclear – those close to Blake later wondered whether it had lasting consequences.

  ‘They were quite inseparable in Holland. But in those days, given their place in the social hierarchy, the Peakes wouldn’t have approved of their daughter marrying somebody like George Blake,’ recalled Hazel Seymour. ‘It ended some time after they returned to England. We all thought he wanted to marry her. All we know is that he went to visit the family, and after that the romance was over. I don’t think Iris would ever have married him – and she certainly wasn’t the type to stand out against her parents. He was a sensitive sort of bloke, and to be told – or for it to be indicated to him – that he wasn’t good enough, would have hurt him.’

  Years later, in 1961, two days before her husband’s trial at the Old Bailey, Blake’s first wife Gillian referred to his friendship with Iris in a letter sent to his solicitor, Albert Cox. ‘There is only one point which I have thought of since our talk,’ she wrote, ‘which is probably of no importance and which my husband may have mentioned to you. It is his friendship with Iris Peake, who he first met in about 1944. He was in love with her, but could not possibly marry her because of his circumstances, and the relationship ended when he went to Korea. I was thinking how this might have added to his restless state of mind.’

  Nearly seventy years on, Iris Peake’s recollection is that she continued to meet George from time to time in London on their return from The Hague, before they eventually lost touch after he was posted to Hamburg in the spring of 1946. She maintains that he never met her father and remembers George as highly intelligent, good company and a popular colleague. She also recalls that in those days he was still considering an alternative career in the Church. She was never aware of his Jewish heritage.

  The theory that Blake was so scarred by Iris’s rejection that it stored up feelings of resentment against the British ‘Establishment’ and helped sow some of the seeds of his later betrayal is one he himself has emphatically rejected:

  That’s just thought up. I had several girlfriends in my younger years, and it’s true she was one of them. But I never went to her home, or met her father, or any other member of her family . . . It was a friendship which was normal at that time of life – and it came to a natural end. I don’t think she ever wanted to marry me and I don’t think I ever wanted to marry her. I just wasn’t the [right] age . . . She had plenty of money, I suppose – I don’t know how much exactly – but I had no money and couldn’t keep a family and wasn’t in a position to marry at all.

  On 19 October 1945, George Orwell contributed a typically perceptive essay to Tribune magazine. Entitled ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’, it presented his analysis of the state of the post-war world. He argued that the new nuclear age had brought a ‘peace that is no peace’, in which the United States and the Soviet Union would be both ‘unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with each other’ (author’s emphasis). Orwell’s phrase describing the ideological clash between East and West would quickly enter the political lexicon as the Cold War.

  There were several key moments in late 1945 and early 1946 that helped crystallise this dangerous, new, bi-polar world of warring power blocs. The first occurred in George Blake’s own world of espionage in September 1945, when he returned to Broadway from The Hague to resume his work in the Dutch Section of SIS. It concerned the defection of Igor Gouzenko in Canada, an event that first alerted the West to the scale of a Soviet spying offensive that had, up until then, gone unnoticed. Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, decided to defect with his family rather than return to Moscow to face complaints about his conduct. After initial scepticism, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police s
tarted to examine over a hundred documents that Gouzenko had brought with him, spirited away from the Embassy hidden in his briefcase. Very quickly the FBI and Britain’s internal Security Service (MI5) were called in to look at this treasure trove, which revealed the existence of extensive networks run by the KGB (the all-powerful Soviet State Security agency, at home and abroad) and the GRU (Soviet foreign military intelligence). These networks spanned Canada, stretched into the United States, and had strong links to Europe. The secret frontlines of the Cold War were now being established.

  On the political and ideological front, the rhetoric was also ratcheting up. On Saturday, 9 February 1946, Stalin made an imposing appearance in the Bolshoi Theatre before an audience of voters in the Soviet ‘elections’. Part of his speech was a characteristic appeal for yet more effort from his people as new five-year plans for heavy industry were put in place. But the passage that sent a shudder of anxiety through Western policy-makers appeared to suggest that the mere existence of capitalism and imperialism made future wars inevitable. Some in Washington even went so far as to read his words as a delayed Declaration of War against the United States.

  The White House sought clarification from those best qualified to read the Soviet leader’s intentions. It duly arrived two weeks later, from George Kennan, US Ambassador to Moscow and an old Soviet hand. Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’, as it would become known, was dictated to his secretary Dorothy Hessman while he was laid up in bed after a painful attack of sinusitis. His foul mood almost certainly contributed to the vehemence of his language, in what was one of the most influential documents in the long history of the Cold War. In a remarkably cogent and prescient eight thousand word essay, he set out to explain to President Harry Truman why he believed conflict with the Soviet Union was inevitable: