The Greatest Traitor Read online

  We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure . . .

  Beware the attempts of Stalin and his cohorts to expand their influence throughout the world, he advised President Truman, while maintaining that those ambitions could be effectively countered by a policy of containment (the Cold War in practice) rather than military engagement. The latter would, in any case, be likely to result in the most horrific outcome – nuclear war.

  Less than a month after Keenan’s telegram, Winston Churchill picked up on the Ambassador’s theme of the Soviets’ seemingly relentless desire to expand their power and dogma. The occasion was his ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech on 5 March, in the Missouri town of Fulton, before a crowd of 40,000. With an approving President Truman alongside him, he delivered a classical but chilling oration. In one particular passage, he defined forever the state of affairs now building between West and East – and effectively sounded the official starting gun on the Cold War:

  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.

  Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high, and in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

  The presence of this ‘iron curtain’ meant of course that intelligence gathering on the Soviet threat – now firmly re-established as SIS’s number one priority – was severely restricted.

  All manner of operations were now being considered in an effort to build up information on the new enemy and, to that end, George Blake was given his own role in this new type of war when he was posted to Hamburg in April 1946. With no German government yet formed, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country, with direct responsibility for a population of more than 20 million. The British ‘zone’ consisted of Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, the present-day state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the western sector of Greater Berlin. It was anticipated that the occupation could last for a decade or more.

  The Royal Navy – to which Blake was still nominally attached – was involved in the development of British ‘denazification’ policy. German admirals and submarine commanders were considered to need particular attention as likely sources of opposition to military occupation. These men were not to be placed in the same category of danger as SS or Gestapo war criminals but their militaristic instincts, combined with staunch patriotism, meant they required close interrogation to ensure they were not considering rebellion of any sort.

  Commander Douglas Child, whose influence had led to Blake finding a place in SIS, now saw another opportunity for his young protégé. A naval intelligence body called the Forward Interrogation Unit, stationed in Hamburg, was about to be wound up. Child suggested that it should be continued, but that Blake should take over its running. He envisaged that Blake, still a sub-lieutenant in the Navy, would now have the perfect cover for any Secret Intelligence activities. Conveniently, there was also a large SIS station for support in Hamburg. It was a great responsibility for an intelligence officer aged just twenty-three, and barely two years into his career, but Blake spoke good German and exuded an air of calm and maturity that belied his years.

  On 7 April, he arrived in a city brought to its knees. Hamburg, a once proud mercantile and cultural centre, had lain in ruins ever since the Allies launched a fearsome bombing campaign, codenamed ‘Operation Gomorrah’, in July 1943. More than 40,000 civilians had been killed and 37,000 wounded over eight days of raids by the RAF and the United States Army Air Force, and the city’s infrastructure was to all intents and purposes completely destroyed. Almost three years later, the population were still suffering a lack of food and housing, and had just endured a lethally cold winter. Cases of death by malnutrition were still being recorded, and in the first five months of 1946, 4,732 fresh cases of tuberculosis were reported.

  The unit Blake inherited had been formed in January 1944 and latterly had links to a colourful, highly secret intelligence group created by Commander Ian Fleming RNVR. The man who would later create SIS’s most famous fictional spy, James Bond, had spent the war as personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence for the Royal Navy. Following success with a number of quixotic deception schemes, in 1942, Fleming decided to form 30 Assault Unit, a tightly-knit commando group operating in conjunction with forward troops, with its brainpower drawn from the Royal Navy, and its brawn supplied by the Royal Marines. Its primary task was to steal German naval intelligence, be it codes, documents, equipment or personnel – and carry out interrogation of the latter, if necessary.

  The Forward Interrogation Unit had worked closely with 30 Assault Unit in intelligence gathering and translation in 1945, but its particular remit had been to extract vital information from prisoners, together with their papers, and send it all back to the Admiralty. By April 1946, that work was all but complete, and its leader, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Izzard, had left for home along with five other members of staff. Only Captain Charles Wheeler remained in the unit’s HQ, a house with a fine view of the River Elbe, two cars, and a resident black spaniel dog.

  Wheeler spent a month briefing Blake and handing over the work of the Unit to him, which included passing on his impressive collection of German naval contacts and some useful social connections, too. Later an outstanding foreign correspondent for the BBC, Wheeler had enough time to form a clear impression of Blake’s character and motivations. ‘He was a curious person. He was very charming. People liked him. Smiled a lot . . . smiled rather too much. Smiled at breakfast,’ he would later reflect. ‘He was affable, he was sociable, he was likeable – but I can’t say I liked George particularly. He was very secretive. George would never tell you what he was doing. We knew, of course, that he was a spook, that his naval uniform was just cover. And it was clear to me that he was looking ahead to a career as an intelligence officer.’

  Some of Blake’s behaviour and methods, according to Wheeler’s description, could almost be lifted from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel:

  He used to play around with invisible ink. And his particular friend, a Major Ramsbotham, would arrive carrying a small wind-up gramophone and a single 78 record.

  Major R always made straight for the telephone; he would dial a number, play the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz into the mouthpiece and replace the receiver. The purpose of this brief communication neither Blake nor the Major ever explained.

  This was all slightly childish to my mind, but he obviously got a kick out of playing around with these toys. He seemed to enjoy the conspiracy of the job – and I would have thought he was very good at it.

  As far as the substance of Blake’s job went, Wheeler did not believe there was much left for him to do with the German submarine officers: ‘I don’t really know what George did in Hamburg – unless the whole operation became an anti-Russian exercise.’ Wheeler guessed correctly. His SIS masters had instructed Blake to take over the most promising of the FIU’s naval contacts and use them to help develop intelligence networks in the Soviet zone. This was the real stuff of the intelligence trade – running agents and gathering crucial information on the enemy. The U-boat officers recruited were briefed to attempt to collect information on the Soviet armed forces, and on political and economic developments in the Soviet zone.

  Personally interrogating some of the cream of the German Navy, plotting operations against the Communists . . . for a time, it went to Blake’s head. To his credit, he had thrown himself into his work with ferocious enthusiasm, i
mmersing himself in huge amounts of technical, military and political detail, and writing reports of interminable length. Some of his colleagues, however, and especially the Royal Navy officers, disliked the way this boyish-looking commanding officer seemed to lord it over them. He could be ‘rude, fussy, vain and voluble, and he often struck them as a little mad’. He consistently urged his sceptical colleagues to be on their guard lest a Soviet agent should penetrate their work, and he introduced special security measures to that end.

  Years later, Blake would concede that his newfound status had made him a little arrogant: ‘The life I was leading in Hamburg was very much a continuation of life in the first few months after the war in liberated Holland . . . The large villas, requisitioned cars, luxury hotels and country clubs . . . All this gave me a feeling of importance and did nothing for my humility.’

  In attempting to establish networks inside the Soviet Zone, he was helped by the deep loathing the German naval officers felt for the Soviet military and, at a time of hunger, money and copious supplies of food, drink and cigarettes also proved powerful incentives in recruiting agents.

  Blake himself relished the reconnaissance side of his intelligence work. He would leave the office for several days at a time and travel to Lübeck, just a few miles from the Soviet border, in the guise of a ‘displaced person’. There, he would meet contacts and get a feel for the level of useful clandestine activity in the city.

  In those days, it was also straightforward enough to send agents into the Soviet Zone through Berlin, where movement between the Eastern and Western sector was still virtually free: ‘I used to dress them up in a Royal Marine uniform, issue them with a movement order in a fictitious English name and service number and then take them myself in my station wagon through the Soviet control posts at Helmstedt and Berlin,’ Blake recalled. ‘Once in Berlin, they made their own way across the boundary into the Eastern sector and from there to various towns in the Soviet Zone.’

  The ‘intense Dutchman’ may have alienated some of his naval colleagues but his superiors in SIS, while acknowledging his eccentricity, were also highly impressed by the results he produced: Blake reckoned that by the spring of 1947, he had succeeded in building up two intelligence networks in East Germany, the members of which were nearly all former naval and Wehrmacht officers.

  He returned to Broadway at the end of March, exhilarated by this experience, and satisfied he had played some part in the early moves in the Cold War. However, another year of relentless socialising in the country homes of the German aristocracy, and in less salubrious surroundings, had forced him to reconsider his earlier, alternative calling. ‘My Calvinistic side strongly disapproved and thought it all rather dissolute,’ he said. ‘The inner battle which ensued had one important consequence. I felt that I was no longer worthy of becoming a minister of the Church as I feared I might not be able to live up to the high standards that calling demanded. I abandoned therefore all thought of going on to a theological college after my return to civilian life.’

  There was, however, a different kind of career open to him. His old friend Commander Child, also demobilised from the Navy, decided to set up a company offering pleasure cruises on the Rhine and the Dutch canals. He offered his apprentice the opportunity to join him in this new venture. Blake declined. Indications from senior SIS officers were that his progress thus far had been duly noted, and that a promising full-time career in intelligence awaited.

  In the final months of his time in Hamburg, Blake had been invited to dinner with Child and several other senior members of SIS’s European operation, including Andrew King, shortly to become Controller Eastern Area (covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Before the war he had made his name as a member of Colonel Claude Dansey’s Z organisation – a parallel spy network to SIS, using legitimate and front businesses rather than embassies to collect intelligence on the buildup to war. Impressed by what he had seen and heard about Blake, the dinner merely reinforced King’s views: ‘We were attracted by his foreign languages and cosmopolitan background. So few Britons spoke foreign languages.’ His impressions were duly logged back at Broadway, where an old colleague from Z organisation, Kenneth Cohen, was Director of Production (D/P) – effectively ‘global controller’ in charge of intelligence gathering. This highly respected senior officer also noted Blake’s potential:‘A gallant past, numerous languages and an ingenious mind.’

  The upshot was that in April 1947 Blake was offered a permanent post in SIS and accepted ‘without hesitation’: ‘I found intelligence work fascinating and liked travelling. The thought of having to serve perhaps in far-flung and wild countries did not worry me and, indeed, attracted me. I knew the direction of the work and was happy with that. Opposing any further Russian advance in Europe was a worthwhile task; I looked upon the Soviet Union as a menace to Western civilisation and our way of life.’

  Even before being sent to Hamburg Blake had been fluent in Dutch, English, German and French. Once there, he started to learn Russian. Blake recalls a senior SIS officer paying a visit to his Hamburg apartment and noticing a worn-out textbook on his bedside table. ‘Are you studying Russian? That’s praiseworthy, but amateurism is not yet an art,’ was the encouraging if oblique observation. Once back at Head Office, it was suggested to him that he might like to attend Cambridge University for six months to develop his Russian on a special course designed for officers of the Armed Services. Blake jumped at the idea. He took great delight in the pure intellectual pleasure of learning a new language and, of course, he could see the obvious advantages of it for him in the changing world order.

  After a brief return to Hamburg to hand over the agent networks to his SIS colleagues, he travelled up to Cambridge in October, eagerly anticipating the opportunity to study at one of the world’s oldest and grandest academic institutions.

  Equally, in such congenial and relaxing surroundings, he now had the chance to reflect upon and take stock of his life. The previous seven years – resistance, escape and SIS – had been a constant whirl of exciting, but demanding activity. Now, amid the ancient spires and towers, he could plot the course ahead.

  6

  Cambridge

  By the time George Blake arrived to take up his place at Cambridge in October 1947, the politicians’ ardour for all things Russian was starting to cool a little. Enthusiastic talk about future intellectual contacts, or the teaching of Russian in British schools, was heard less as the regime of ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin proved a very different proposition in peacetime from the redoubtable ally of the war. There were, nonetheless, political, trade and cultural links to maintain, despite the gradual lowering of the Iron Curtain, and, for spies like Blake, understanding the new foe meant a good grasp of the Russian language was invaluable.

  Dr Elizabeth Hill was the charismatic, exuberant lecturer at Cambridge University who was to guide his academic progress over the course of the next eight months. It was a period he would describe as ‘one of the watersheds in my life’. Dr Hill liked to regale her new students with the history of Russian studies in Great Britain, tracing it all the way back to Queen Elizabeth I, and even claiming that the Monarch herself had learned the language.

  Certainly the start of close Russo-English relations can be plotted back to the sixteenth century, with Richard Chancellor’s voyage to the White Sea and extraordinary journey to Moscow, the subsequent formation of the Muscovy Company, and then the correspondence over many years between Elizabeth and Ivan the Terrible, who offered at one point to marry the ‘Virgin Queen’.

  Short and stocky with broad features, her hair usually tied back in a severe bun, Elizabeth Hill was indubitably a woman of great personal magnetism and warmth of spirit. She was an outstanding if exacting language instructor, urging her pupils to ‘rabotat, rabotat, rabotat – work, work, work’, and thus ‘fall in love with themselves’. She also stirred them with her passion for the classical Russian writers of the nineteenth century like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and
Gogol.

  Born Yelizaveta Fyodorovna in St Petersburg in 1900, she came from a well-off Scots-Russian family who were forced to flee the Bolshevik regime in 1917. Her father Frederick eked out a meagre living as a door-to-door chocolate salesman in London – and won a few shillings from time to time playing bridge – while her mother was forced to knit to raise money for the household.

  The barriers against women academics at Cambridge were substantial in those days but Liza – as she was known – persevered, and through a mixture of talent, charm and sheer doggedness finally secured a coveted post as lecturer in the Slavonic Studies department in 1936.

  Among Dr Hill’s eccentricities was a firm belief in the influence of the stars on people’s lives. Her more cerebral friends and colleagues would joke about it with her, but she was not to be deterred. ‘I consider that the character of a person, his or her personality, indeed the whole structure of a person are very influenced by the stars,’ she maintained. She would listen attentively to new students, drawing them out into conversation, all the while trying to assess which astrological type they were. ‘Very often I was right, and so it was with George Blake. He turned out to be a Scorpion, which is what I am myself. We are either great eagles, or awful devils, so I would say, well George, you can attain great heights, and I’ll help you when you’re flagging.’

  She would take him and other favourite pupils in her rickety Renault car to London to attend services at the Russian Orthodox Church. Trips like this, along with her inspiring lectures and tutorials on the history, literature and art of her homeland, began to work a change on Blake. By Christmas he had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the original Russian and, after that, moved swiftly on to Resurrection. He felt he was now developing a real understanding of the Russian people, their customs and traditions: