The Greatest Traitor (11 page)

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 started 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:

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.’