The Greatest Traitor (20 page)

Gillian Blake, for her part, believed her husband’s ideological switch came some time before Korea: ‘I don’t think his conversion to communism was really in the camp. It was there before . . . I think it was the result of a mixture of a latent feeling he had always had of wanting to better things, and a lack of the substantial background that people have, of family and schools and all that sort of thing, which makes them able to sink back when they see that sort of thing . . . I don’t know, but I don’t think that he’d be switched over in camp like that.’

If the conversion had come much earlier, his experiences in the
war acted as a catalyst in a mind now fixated against his country and Western aggression: ‘I remembered how in Holland, during the war, when I heard at night the heavy drone of RAF planes overhead on their way to bomb Germany, the sound had been like a song to me . . . Now, when I saw the enormous grey hulks of the American bombers sweeping low to drop their deadly load over the small, defenceless, Korean villages huddled against the mountainside, when I saw the villagers, mostly women and children and old people – for the men were all at the front – being machine-gunned as they fled to seek shelter in the fields, I felt nothing but shame and anger.’

Beyond the walls of his farmhouse compound, seismic political and military events were taking place. President Truman and his commanders faced up to the last, great battle for territory in the war – the Chinese ‘Fifth Phase’ or ‘Spring Offensive’. It lasted from 22 April through to 20 May 1951, with three field armies of 700,000 men aiming to encircle and annihilate UN forces in the West. Despite early successes in ferocious battles at Imjin River and Kapyong, the Chinese assault was repulsed by a determined and coordinated rearguard action by troops under the command of General Ridgway, who had replaced MacArthur in April 1951. The Communists were eventually thrown back with appalling casualties and the UN forces recaptured the ‘Kansas-Wyoming Line’, just north of the 38th parallel. A long stalemate now developed which would last until the armistice, two years later. Mao, viewing the huge losses his armies had suffered since the beginning of the year, accepted that the UN forces could not be decisively beaten. Stalin too, watching from the sidelines, had come to much the same conclusion.

Low-level peace talks, ‘strictly military’, with no political content, began between the two delegations at Kaesong on 10 July. Meanwhile in the air, the first ‘Jet War’ was now underway – the one occasion in the Cold War where American and Soviet military forces regularly engaged each other in battle, with the US Sabres and Russian MIG-15s locked in fierce combat.

In August, Blake and his colleagues’ hopes of release were raised when an official from the North Korean Ministry for Foreign Affairs arrived at the farmhouse in Moo Yong Nee. He told them that a message had been received from their families, that they were well and thinking of them. Frustratingly, he had no specific words or details. He then urged the captives to write short messages to their relatives in no more than twenty words and assured them that they would be passed on, via the International Red Cross. Blake tried to cram in as much reassurance about his health and his hopes for a speedy reunion.

For some time the Foreign Office had been making concerted efforts to discover the whereabouts of the captured British nationals and request their release. The quest began in earnest when Sir David Kelly, British Ambassador to Moscow, demanded a meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. Gromyko’s manner was evasive. He told Kelly that, in the first instance, the British Government would be advised to approach the North Koreans directly. In February 1951, Ernest Davies, junior minister at the Foreign Office, somewhat overstated his department’s progress when he reassured the House of Commons: ‘We approached the Chinese Government and the Soviet Government, asking them to use their good offices, and I am glad to say that the Soviet Government are doing so.’

In reality the Soviet Government would make little effort for many months. It did eventually indicate a willingness to play a role as a ‘post box’, transmitting messages to and from Captain Holt and his group, but the reliability of service was poor. Messages went out from the camp, but there’s no evidence that the prisoners actually received any letters from their families.

It is as clear as it reasonably can be that it was in the autumn of 1951 that Blake took the irrevocable step towards which he had been heading, and began actively to betray his country. What remains a matter of contention is how that step was taken – was he actively
recruited by the KGB (then known as the MGB), or did he readily
offer
his services, and choose treachery of his own free will? There are two versions of the story.

In Blake’s account, he made the first move late one evening when everyone else had gone to bed. He went out to relieve himself in the field behind the farmhouse and, on his way back, he stopped off in the guards’ room, where a light was still showing. On opening the door he came across a familiar scene – Commander ‘Fatso’ giving one of his regular, evening political lectures to a group of colleagues: ‘I put my fingers to my lips as I handed him a folded note. He looked at me somewhat surprised, but took it without saying anything. I closed the door and went back to bed.’ Blake says he wrote the note in Russian, and addressed it to the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang. In it, he stated he had ‘something important to communicate which they might find of interest’.

For six weeks Blake says he heard nothing. His note, he claims, sent the Soviet officials in the North Korean capital scurrying to confer with their KGB colleagues in Vladivostok, who then swiftly reported back to Moscow. Then a ‘young, fair Russian, with pleasant, open features’ arrived in Manpo, along with an older man: ‘the chief’, who was clearly his superior. Blake attaches names to neither of them. His account has him interrogated by the older of the two: ‘He was a big, burly man of about forty or forty-five with a pale complexion. What was most remarkable about him was that he was completely bald, so that he looked very like the film actor, Erich von Stroheim, and that, for reasons best known to himself, he wore no socks.’

On that first day, the officer had Blake’s note spread out before him on the table and asked him to explain what information he had to offer. Blake told him that he wanted to offer his services to the Soviet authorities. He explained that although ostensibly a diplomat, a vice-consul at the British legation, in reality he was a spy. ‘I had no indication that they knew I was an SIS officer,’ he recalled. For some time his offer was regarded with the automatic suspicion that all intelligence agencies view ‘walk-ins’. As Blake tells it, his interviews with ‘the
chief’ carried on for several months. Finally, he was told his vetting process was over and that he had been accepted as a Soviet agent. When the right time came, they would activate him.

Blake’s version of events fits neatly into the legend he created for himself and, though it may well be true, appears to bear the tell-tale signs of a KGB propaganda job: the disillusioned Western intelligence operative, scales lifted from his eyes, brought willingly to the Marxist cause by a mixture of personal experience and ideological conviction. There are those in Russia, however, who have always maintained that Soviet intelligence, in the person of 25-year-old Nikolai Andreyevich Loenko, made the decisive move to bring Blake into the KGB ranks, and there are reliable sources which support that view.

In the early 1950s, Moscow Centre was in need of new recruits within the British establishment after its successful Cambridge spy ring had been broken up. Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess – the former knowing he was about to be brought in for questioning by MI5 – had hurriedly left the country on a boat from Southampton on 25 May 1951, subsequently making their way across Europe to the sanctuary of Moscow. The ‘Third Man’ in the group, Kim Philby, was incommunicado as growing suspicion mounted over his allegiances. Indeed, during the autumn, MI5 had formally told him that his relationship with Burgess made him a prime suspect for treachery.

A solution for filling these gaps was proffered to the strategists in the Lubyanka by Loenko, an up-and-coming intelligence officer in Vladivostok. Loenko had joined the KGB in 1944, and naturally concentrated his early intelligence work in neighbouring China and North Korea. Despite his youth, his talent was recognised right from the start; he was part of a Soviet delegation that met Kim Il-Sung and his cabinet in 1948, and he would eventually earn the sobriquet, ‘Lawrence of the Far East’. Ironically, he would have been one of those Soviet officials that Blake had been tasked to ‘turn’ when he first arrived in Seoul. In 1951, the boot would be very firmly on the other foot.

Possessed of a rustic charm and a good sense of humour, young Loenko was not cut from the usual cloth of the Soviet apparatchik: his skills also included a facility for languages, including English. Loenko had become aware of the group of British diplomats, journalists and missionaries being shunted around from camp to camp near the Yalu River. He also knew that the Chinese and North Koreans who ran the camps had offered Soviet intelligence operatives like himself unfettered access to the Western prisoners. He suggested to his masters in Moscow that now was the time for an approach.

Loenko arrived in Manpo under the guise of an ordinary army officer, assuming the name of ‘Grigori Kuzmich’. One by one, the captives, starting with Captain Holt, were asked to accompany their camp commander, ‘Fatso’, on the forty-five minute walk from the farmhouse to the small office Loenko had established in one of the few remaining houses in Manpo. Initially, he probed gently about their views on the war, gave them some propaganda material to read, and asked, very politely, if they would sign a statement condemning the conduct of the United Nations.

As Loenko began to win Blake’s trust, the SIS officer gradually confided in him his revulsion at the Rhee administration, his opposition to the UN action and, in particular, the brutal American military tactics, his growing disillusionment with capitalist society and newfound enthusiasm, via
The Theory of Communism
and
Das Kapital
, for Marxism. The young intelligence officer showed a keen understanding of Blake’s belief system, rooted in his former religious convictions, and offered him an interpretation of the Soviet Union as a country whose goals were not dissimilar to those of Christianity. Paradise on earth instead of paradise in heaven.

Blake may have been ripe for the picking, but it took many meetings over a series of weeks before Loenko felt confident he had his man. Meanwhile the young officer’s superiors back in Moscow remained wary of Blake. They suspected the charming, clever Captain Holt of masterminding a ploy against them and grew extremely cautious once
they learned of Blake’s activities in Hamburg in 1946. He just seemed too good to be true.

Once Blake had, at last, pledged his future to the KGB, he was at great pains to emphasise that he did not want any personal advantages in return for his work; in particular, he made it clear he wanted no money as a reward for his spying on their behalf: ‘I was doing it for a cause.’ While he remained in captivity, he insisted he should have no privileges of any kind, none that would set him aside from his fellow prisoners. This was not just a matter of principle – any extra benefits he received might well alert the suspicions of his companions at the farmhouse.

He told his interlocutors that he would supply all the information he could on SIS operations directed against the Soviet Union, and indeed, the rest of the world Communist movement: ‘My sole aim in all this was to assist in preventing espionage operations from harming the Communist bloc and, more especially, the Soviet Union.’ Over the course of the next few months, the KGB men asked Loenko to put Blake to the test: they wanted the Briton to provide them with full details of the structure and organisation of SIS. Of course they already had this information, thanks to Kim Philby and others, which made it an effective way of proving his sincerity. Eventually, the KGB was satisfied it had a bona fide British intelligence officer on its books. In the absence of Burgess and Maclean, and with Philby’s usefulness coming to an end, Blake was a welcome addition to the Soviets’ roster of moles.

Loenko died in a car crash on 20 September 1976 at the age of fifty. In October 1999 Blake travelled to Vladivostok at the invitation of the Governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko, and the FSB Head, Major-General Sergei Verevkin-Rahalskogo. Older KGB officers often referred to him as ‘Blake’s godfather’, and Blake made a point of visiting the
Morskoye
cemetery to lay flowers at Loenko’s grave.

Whatever the exact truth of Blake’s recruitment, his acceptance into the Communist fold proved to be a moment of enormous relief for him, though it was also one of sharp realisation: there was no
turning back. He was embarking on a lifelong road of deception and treachery: ‘I fully realised I was betraying the trust put in me: I was betraying the allegiance that I owed to Britain, I was betraying my colleagues and friends . . . But I felt it would be wrong to forgo the opportunity of making such a valuable contribution and that was a guilt I should take upon me.’

He slipped effortlessly into this ‘atmosphere of illegality’. Albeit now darker and deeper, such shadowlands had been his natural environment ever since he had worked as a courier in the Dutch underground. More than that, though, spying for the Soviet Union gave him his vocation: ‘It gave a complete sense to life. Having this very important task put every other problem in my life in perspective. Many of the other problems that concern people – marital problems, day-to-day concerns – they didn’t worry me, because they were nothing compared to what I was doing.’

There would no glimmer of an indication in his behaviour as to the change that had taken place. He made sure his fellow captives had no inkling of his very different conversations with Loenko, and he carefully ensured his accounts of discussions with the young officer tallied with theirs.