The Greatest Traitor (21 page)

Another young KGB officer appeared on the scene a few weeks later to aid Loenko – Vasily Alekseevich Dozhdalev, aged thirty, who had just started working out of the London office. Loenko had done all the spadework, but Dozhdalev would ultimately be the one to enjoy a long and fruitful acquaintance with Blake.

In early 1952, the peace talks at Panmunjom looked to be close to securing agreement, but the dispute over the return of prisoners of war remained a major obstacle and the conflict continued – a slow, grinding affair of low-level attrition on the ground.

Back at the farmhouse, in March, Blake and his companions were able to leave the courtyard for the first time in over a year to take supervised walks in the countryside. Little else had changed, however.
Norman Owen kept a diary on the wall and, in the first six months of 1952, there were just fifteen entries: eight of them read ‘barber came’, while four said ‘cigarettes issued’.

In those long, uneventful months when the conversations drifted away from history, philosophy and art, they invariably moved on to food. They had enough to eat now, but remained obsessed by the subject. ‘We were also frequently plagued by frustrating food dreams,’ Blake recalled. ‘We would find ourselves in a pastry shop with all kinds of delicious cakes, or a restaurant with tables piled high with food. All this disappeared just when we had great difficulty making up our minds what we were going to have, and were ready to start eating.’

The relationships with the villagers who came to the farmhouse grew closer. The guards believed servants should be kept in their place and treated the prisoners’ cook and her little daughter particularly badly. The woman and her child, a 3-year-old girl named Yong Sukee, were made to take their meals in a draughty, freezing outhouse. As the weather worsened in the winter of 1952, the child grew increasingly unhappy. The captives therefore ‘adopted’ Yong Sukee, taking her into the house, making her clothes and keeping her warm. ‘Owen, an expert father, was in charge during emergencies, when soothing or restraining was needed,’ recalled Deane. ‘At other times she played with the rest of us, especially with Blake, who was the most patient and who she regarded as her father. She learnt a few words of English, gave us nicknames, and dominated much of our existence.’

Owen’s wall chart for the year contained just two more entries in the final five months. The captives had now been together for over two years, and, even in this group of compelling conversationalists, the stories were starting to dry up. Fragmentary news about the war suggested peace was still a long way off and provided little reason for optimism that the monotony would end soon.

It took changes at the top in Washington and Moscow to start to break the deadlock. In November 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe in
World War II, won the American presidency after a landslide election victory over the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower made it clear his first priority as President would be to end the war but he was determined not to do so from any position that could be construed as weak. To that end, the successful testing in January of the first surface-to-surface rocket for carrying nuclear weapons – dubbed ‘Honest John’ – gave the US the upper hand. The Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that ‘the timely use of atomic weapons should be considered against military targets affecting operations in Korea’.

Equally crucial for the prospect of peace was the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. The dictator had continually placed impediments on negotiations, believing the inevitable compromise would damage Communist standing and free the West from the huge burden on its resources that the war had entailed. The first sign that things might be about to change in the camp was when Stalin’s picture, which had taken pride of place in the guardroom, quickly disappeared a day or so after the announcement of his death.

On the morning of Friday, 20 March, while the captives were talking their usual morning walk round the courtyard, the British inmates were ushered back into the farmhouse and told to get their belongings together. Soon afterwards, they were in the back of an open lorry and on their way to Pyongyang. They were taking their first steps to freedom, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the new Conservative Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.

Eden had been ‘greatly troubled’ by the continued imprisonment of Holt and his party. Ever since coming into office in October 1951, he had tried all manner of means to secure their release, including approaches to more sympathetic Communist powers, all to no avail. One weekend in February he decided to make another attempt through the Soviet Ambassador, Andrei Gromyko. Eden thought he detected indications from the Soviet government that, with the departure of Stalin, they were interested in developing better relations.
‘This might be turned to good account, but I was not sanguine,’ he reflected. Gromyko was called to the Foreign Office, where Eden charmed and cajoled him in equal measure.

I gave him an
aide-memoire
setting out the facts and pointed out that these people, who were civilians, had been detained for a very long time.

Though the Soviet Government had maintained that this was not a matter of direct concern to them, they had been good enough on one or two occasions to transmit messages and I appealed to Mr Gromyko to do what he could to secure the release of these unfortunate people.

At first, Gromyko stuck to the standard position: his Government ‘had no responsibility in this matter’ and, as far as he knew, nothing had changed. But Eden’s argument that he could – and should – exert more pressure on the North Koreans eventually drew a pledge from Gromyko that he would talk to his government in Moscow and see what he could do.

Six weeks later, to Eden’s surprise and delight, ‘the oracle worked’. The Soviet authorities in Moscow came back with a complete list of the captured British subjects. It was the first time for many months that their existence, let alone their well-being, had been confirmed. Just days later, the Soviet
Chargé d’Affaires
, in the absence of Gromyko, gave Eden’s junior minister Selwyn Lloyd an assurance that the prisoners would shortly be freed.

In Pyongyang, the captives were put up in a mountain cave for several days to shelter from American air attacks, which were still taking place several times a day. There, confirmation of their new status came in the form of a sumptuous breakfast served to them by no less than a brigadier. As they tucked into caviar, butter, ham, eggs, spaghetti and petit-beurre biscuits, they reflected on the time when a mere sergeant
had beaten them with the butt of a rifle. The VIP treatment continued as they were shaved, given fresh underclothes and newly laundered shirts, and, before long, visited by a tailor, who measured them for suits and overcoats. A cinema operator even appeared with a selection of films for them to watch, including such socialist realist classics as
Knight of the Golden Star
,
Glinka
and
Happy Market
, as well as some delightful sequences of the prima ballerina Galina Ulanova.

The representative of the
Labour Journal
, the
Pravda
of North Korea, came to interview them on the evening of Friday, 7 April, in a final, unsuccessful effort to extract some propaganda value. Diplomats and journalists alike played a straight bat to a barrage of questions.

The following morning they were finally on their way, climbing onto a lorry together with two officers and four soldiers before being driven along the Pyongyang-Antung road to the Chinese frontier.

Deane had been worried that the North Korean customs officers would take away the notes he had made while in captivity, so he had sown the valuable papers into pads, which he then strapped around his calves. As a diversionary tactic, he kept a much larger body of material to which he was not especially attached on plain view in his bag. When the customs men said they were confiscating it, he made a great play of being furious and insisting that it should eventually be posted on to his home in England. The tactic worked, and he crossed the Korean-Manchurian border on 9 April with all his writings intact, ready to be turned into a vivid account of his captivity.

‘King Paul of Greece was right,’ Blake reminded Deane of a dream the journalist had had, as they finally left Korea after thirty-four months as prisoners. ‘You’ve been freed before the tenth.’

10

Hero

O
n their first night of freedom in a hotel in the Chinese border town of Antung, Blake and his colleagues celebrated in a communal bath with lusty renditions of hymns and nursery rhymes. The privations of the past three years were forgotten as they revelled in the everyday pleasures of scented soap and freshly laundered towels.

The conditions of luxury continued the next day as their Trans-Manchurian Express train progressed steadily towards the Soviet border. In their special carriage, attentive waiters served them chicken and caviar, and they slept in huge, beautifully decorated cabins. Once they had arrived at Mukden (now Shenyang) and were settled in the best establishment in the city, they were allocated rooms with private bathrooms, and, in the panelled private dining room, the chef offered to cook any kind of food they wanted.

On Monday, 13 April 1953, the party arrived at the Soviet border town of Otpor (now Zabaikalsk). Here, Blake had business to conduct: he was to meet up with a new KGB contact, who would also be on the train that would take his group on the 6,500-mile final leg of their journey, to Moscow. As in Manpo, the meeting was carefully planned
so that none of Blake’s companions would suspect anything untoward. One by one, the former captives were taken to the customs house at Otpor, where they were met by officials, asked a few cursory questions, and then made to fill in a form. When it was Blake’s turn, he was escorted to a small room at the back of the building, where he met his new case officer, Nikolai Borisovich Rodin, an experienced intelligence operative who was just completing his term as KGB
rezident
at the Soviet Embassy in London.

Blake’s recollection is that it was a business-like, rather brusque meeting: ‘He didn’t introduce himself, but simply said that in future we would be working together. Without losing any time he began to discuss plans for our first clandestine meeting.’ The two men agreed upon a time and a place in July, in The Hague. The venue was Blake’s suggestion. He told Rodin he would feel more confident on home turf, and far better placed to react if anything went wrong. Both would carry a copy of the previous day’s
Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant
under their arm, as a sign that all was well. With that settled, Rodin allowed Blake to rejoin his colleagues. He told him that he would be occupying a compartment three doors along, and that if Blake had the chance to slip away without raising any suspicions, they could talk again. Moreover, he instructed him not to take any risks.

In the event, although Blake and Rodin passed each other in the corridor from time to time, they did not have a further meeting. The week that followed was spent mainly in the restaurant car, where abundant quantities of caviar and vodka were thrust upon the former prisoners. Finally, dazed, overfed and astounded at the turnaround in their fortunes, they arrived in the Soviet capital on Monday, 20 April. They were greeted on arrival at Kazan station by the British Ambassador, Sir Alvary Trench-Gascoigne, and his staff, who later royally entertained them over dinner.

The following morning, an RAF Hastings plane flew them to Gatow airfield in West Berlin. There, they were greeted by Major General Charles Coleman, Commandant of the British Sector in the city;
various embassy staff and other officials, and a large contingent of press correspondents and photographers.

Blake and his colleagues had been instructed to be extremely cautious in their dealings with a naturally eager and curious media. They were told to say as little as possible about the conditions in which they had been kept in North Korea because criticism might endanger the position of other internees yet to be released. The reporters noted that the men were all shabbily dressed, in ill-fitting clothes that had clearly been given to them just before their release. ‘All were sunburned and looked relatively well, although the faces of some bore the marks of their suffering,’ observed the man from
The Times.

Among the press corps was none other than Charles Wheeler, Blake’s colleague back in Hamburg in the spring of 1946. Now Wheeler was employed by the BBC, as a correspondent for the Corporation’s German language service. His encounter with his old colleague that day left him perplexed: ‘I went to meet the incoming internees at the airport – it was a good story, obviously. In the midst of this large welcoming party I walked up to George, who had his back to me, and I said, “Hello George”. He turned round and saw me, and jumped about a foot in the air and went pale . . . I told him I was now living and working in Berlin, and asked him to come and have a drink with me in the evening. “I shan’t have time, I shan’t have time,” he replied hurriedly, and I was surprised at this, because although we were never close friends, I must have been the only person in Berlin he knew.’

In later years, as events unfolded, Wheeler reflected on Blake’s behaviour that day; ‘He certainly wasn’t pleased to see me. He didn’t know I was a journalist – perhaps he thought I was a security man.’

Captain Holt and Bishop Cooper spent the night at Commandant Coleman’s residence, whereas Blake and the rest bedded down in the officers’ mess at Gatow. The following morning, Wednesday, 22 April, they boarded the De Havilland Hastings aircraft once more for the return to British soil.

Finally, on a glorious spring morning, Blake and his companions
touched down at the Abingdon RAF station in Oxfordshire. A Salvation Army band, led by Commissioner John Allan, struck up the well-known doxology ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’ as the internees appeared on the gangway. First down the steps was Holt, quickly followed by Owen, Lord and then Blake. The Pathé News commentary of the event refers to ‘George Blake, of the Seoul legation staff’, and then – less forgivably – says he was greeted by his wife. In fact, it was his mother Catherine, right at the front of the crowd, who hugged and kissed him the moment he left the steps.