The Greatest Traitor (28 page)

Blake has strenuously denied having anything to do with Bialek’s kidnapping and, in a court of law, the prosecution would be extremely hard pressed to win a conviction against him. Nonetheless, SIS did know all about Bialek, and the Service was one of the first on the scene after his defection, finding out what he knew and how he might be able to assist it. Although he never became one of its agents, SIS would have been aware of the arrangements for his security and his movements. Blake and Bialek would not necessarily have crossed each other’s paths on Platanenalle, where they both lived for a month in the spring of 1955, but it seems inconceivable that Blake would not have taken an interest in this highest of high-profile defectors. Nor is it unlikely that his masters at Karlshorst would have asked him for some information on their target, with the intention of passing it to the Stasi. Charles Wheeler, who knew Bialek and the BBC producers who worked with him, always suspected that intelligence supplied by Blake may have led the defector’s kidnappers to him.

Aside from the human casualties of his treachery, and the Berlin tunnel, Blake also betrayed various other technical operations in which SIS and the CIA were engaged. He alerted his Soviet handlers to the eavesdropping on the Yugoslav military mission, and the bugging of their Polish equivalent.

Ted Shackley, the CIA’s Chief of Satellite Operations in Berlin,
recalled how the agency was keen to listen in when a new man, Wūadysūaw Tykocinski, an experienced Polish Foreign Service officer, arrived to take up his post. The opportunity arose because the Polish mission was looking to move to a new building. CIA officers got in touch with Berlin estate agents and brokers to make sure that the Poles were steered towards buying a spacious villa in the Charlottenburg district. Before they could move in, the CIA had bugged it from top to bottom. When Tykocinski settled in, senior politicians paid court, as did Poles who came to East Berlin on business. ‘All of them talked, and Tykocinski himself talked the most, making a point of briefing his staff on developments at home and the substance of the cable traffic that was coming in from Moscow. It was a goldmine,’ was Shackley’s assessment. Then, a few weeks later, a counter-intelligence sweep team were heard looking for, and finding, hidden microphones. The game was up.

Shackley knew there had been a leak and later discovered who was to blame: ‘It was Blake who had closed our goldmine. Apparently he had overheard two SIS staffers chatting about it in their Berlin headquarters and had picked up just enough of their conversation to enable him to tell his Soviet handler that an operation was in progress against an unidentified Polish installation in West Berlin.’

Blake had clearly performed well for the KGB in Berlin, but he also managed to keep his official employers satisfied at the same time. Running a major Soviet agent, someone in a position of real clout in the political or economic sphere, had proved well nigh impossible for most of his colleagues but, somehow, Blake managed to reel in a top catch. His source in the upper echelons of Soviet government was ‘Boris’, an economist working for Comecon, the economic organisation that linked all the Communist countries. He also happened to be a senior interpreter at all top-level Soviet negotiations on economic matters, so he would routinely accompany senior Kremlin personnel and pick up much sensitive political information. Blake recalled SIS’s delight: ‘They thought he represented a source of great promise and should be carefully cultivated. Though
he was not “our man in the Kremlin” yet, there was a good prospect that he might become one.’

Boris was, of course, a plant, put in place by Blake’s KGB masters to impress SIS and the CIA and enhance his growing reputation.

The recruitment of Boris was carefully staged. One of Blake’s regular agents, Horst Eitner, otherwise known as ‘Mickey’, had secured a job as an assistant in a clothes shop called Semel on Badstrasse, in the Wedding district of West Berlin. This traditional working-class area lay in the French Sector, close to the sector boundary, and was known as ‘Red Wedding’ because of its Communist sympathies in the 1920s and 30s. It had been heavily bombed in the war and much of its housing destroyed and, in the wake of that devastation, a business community arose that veered from the vibrant to the seamy, with hard-working local traders being joined by spivs, prostitutes and chancers of every kind in one big, teeming settlement of shops and shacks.

There was dirt on the streets of Wedding, but there was glitter too. It attracted its fair share of visitors from the Soviet sector, looking for attractive items at reasonable prices. One of those who turned up at Semel one day was Boris, who told Mickey he was looking for a fur-lined wind jacket. When Mickey told Blake about this interesting Russian, Blake instructed his agent to buy a good-quality jacket from one of the best men’s shops on the Kurfürstendamn and sell it to Boris at half the price. Boris was pleased with his purchase and next showed an interest in buying a Swiss watch for his wife. When Boris said he could not afford the watch (at a deliberately-inflated price set by Mickey), the agent said he could pay by other means. Could Boris supply a dozen pots of caviar, because he knew he had a friend who was interested in buying the delicacy? The deal was struck.

The friend who wanted the caviar was, of course, Blake, and Mickey contrived a meeting between the two men in his flat on Wielandstrasse. There, over liberal amounts of wine and brandy, Boris told Blake about his job, while Blake – who gave his name as de Vries, his wartime resistance pseudonym – explained that he was a Dutch journalist,
the correspondent on a newspaper in Berlin. The two men got on well, and Boris readily accepted Blake’s invitation to meet again the following week at a nightclub. It was the start of a profitable working relationship that would last for several years.

Boris had been primed to co-operate with this ‘Dutch journalist’ by the KGB, but – according to Blake – he only realised that the other man was in fact a Soviet agent working in SIS when he picked up a newspaper and read about Blake’s trial in 1961. ‘Though, ostensibly, the luxury articles which I obtained for him were in exchange for the caviar he continued to bring me, it was well understood between us that what I was really interested in was the information he was in a position to supply,’ Blake explained. ‘He apparently accepted my explanation that I needed it as background material and my assurance that nothing he told me would ever be published by my newspaper.’

In the way of these counter-intelligence schemes, some of the intelligence Boris supplied to Blake was genuine, in order to build up his credentials as an important recruit back at SIS headquarters in Broadway. Excited by Blake’s reports, Whitehall sought ever more detail from this excellent source. They would instruct Blake to ask Boris specific questions on burning questions of the moment and, on nearly every occasion, the ‘plant’ responded with the required information. Thus the KGB believed fulfilled two objectives. One, to raise the stock of their prize agent in the eyes of his superiors at SIS; the second, through the misleading material Boris fed Blake, to deceive the West about the true state of the Soviet economy and so influence policy-making. It was one of many sources of information that helped to obscure the fundamental truth about the economies of the Eastern Bloc – that they were inherently weak and structurally unsound. Had that been known in the late 1950s, the Cold War might, for good or ill, have ended much sooner than it did.

Horst Eitner, the SIS agent who brought Blake and Boris together, was typical of the cast of colourful characters who threw themselves into
the city’s espionage world, but for whom loyalty always came with a price tag. He was a major figure in Blake’s ‘legitimate’ spy work during his time in Berlin but, as it turned out, would also have a prominent role to play in his eventual downfall.

Eitner actually began his espionage career with the Gehlen Organisation (forerunners of the BND) in 1951. Reinhard Gehlen, a former general in the German Army and a spymaster for Hitler, was not shy of recruiting ex-Nazis, employing hundreds of them like Eitner, who had emerged from the Allied prison camps after 1945. He was trained at one of Gehlen’s spy schools at Bad Worishofen but, as time went on, and as a German who felt resentment at both East and West for the occupation of his country, he increasingly saw Gehlen as a mere appendix of the CIA. More importantly, the payments received for his work were poor and often slow to arrive. Some ‘business’ friends of his had contacts with SIS, to whom he transferred his allegiance at the end of 1953. There, he was run by two officers, known only to him as ‘Peter’ and ‘Peter 2’, before Blake inherited him at the beginning of 1957. Blake resurrected his cover name from his Dutch resistance days, ‘Max de Vries’, for his dealings with Eitner. What Blake did not know, at the time he first met Eitner, was that ‘Mickey’ was also working for the Russians.

He had been approached towards the end of 1956, not by the KGB, but by the GRU – Soviet Military Intelligence. From SIS, he received a regular monthly wage of 250DM, which would sometimes rise to 400DM, with bonuses for successful jobs. When the Russians came calling, he asked for 500DM a month and his request was readily accepted. As well as paying more generously, the Soviets proved less demanding than the British: whether his reports were good or bad, he would almost invariably receive his 500DM each month. Eitner had a wife, Brigitte, and three young children to support; he also sent payments to his parents in Cottbus. His flat on Wielandstrasse did not come cheap. In addition, he also had extravagant tastes and an expensive drinking habit.

They were an odd couple, Blake and Eitner. Blake was cool,
calculating, cerebral and restrained in his behaviour; Eitner was an earthy, boisterous extrovert, a carouser and a womaniser. Although each man used the other coldly for his own ends, these polar opposites worked together effectively, and even enjoyed each other’s company. ‘The reason for the nickname [Mickey] was obvious the moment one saw him,’ Blake wrote. ‘He bore a strong resemblance to Mickey Mouse. He was small, agile, with bandy legs and large ears. If the expression on his face had been less than cheerful, it might have been called rat-like.’

Just to complicate matters for Blake, Eitner’s wife was also doing occasional shifts as a Russian spy, having previously been in trouble with the Soviet authorities for spying on behalf of the CIA. She acted principally as a courier between the GRU and her husband. A pretty, vivacious, highly-strung Polish woman, she was fond of ‘Max’, who would bring her small presents to cheer her up: ‘He was a charming man and very good company. He liked to tell us stories about his time in the British Navy in which, he told us, he’d served as an officer during the war. But Max could be moody, too, you know. One minute he was gay and laughing, and suddenly he would turn very serious and dry up.’

Eitner had no idea Blake was working for the Soviets; but Blake eventually learned of the German’s identity as a double agent. His handler, ‘Dick’, revealed the truth about a year after Blake had started running Eitner: ‘I thought the recruitment by them pretty pointless, but as a sister organisation was involved, it was apparently very difficult to do anything about it. On the other hand, it did not seem to matter very much and so it was left at that.’

The partnership endured until April 1959 when Blake finished his tour of duty and another SIS officer, known to Eitner as ‘Temple’, replaced him, but he had not heard the last of Mickey. An episode on the evening of Sunday, 16 October 1960 would spark off a chain of events that would once more draw them together. The consequences for both would be calamitous.

13

Discovery

A
t just after 1 p.m. on Sunday, 22 April 1956, East German engineers peered through a hole in the wall they had just dug and were able to take their first look down the length of the Berlin tunnel. They were amazed by what they saw: ‘Man, look at this . . . it goes all the way under the street . . . it’s fantastic!’ Their surprise and appreciation of the sheer technical excellence of the underground listening post was completely genuine, unlike the mock outrage about to be expressed by their political masters in Karlshorst and the Kremlin.

Yevgeny Petrovich Pitovranov, chief of the KGB in Berlin, Ivan Serov, overall Chief of the organisation and Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party, had all known about the tunnel and had finally come to a joint decision to stage its discovery on that April weekend.

The tunnel had lasted eleven months and eleven days. For nearly all of that time, this elite group at the very top of the Soviet political and intelligence establishment had been aware of its existence, even before the first sod had been dug from the ground. George Blake, their mole at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, had provided them with full details as far back as February 1954.

Khrushchev, under pressure from his critics at home and abroad, was looking for a tough gesture with which to appease the old guard in the Kremlin and retain their support. Abroad, he was irritated that two of his measures for easing Cold War tensions – the withdrawal of troops from Austria, and Soviet recognition of West Germany – had not prompted any reciprocal gestures from the West. The ‘discovery’ of the Berlin tunnel, and the chance to castigate the underhand West for its ‘nest of spies’, provided the propaganda coup for which he had been looking.

Blake was warned by Sergei Kondrashev some days in advance that the tunnel was about to be ‘blown’ but it was still a period of great worry for him: ‘I had naturally been watching these developments, which I knew were about to occur, with some anxiety, on the alert for any signs of suspicion on the part of SIS or the CIA that the Soviets might have been forewarned.’

As it happened, the unusually bad spring weather offered the Soviet planners the cover they had been looking for to stage an accidental find. Heavy rains had begun shorting out the long-distance cables, so the Karlshorst signals team had a legitimate reason for descending on Schönefelder Chausee beneath which the taps had been placed.