The Greatest Traitor (3 page)

Yet as reporters began to uncover the other side of George Blake, the quietly brave, charming man beyond the headlines screaming ‘TRAITOR’, one or two of the testimonials hinted at something else. Philip Deane, the Greek-born
Observer
journalist, who, like Herbert Lord, had suffered side by side with Blake in North Korea, said his friend ‘had Walter Mitty dreams, always seeing himself knighted or consecrated bishop for some service to the state or God’. Was this daydreaming merely a harmless, introspective habit, indulged during the long hours suffered in the hothouse psychology of the prison camp? Or had it developed into something more than a dream? A temptation to play the great spy in the secret power play of the Cold War?

Clues as to what had driven Blake’s treachery could be found in Jeremy Hutchinson’s eloquent speech of mitigation, though, at the time, neither the Press or the public were allowed to hear it. His client’s life, the QC said, had been almost wholly forged in the conflicts and upheavals of the twentieth century. From the age of sixteen Blake had known little else but constant clandestine activity, since he immersed himself in ‘war, deprivation, murder and suchlike’. Hutchinson had told the closed court Blake’s extraordinary life story – a story that, to all intents and purposes, was now at an end.

Blake, however, had a final chapter in mind. As he left the Old Bailey that afternoon for Wormwood Scrubs, handcuffed to two prison officers in the back of a small van, he peered out of the window and saw the newspaper vendors carrying placards emblazoned with his photograph and sentence, and he made a vow to himself: he wouldn’t stay in prison until 2003, when he would be 80 years old, whatever it took. Fourteen years he could have accepted, but forty-two appeared vengeful. To paraphrase Marx, he had nothing to lose but his chains.

He would escape.

1

A Question of Identity

G
eorge Blake was born George Behar, in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. His mother Catherine Gertrui (née Beijderwellen) gave birth on 11 November 1922, at 3 p.m. In a life that would be shaped by confused identity and shifting loyalty, what happened next was surely a portent of things to come.

His mother and father discussed what to call their son and had reached an easy decision: two grandfathers on either side of the family were called Jacob, so the baby boy would carry that name in memory of both. But, on leaving his wife and infant son that afternoon to walk to the town hall in Rotterdam to declare the birth, Albert William Behar had time to think, free of family constraints.

It was Armistice Day, just four years after the end of The Great War in which he had fought. Despite his own rather mysterious origins, Albert was then a patriotic Briton: he decided there could be no more appropriate name on that auspicious day than George, in honour of king (George V) and country. The registrar was duly informed.

It was an uncommon name for a Dutch boy, and Albert quickly discovered that his impulsive act was scorned by little George’s
conservative and parodial relatives: instead, they would always prefer to call him by his Dutch nickname, Poek.

A few years later as little George started to read, the first book with which he was presented was the illustrated
Children’s Bible.
Heroes like Abraham and Isaac, David and Saul, and Samson stirred his imagination. But above all, the character he enjoyed most, and with whom he most closely identified, was Jacob – the biblical source of his intended name.

The Behar family home was at 104, Gedempte Botersloot, in Rotterdam, one of the city’s oldest and wealthiest streets. By the time Albert and his family took up residence there it had undergone major development, but without losing its air of affluence. The year after George’s birth the Behars moved into the vacant house next door, No. 102, where there was more space. Their second child, Adele Gertrud, was born there in June 1924, and the family moved soon afterwards to an even bigger residence at 40c Spengensekade, an equally respectable address. There, Catherine gave birth to their second daughter, Elizabeth, in August 1925.

It seemed an entirely conventional middle-class life, but their road to this destination had been a rocky one, and their union was anything but commonplace.

Both sets of parents had frowned upon the relationship. The Beijderwellens were very reluctant to see their daughter marrying a somewhat exotic man whose past seemed cloaked in mystery, however charming he might have been: a Dutchman with solid bourgeois credentials would have been their preference. And the wealthy Behar family, for reasons that would only become clear many years later, warned Albert, quite straightforwardly, that if he married this Dutch girl he would be cut off without a penny.

Catherine Beijderwellen was 26 at the time of her marriage – tall, fair-haired, and vivacious. She came from a conventional, well-established Rotterdam family with deep Protestant roots, although they were actually members of the minority Remonstrant Church. She knew
little about her fiancée. She thought Behar was an English surname and understood that Albert was British, though she knew he had been born in Cairo, and that his family still lived there. His origins did not matter: she was under the spell of this dark, handsome man whose romantic image was only enhanced by shrapnel wounds on his face sustained in the First World War. An unreliable outsider in one light, he was undoubtedly a heroic figure in another.

Albert had constructed a stirring narrative of the life he had lived before meeting Catherine. He claimed to have studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, to have served in the French Foreign Legion, and then, in the First World War, to have won the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Other accounts of his life have even had him serving on Field Marshal Haig’s Intelligence Staff.

Although a good deal of this story had the ring of truth, certain parts were undoubtedly embroidered, and one or two others would later fail to stand up to examination. It only becomes possible to clearly separate fact from fiction in Albert’s life when looking at what he did in the First World War, where his full service record reveals the less glamorous, though no less heroic, experience of an ‘ordinary’ soldier.

Enlisting in France in 1915, he served as a driver and motorcycle despatch rider on the Western Front. He was, indeed, seriously wounded, sustaining a fractured back and skull and contusions to his face and hands. Such injuries certainly resemble the damage that might have been caused by an exploding shell, but his service notes include the word ‘acc’, suggesting that the words were accidentally incurred. Either way, he was evacuated to England for treatment on 25 May 1918. While recovering in hospital in London, he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for gallantry and commendable war service.

Albert’s last posting with what was by then called the Royal Army Service Corps was to Rotterdam, in December 1918. It was early in the following year, as he helped the British Expeditionary Force wind down its wartime operations, that he met Catherine.

Despite unanswered questions about his background and her family’s disapproval, the marriage went ahead. Given their strength of purpose, Albert and Catherine felt they had little choice but to elope and so headed for London, a city Albert knew well after spending time there recuperating after his wartime exploits. The wedding ceremony took place at Chelsea Registry Office on Monday, 16 January 1922. The certificate shows that they both listed 11 Markham Square – just 300 yards away – as their residence at the time of the marriage. Two men named G. Challis and A.J. Grimes – Army colleagues of Albert – were noted as the witnesses.

The Behars’ opposition to that marriage would remain total. They would have little or no contact with their son and his growing family for the next thirteen years. The Beijderwellens, however, were gradually worn down. They were reconciled with Catherine and accepted Albert before George was born.

The new arrival quickly became the subject of great attention from his many aunts and uncles. His favourite companion was Aunt Truss, his mother’s unmarried youngest sister, who held a good job with an established Dutch bank. On long weekend walks, she would regale him with interesting tales of her workplace, skilfully imitating the speech and mannerisms of her colleagues and keeping young George endlessly amused.

Albert, meanwhile, had a secret and meant to keep it. The battle he had fought to persuade Catherine’s parents to accept him was difficult enough, and he felt – almost certainly correctly – that to disclose the nature of his true self to them would still have disastrous consequences. Having listed his religion as Roman Catholic for the British Army, he now promptly declared he was Evangelical Lutheran when registering for citizenship in Rotterdam.

Initially Albert relied on two sources of income to provide a comfortable life for his family. One was his Army pension, but the other – more significant – came from his Turkish railway bonds. Those were rendered worthless, however, when Kemal Atatürk’s government
nationalised the railway industry in 1927. For several years, Albert ran a store selling leather and sports goods down in the Leuvenhaven, one of Rotterdam’s oldest harbours. Then, in 1928, he decided to open a small factory – from the ground floor of his house – making leather gloves for the longshoremen in the port. That venture was barely underway when it was hit hard by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the subsequent worldwide recession. Little work was taking place in the shipyards, and the widespread laying off of workers had a perilous knock-on effect for small businesses like Albert’s.

George’s aunt’s husband, who was a grain dealer, went bankrupt at this time. ‘Like several other ruined and embittered middle-class people my aunt and uncle began to look towards National Socialism for salvation,’ Blake recalled. ‘At home the daily conversation centred around the ups and downs of business, the difficulties of paying creditors, how many people and who should be sacked and kept on, whether there were signs that things were getting better or, on the contrary, worse.’

Albert’s business struggled on even as his health began to deteriorate. He was having difficulties with his lungs, perhaps related to the effects of mustard gas from the battlefields of the First World War. Whatever the reason, the family doctor advised that a move away from smoky, grimy Rotterdam to an environment with cleaner, fresher air might do the patient some good. When, in 1933, an opportunity arose to move to Scheveningen, a pleasant seaside resort not far from The Hague, the Behars eagerly grasped it, settling into a villa at No. 4 Maasstraat, close to the impressive Kurhaus, the luxury hotel and concert venue.

To sit down at the dinner table in the Behar home in the early 1930s would have been an entertaining yet puzzling experience. Albert was fluent in English and French, usually opting to speak the former as he continued to uphold the image he had created of himself as a British entrepreneur. He did not speak Dutch, however, and stubbornly refused to learn the mother tongue of his wife and children. Catherine knew a little English and could communicate well enough
with her husband, but George and his sisters – although just starting to learn both French and English at school – did not share a common language with their father. Albert would effectively remain a stranger in a foreign land, an attitude no doubt partially responsible for the failure of his successive businesses.

To his children he seemed a remote, otherworldly figure. When he was working, he would set off early in the morning and not arrive home in the evenings until after 8 p.m. when they had gone to bed. On Sunday, his only day off, he would usually choose to stay at home and read while George and his sisters would be taken for a walk by their mother and aunt. He left most of the care of his children, material and spiritual, to Catherine, and retreated into the background. When he did turn his attention to them, he invariably spoiled them with spontaneous gifts and presents.

Nonetheless, the young Blake inherited his father’s intellectual curiosity and sense of adventure. When growing up in Rotterdam, he was inspired by the famous statue of one of the city’s notable sons, Erasmus, which he could see from his window. The philosopher is depicted holding a book, and George was assured he would turn a page each time the clock on the nearby church struck the hour. The little boy believed the story and spent much time pleasantly anticipating the event.

As well as reading – he particularly enjoyed stories from the Bible, and books on Dutch history – George’s imagination was stirred by thoughts of life in foreign lands. He would spend many hours on his own wandering the quayside at the port of Rotterdam, watching the ships come in from all over the world and observing the diverse cargo being unloaded – timber from Russia, spices from India, coffee from Brazil.

Dina Regoort, a long-serving maid to the Behar family, remembered him as a quiet, polite, somewhat solitary boy. ‘I always felt he was apart and rather sad,’ she said. ‘He had no friends of his own age, and he did not play with his schoolmates or other boys.’

Instead he preferred to act out games of fantasy in his own home, often persuading his reluctant sisters Adele and Elizabeth to join him. One family snapshot of the time shows him in Arab dress, another in the guise of an admiral. In one game, dressed in an old black gown belonging to his grandmother, he would be a minister of the church addressing his congregation (his sisters). In another, he would place an old black hat on his head and pretend to be the judge presiding over a courtroom. Dina would often be called upon to play the prisoner in the dock – more often than not accused of serious crimes.

In 1935, Albert Behar’s failing health took a turn for the worse. Lung cancer was diagnosed and, after a period of many months confined to his bed at home, he was transferred to a hospital in The Hague. George, who was in his first year at the municipal Gymnasium, went to see his father every day after school. One particular visit left an abiding and disquieting memory.