The Greatest Traitor (30 page)

This apparently carefree, young married life inevitably slowed down when their first child, Anthony, was born in the Military Hospital in Berlin in 1957. The Blakes drove back to England via Holland to have him christened at St Michael’s Church, Chester Square, close to where Gillian’s parents were living.

Blake seemed content to let Gillian make nearly all the decisions about Anthony’s future – and that of James, who would follow in 1959: ‘I was pressing for an education policy, and my point was that, as we would be travelling around and going abroad continually, it would be far better to give them a boarding school education. George rather fobbed it off, saying “Oh, well, in ten years’ time we’ll all be going to state schools anyway, and what’s wrong with that?” But he didn’t push the issue, and to keep me happy he let me put Anthony – and then James – down for Rugby, where my brother had been.’

Despite all outward appearances, Blake was starting to feel the enormous pressure of his double life, particularly now with the birth of his first child. He wondered if there was any way out of the web in which he had become entangled: ‘This contradiction in my life became even greater and an increasing strain on me. Here I was, building with one hand a happy family life with its roots firmly attached to this country, and with the other hand I was pulling the foundations from underneath it so that it might crumble any moment.’ His high-minded idealism, his secret dedication to the Soviet cause remained, but the will to sustain his treachery was faltering.

In the autumn of 1958, an exit strategy presented itself. His superiors in Broadway suggested he should leave Berlin the following spring, spend a short time in London, and then go to the Lebanon to learn Arabic at MECAS (the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies), a language school in Shemlan for diplomats, businessmen and intelligence officers. Blake was delighted at the prospect: ‘I saw in this an opportunity to bring the work to an early end, and it would give me the opportunity to think of a permanent way out, possibly by trying to get, through my knowledge of Arabic, a good job in an oil company.’

It was in good spirits that he returned to England with his wife and child in April 1959. He was out of the Berlin shadowlands, free of the perpetual stress and responsibility of dealing with the likes of Horst Eitner and Boris, free of juggling his two lives ever more precariously. Gillian, too, welcomed the move: ‘We didn’t mind staying out there quite so long, but we were both happy to come home when we were eventually posted.’ With much relief, Blake resumed work in Broadway on 12 April, on a junior desk dealing with Lebanon and Jordan, where he could gradually ready himself for his posting to MECAS in the autumn.

Within weeks, all hopes of extracting himself from his duplicitous existence had been dashed. The obstacle came in the shape of Robert Dawson, who had been Head of one of SIS’s sub-stations in Berlin, and was most impressed by Blake’s work there. The avuncular Dawson, who
had run a happy ship in Berlin, was back in London and had taken over a department called Directorate of Production 4 (DP 4), dealing in Russian affairs. He wanted to recruit the best and the brightest, and asked for Blake, who was desperately disappointed. Though he protested as far as he felt able, Dawson was adamant he needed him and ultimately had his way. Blake did, however, manage to extract the concession from the personnel department that the appointment was only temporary and that he would be on his way to the Lebanon in October 1960.

On 15 June, after just two months immersing himself happily in the Middle East, Blake was back on the same old beat, concentrating once more on intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, but this time on home soil. An example of the kind of work he undertook was recorded by one of his targets.

One day in the winter of 1959, a 23-year-old undergraduate was in his rooms at Merton College, Oxford, studying for what he hoped would be a First Class degree in Oriental Studies, when there was a knock on the door. The student was Oliver Miles and the man he ushered into his living room introduced himself as George Amis. Miles had been expecting the visit, as Amis had rung some days earlier to ask if he might stop by. It quickly became evident to Miles what Amis’s business was, although the other man never spelled it out in so many words.

He said he was from the Ministry of Defence, and that his job was to keep an eye on Russian students in British universities and make sure they weren’t getting up to anything they shouldn’t be getting up to.

He went on, ‘I understand you know some of the Russians who are here as undergraduates. Would you be willing to keep track of what they’re doing, and contact the authorities if you think they’re up to anything suspicious?’

Miles realised Amis must know all about his background. He had learned Russian during his National Service in the Navy and when he came up to Oxford in 1956, got involved in various Russian-related activities, including travelling to Moscow on an exchange visit in 1958. ‘Although at the time I was convinced of the wickedness of the Soviet system, I told Amis I was not terribly keen on becoming an unpaid spy,’ Miles recalled. ‘This was my final year reading very difficult subjects, Arabic and Turkish, and I was concentrating all my energies on that, so there wasn’t a lot I felt I could do for him. He was very sympathetic and left me alone.’

Amis, however, continued to contact Miles from time to time while he was still at Oxford: ‘I told him I was hoping to pursue a career in the Foreign Office. He asked if I’d be interested in having my name put forward for a “sister service”. I said I’d heard about that, but I really wanted to get through the front door rather than the back, so to speak, and we left it at that.’

‘George Amis’ was, of course, Blake. He had tried and failed to recruit a young man who would go on to become one of Britain’s leading diplomats, his posts including Ambassador to Libya, Ambassador to Luxembourg, and Ambassador to Greece. Their paths would soon cross again, in Shemlan in October, where they were both on secondment – one from the Foreign Office, the other from SIS – to improve their Arabic. Even years later, the long shadow of Blake’s treachery would also fall on Miles: he was refused a post in Moscow purely and simply because of these few passing encounters with Blake.

Students, dons, businessmen, scientists, people in the world of art – Blake attempted to recruit anyone who, in one way or another, was in direct contact with Soviet citizens. In the late 1950s this could be achieved more easily than the image of a world divided by the Iron Curtain might suggest. This was the era of Khrushchev’s ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West, when contacts with the Eastern Bloc countries opened up a little and there was a flow, or at least a trickle, of visitors back and forth between Britain and the Soviet Union.
There had previously been a clear rule that SIS should not carry out intelligence on British soil as that had always been the preserve of the Security Service, MI5. Such strict territorialism was abandoned in order to exploit the opportunities available in the more relaxed environment. SIS could now run agents at home.

Blake’s immediate boss was Arthur Temple ‘Dicky’ Franks, a gifted, energetic intelligence officer who, twenty years later, would rise to the very top of SIS as Chief. As Blake recalled: ‘His trim figure had something boyish and, with his glistening, rimless glasses, slightly too large head and snap reactions, he reminded me irresistibly as the brightest boy in the class.’ Franks and a small team worked at recruiting agents within large companies and newspapers, cultivating the chairmen and managing directors of such firms in particular.

One of Blake’s more interesting tasks was the setting up of the Anglo-Russian Interpretation Agency, which had offices in Queen’s House, off Leicester Square. It was entirely an SIS front organisation. Two ‘White’ Russians, with established links to SIS, were its directors, and the whole of the staff worked for the Service. ‘In this way,’ Blake recalled, ‘SIS was able, in time, to have its agents attached, in the guise of interpreters, to almost every Soviet visitor of interest and send them to the Soviet Union with British delegations of every kind.’ Blake betrayed them, of course, passing the full details of the front to two of his oldest case officers who were now back in London – Vasily Dozhdalev, whom he had met in Korea, and Nikolai Rodin, the ‘old hand’ he had first met in Otpor.

Blake relished the company of the younger man, who would remain a good friend in future years: ‘He had a much more cheerful disposition and looked typically English so that if he didn’t open his mouth, nobody would have dreamt of taking him as a foreigner.’ For his part, Dozhdalev was delighted to be working in London again. ‘A superb city from the point of view of intelligence,’ he reckoned. ‘It is a haystack where a person is like a needle. And you will never find him there.’

As they strolled through the quiet streets of the city’s northern suburbs, Blake was also able to inform Dozhdalev of other, shadier SIS activities in London, such as the proposed bugging of the Moscow Narodny Bank in Moorgate: ‘It was at its planning stage. George told us what people SIS had selected to install the technology and so on, so we have plenty of time to prepare for it and, by using various means, quietly prevent them from implementing it.’ Not that all the clerks and managers in the Moscow Narodny Bank were bona fide bank officials. There was usually a spy or two among them, and a number of its employees were thrown out of the country in 1971 as part of Prime Minister Edward Heath’s mass expulsion of over a hundred agents.

The darker arts of espionage within SIS were left to the Special Political Action Section (SPA). Set up in 1953, the short-lived SPA specialised in ‘black’ propaganda: influencing elections, even occasionally helping to overthrow leaders, as in Operation Boot that removed the Iranian leader, Mohammad Mossadeq. This was retribution for Mossadeq’s nationalisation of the country’s oil industry, under British control since 1913. SPA was known within Broadway as the ‘jolly fun tricks department’. Among those tricks, Blake was able to tell the KGB about Operation Lyautey, a scheme designed by SPA to gather political and personal information on Soviet officials with a view to blackmailing them. It was always intended as a long-term operation, hence the decision by some wag in Broadway to name it after the great French Marshall Hubert Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree for shade. The gardener objected, saying that it would not reach maturity for a hundred years, to which the Marshall replied: ‘In that case, there is no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon.’

After living with her parents in Chester Row for a short while on their return from Berlin, the Blakes moved out into the suburbs, to Bickley in Kent. There, they took a top-floor flat in Lauriston House, on Bickley Park Road, a large mansion that for many years had been the home of Lewis Wigram of the well-known shipping and brewing family.

In the morning, Blake’s routine was to read the papers in bed, shave, and sit down to breakfast at 8.30. He would leave the house half an hour later, allowing plenty of time to catch the 9.17 from Bickley station to Victoria. At the age of thirty-seven, to any casual onlooker, Blake would have appeared the archetypal commuting civil servant, minus bowler hat, which he disdained to wear despite Gillian’s prompting. Invariably he would be dressed in a ‘dark grey, heavy flannel suit, with a soft collar (he couldn’t wear stiff ones – again, a legacy of Korea)’ and carrying an umbrella. He would get to his new offices at Artillery Mansions, Victoria Street, by 10 a.m. For the return journey, the 6.24 would get him home just after 7 p.m. For his KGB work, he might occasionally take the earlier train, the 6.18, which took him into Bromley South station. There, or in a nearby street, he might have a brief encounter with Dozhdalev, handing over some film from his Minox camera under cover of a folded newspaper. He would then pick up the next train to Bickley, perhaps arriving home just after 7.30.

The couple’s second son, James, was born soon after their return from Germany. ‘George loved playing with the children. In London he didn’t get back in time in the evening to see them – they were too small,’ recalled Gillian. ‘But he loved taking Anthony, when he was old enough, on little expeditions. They would go up on the train to Victoria, with nothing particular to do. They would go up to town and do something and come back down, because Anthony loved to go on trains.’ When Anthony was a little older, encouraged by his father, he started to develop a love of churches. He was drawn to the sound of the bells and the music of Bach. Father and son would go on little expeditions to the prettier churches in Kent.

After the disappointment of being denied a posting in the Middle East, Blake had adjusted to his temporary grounding in London. His home life was fulfilling and he was settled enough at work, so he was content to bide his time. This mood of well-being was abruptly shattered in November 1959, when his boss in DP 4, Robert Dawson, requested that he stay in the section for a further three years. Blake
was distraught: ‘I refused to stay, and said that if he insisted I would resign from the Service. When the Personnel Department realised how strongly I felt about this they agreed to abide by their original promise, to let me go to the Lebanon in September 1960.’

When Blake eventually informed Rodin and Dozhdalev about his move to this Cold War backwater, he was somewhat economical with the truth: ‘In reporting my new appointment to the Russians I did not say it was my own choice that I’d been sent to the Lebanon, but that this was a decision of the Service, which it would be unwise to go against. The Russians were naturally anxious that I should stay in the position I was in, in London.’

Lebanon would offer a vital respite, but Blake, in his darker moments, had a sense of foreboding. Reckoning was surely close at hand. He or his KGB colleagues might slip up and fail to evade surveillance, and there was always the risk of being unmasked by a Soviet defector. In that eventuality, what should he do? Would the KGB want him to confess or deny? Would they want him to stand up in court and denounce the subversive activities of the Western intelligence services against the Soviet Union? One summer evening as they were walking along a quiet street in Croydon, he sought guidance on this matter from Rodin. To his surprise, his controller was completely unwilling to talk about it: ‘He argued that if I did everything right and made no mistakes, nothing could go wrong. The very fact of discussing the subject was already an admission of defeat.’ Suitably chastened, Blake resolved to suppress his anxieties.