The Greatest Traitor (32 page)

The legend that MECAS, sponsored and run by the Foreign Office, was a ‘School for Spies’, went right back to its earliest days in Jerusalem. One of its joint founders, Brigadier Clayton, had been Head of Intelligence in Cairo, while the Principal Instructor, Major Aubrey Eban, was a British army officer who went on to become Foreign Minister of Israel. The mutterings among the Arabs continued off and on, and Blake was certainly not the only spy ever to pass through the school’s doors, but joining him that autumn was the usual mix of diplomats, businessmen, linguists and Oxbridge graduates, all there to immerse themselves in this extremely practical, exceedingly tough language course.

The Blakes were given a large apartment on the top floor of a house built against the mountainside, just outside the village. They had no garden, but red geraniums grew against the wall of the house, and there were some flourishing tomatoes left by the previous occupant. At the start Gillian found the move stressful: ‘The first four months of life in Beirut were absolute hell, because I was pregnant and I felt miserable. But I settled down and it became a wonderful time, a terrific time, and we were frightfully happy there. I liked being out of the running, I liked being out of the town and having a relaxed lifestyle.’ She hired a ‘live-in’ maid, a local girl called Khadijh, to help look after Anthony, now four, and James (Jamie), not yet two. ‘I even had time to take the occasional Arabic lesson myself, although I was not gifted in that respect like George. For the first time in my life I was rather well organised.’

Blake’s course was designed to last eighteen months, the first half providing students with a sound working knowledge of written
and spoken Arabic, the second preparing them for the Civil Service Higher Interpretership Exam. A spirit of healthy competition existed, with regular tests, and taxing exams at the end of each term.

Blake relished the challenges, but took one day a week off to give his mind a complete rest, when he and Gillian and the children would invariably picnic by some beautiful ruins in the mountains, or find a sheltered cove along the rocky coast. Often Louis Wesseling, his best friend on the course, and his wife and two young children, would accompany them. Wesseling, a 32-year-old Dutchman, had previously worked for Shell in East Africa, but now the oil company wanted him in the Middle East. He talked a lot about politics and current affairs, and quickly became aware that his new friend was part of the intelligence community: ‘These things were known between us, if never actually acknowledged. As for his politics, he was clearly a man of the left. He never hid his distaste for what he saw as the crass commercialism of firms like mine. I was particularly struck by his criticism of the Royal Family. He disliked the pomp and circumstance and injustice of public life; he said the present Queen would be the last one in the line.’

On one occasion, Wesseling had a curious conversation with Blake that, in hindsight, took on a greater significance:

There was at the time the discovery of a British naval officer [Henry Houghton] passing secrets to the Russians. George discussed that case at length with me, and he told me, ‘You know, this is really, really small beer’. I said, ‘Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s not so small, betraying your country in that way.’

But he merely said, ‘No, those sorts of people are paid, and the
real
spies are those who are not paid and do it for conviction.’ Of course at the time, I had no idea he was referring to himself.

In Wesseling’s view, Blake had few equals on the Arabic course: ‘He was the best student, probably because of his blood, his father,
but also because he was very intelligent – he was the star of the class. He was admired by the younger students for his ability, but also for his strong, original opinions on most matters.’ Not everyone shared Wesseling’s high opinion of Blake, though. John Coles – later Sir John, Private Secretary to Mrs Thatcher and Head of the Diplomatic Service – thought him ‘a dull swot’: ‘He was always walking about with those word cards, checking the English on the front with the Arabic on the back. He answered questions with a broad smile, but did not have anything very interesting to say.’ Coles did recall a group outing, which gave a surprising glimpse of Blake’s true state of mind:

We had formed a dining club called, I think, ‘The Mountain’ . . . the normally punctilious Blake had turned up very late for one of our dinners, probably because he was seeing some agent somewhere in the city. We further remembered going on to the Casino Du Liban and playing roulette.

Blake had bet on single numbers. More, he had won a pile on one number and immediately put all the proceeds on another number. It takes a real gambler to do that. And that of course is the point. We were watching someone who was engaged in a lifetime gamble and got his excitement from living on the edge. But it had not struck us so at the time.

Blake may have been away from operational work, immersed in study, but the KGB remained eager to stay in touch with their prize. Soon after his arrival in Lebanon, he made contact with the organisation’s Head of Station in Beirut, Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin. There was little information Blake could pass on, but the two men decided to meet once every two months regardless, and Nedosekin gave him a telephone number on which he could be reached in the event of an emergency.

What Blake did not know was that SIS was equally keen to keep an eye on him. All the while, a couple of his fellow students – who were really British agents – were doing their level best to monitor his movements. They were placed there in Beirut because, back in the summer of 1960, although Terence Lecky had provisionally cleared him in the mole hunt, doubts persisted. Lecky and his colleagues retained Blake on their shortlist of three as the candidate for the traitor in their midst, and wanted him isolated and kept under surveillance until they could completely prove his innocence – or guilt. So although Blake believed he had won a battle to be sent to Shemlan, the reality was that his employers had eventually been equally keen for him to go there.

Oblivious to the scrutiny, his studies were progressing smoothly. He had passed the tests at the end of the first term with flying colours and, as Easter approached, he was revising hard and hoping for even better results in the second set of exams.

After the Easter break, students were due to head off for month-long placements with Arab families in various parts of the region, where they would have to speak the language daily and would hopefully build up their confidence and expertise. With Gillian expecting their third child, the Blakes had to come up with a different plan: George would spend his placement with a Lebanese family in the nearby village of Souk El Gharb, and it was agreed that his mother would come out and look after the boys while Gillian was in hospital.

Seemingly free of the intrigues of London and Berlin, indulging his passion for languages, and soon to be a father again, perhaps, for the first time since his posting to Korea, Blake began to appreciate a modicum of peace.

Back in Broadway, what had once been mere doubts about Blake were hardening into near certainty: SIS’s most respected Soviet specialist, having studied the evidence provided by Goleniewski and Eitner, was now ready to confront the man he was ‘90 per cent sure’ was the
traitor. Blake’s nemesis would be Harold Taplin Shergold, known to colleagues and friends as ‘Shergy’, an intelligence officer of a retiring disposition, but possessing an outstanding intellect, great drive and complete moral integrity.

Shergold, born in 1915, was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, before becoming a schoolmaster at Cheltenham Grammar School. When war broke out, he joined the Hampshire Regiment, but quickly switched to the intelligence corps. He eventually joined the Combined Service Interrogation Centre, based in Rome, from where he was attached to the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy. So obviously effective were his skills that he was put in charge of all interrogations from the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt to Cassino in Italy. Shergold chose to join SIS in 1949, and, as the pace of the Cold War quickened, was posted to Germany, where he earned a reputation for running agents with calmness, persistence and authority. In 1954, he was brought back to Head Office to manage agent networks in the Baltic States.

Of no great height, slim, with open features and a high forehead, Shergold’s ‘bright eyes and compressed vitality suggested intelligence, competence and tight restraint’. He was revered by his colleagues in Broadway. ‘In the office he seemed to be utterly reliable. You
believed
what he said, you listened to his every word. He was a real leader of the very best sort,’ said an SIS officer who was one of Shergold’s protégés in the 1960s. ‘He led because of what he was, he was “all of a piece”. He could be very tough – but he was also very loyal to his staff.’

Shergold was a very private man, rigidly separating work from personal life. He was never in danger of breaching the intelligence officer’s dictum that ‘a secret is for life’. Few photographs of him exist; he was to be particularly irritated – and only reluctantly acquiesced – in April 1961 when his CIA colleagues persuaded him to pose with them and the defector Oleg Penkovsky for a picture. Few colleagues knew his wife Bevis, who was an Olympic discus thrower and shot putter at the 1948 London games; nor did they know of Shergy’s lifelong charity
work for Guide Dogs for the Blind. When he died in December 2000, not a single newspaper ran an obituary.

Goleniewski’s other British mole, LAMBDA 2, had already been unmasked by MI5 as Harry Houghton, a clerical officer at the Underwater Weapons Establishment in Portland. Houghton, a heavy drinker and black marketeer, was recruited by Polish intelligence while on the staff of the British Naval Attaché in Warsaw in 1952. Back home, he was in an office where sensitive documents about submarine warfare regularly landed on his desk. He started to routinely pass these secrets on to Polish spies, who in turn passed them on to the Soviets. Houghton also recruited his girlfriend, Ethel Gee, a filing clerk at the base, to help with his spying. The MI5 investigators on their trail stumbled on a much bigger enterprise – in fact they uncovered a whole spy ring.

Their surveillance established that Houghton and Gee were regularly in touch with a businessman called Gordon Lonsdale, who leased jukebox machines, and an antiquarian bookseller named Peter Kroger, and his wife Helen. Lonsdale and the Krogers were revealed to be ‘illegals’, Soviet spies who had been living in England under deep cover for several years. Lonsdale was in fact Konon Trofimovich Molody, the son of two Soviet scientists, who was selected as a potential foreign intelligence officer from childhood. He had established his fictional identity in Canada, where he obtained a passport in the name of a ‘dead double’. Peter and Helen Kroger were in reality Morris and Ethel Cohen, longstanding American KGB illegal agents. At the Old Bailey on 22 March, Molody was given a twenty-five-year sentence, the Cohens twenty years, and Houghton and Gee were each sentenced to fifteen years.

Now it was SIS’s turn to trap LAMBDA 1, and by the time of the Portland Spy Ring trial, Shergold felt he had assembled all the pieces of the jigsaw. The Golenieswki material had all been re-evaluated, and documents known to have fallen into KGB hands painstakingly cross-checked and cross-referenced with every report that had landed on
the desks of SIS officers in Berlin during the period 1955–59. There was one common denominator – one man who appeared to have had access to them all. Then there was the Eitner evidence. One clue, above all others, persuaded Shergold of Blake’s treachery: why had the microphones and recorders in Horst and Brigitte’s flat only been installed after Blake had left Berlin? Surely it was because the KGB had no need to listen covertly to his conversations: he was already one of them.

Easter was approaching. Dick White, the Chief, who had been closely briefed on Shergold’s findings, was worried that any delay might risk the possibility of an internal leak. The Lebanon was not a secure place for an interrogation and so he wanted Blake brought back to London as quickly as possible. Letters were despatched to Nicholas Elliott, the SIS Chief of Station in Beirut, disclosing that Blake was a suspected Soviet mole and urging the officer to tell him that he should return to London immediately, on the pretext of discussing a future posting. The second letter was for Elliott to hand personally to Blake.

When the letters arrived, Elliott was shaken by the revelation. Like many other senior figures in SIS, he had regarded Blake as a most promising officer. Nonetheless, he quickly got to work, contriving an apparently random encounter with the suspected traitor at which he could relay the request from Broadway. That meeting took place on the evening of Saturday, 25 March.

Earlier that day, Elliott’s secretary, a friend and former work colleague of Gillian’s, went to the hospital in Beirut where the Blakes’ youngest son, Jamie, was being treated after catching pneumonia. The boy was out of danger, but his mother was sleeping in the hospital with him, while Blake was visiting. The secretary told the couple she was going to see the production of
Charley’s Aunt
by the local British drama group that evening. She had a spare ticket and wondered whether Blake would like to accompany her? Blake was reluctant at first, pleading pressure of work – his end-of-term exams were just a few days away – but Gillian persuaded him that it would be good to take a break from his studies, so he eventually acceded.

Blake and the secretary enjoyed the first act, and then decided to go to the bar during the interval. There, they encountered Nicholas Elliott and his wife Elizabeth. ‘In the course of conversation, Elliott drew me aside and said he was glad I happened to be there as this had saved him a trip up the mountain to see me,’ recalled Blake. ‘He had received a letter from Head Office with instructions for me to return to London for a few days’ consultation in connection with a new appointment. It suggested that I should travel on Easter Monday so as to be available in London early on Tuesday morning.’