The Greatest Traitor (33 page)

At home that night, Blake’s thoughts were awhirl. Elliott’s news was disconcerting, indeed deeply worrying. Why was he being contacted like this now, when he was in the middle of intensive study? Could not a meeting about his next appointment, which was some way off, wait until July when he was back in London after his holidays? He had been called back hastily to London before for consultations and courses – perhaps this was no different to any of those previous summonses? The more Blake pondered the message, the less he was reassured and his mind turned to a potential escape plan. He had a valid visa for Syria, and as soon as his son was well enough to leave hospital in a couple of days’ time, he would be able to drive his wife and children over the border to Damascus. There, he would receive sanctuary from his Soviet masters. It would mean, however, explaining to Gillian what he had done and, anyway, what if he was running away on a mere hunch? Words from Proverbs 28 came to him: was this not a case of ‘the wicked flee when no man pursueth’?

By the following morning, Blake’s worries had subsided a little. Nonetheless, he felt the need to elicit Moscow Centre’s views on whether he was in jeopardy, and so rang Nedosekin’s emergency number. The two men arranged to rendezvous that evening on a beach not far from Beirut. At their meeting, Nedosekin attempted to calm Blake’s fears, promising he would contact KGB headquarters and relay their views the following day. In their second encounter, the Soviet officer told Blake that Moscow saw no cause for concern. The KGB’s
enquiries had failed to reveal a leak: Blake should return to London, as requested. Blake was relieved: ‘This was exactly the news I wanted to hear. The moment of truth had been put off. I would not have to confess to my wife that I was a Soviet agent.’

He then embarked on two days of exams. When the results were announced on Thursday, 30 March, he finished fourth overall. That evening, winding down after the various tensions of the last few days, he was persuaded to join a stag party in one of Beirut’s more expensive restaurants, followed by a session at the Casino du Liban. He won well, but then lost everything in a single throw.

The next day, at the start of the Easter weekend, he called on Nicholas Elliott at the British Embassy to collect some money for his airfare, and took charge of the letter from Broadway. He found nothing in it to worry him. However, there was to be one last jolt to his system: on parting, Elliott asked whether he would like to be booked into the St Ermin’s Hotel, just opposite head office in Broadway, for the duration of his visit. Blake replied that he would be staying at his mother’s home in Radlett, as usual. Elliott persisted, suggesting it would be more convenient to stay at the hotel. ‘For a moment a shadow of a doubt passed my mind but it passed away again,’ Blake recalled.

His final day in Lebanon, Easter Sunday, 2 April, was a memorable one. The Blakes headed off by car for a trip to Byblos, which, with its Crusader citadel, Phoenician ramparts and Bronze Age temples was reputed to be the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world. After a picnic by the side of the desert under a fig tree, they drove back through colourful, festive Maronite villages where the locals were out in force in their best clothes, celebrating the holy day. That evening, the Blakes were invited to dinner by fellow student, Alan Rothnie, already an established diplomat, and his wife Anne. A bottle of champagne was opened to celebrate Blake’s new appointment.

Next morning, Easter Monday, 3 April, Gillian accompanied her husband to the airport for an early flight. Blake promised to be back in
Shemlan on Saturday in time for Anthony’s fifth birthday party.

He touched down at Heathrow to a sullen, wet day in London in sharp contrast to the endless blue skies and warmth of the Lebanon. With much to look forward to, he remained in good spirits. At her flat in Shenley Hill, Radlett, he told his mother about Jamie’s illness, Gillian’s pregnancy, and their plans for Anthony’s birthday party at the weekend. Mother and son stayed up talking until after midnight.

A few hours later, the dismantling of this happy family life would begin.

15

Confession

T
he SIS officers gathered at Head Office in Broadway on that Tuesday, 4 April 1961, had been pondering the trickiest of matters: how best to interrogate a colleague they now believed was a traitor.

The Chief, Dick White, was determined to learn the lessons of the Philby débâcle in 1951, when a haphazard, episodic ‘trial’ of sorts had brought no results and no conviction. Nor did he think it appropriate in this case for an outsider like Jim Skardon – the skilful MI5 interrogator who had broken Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who gave the Soviets secrets of America’s atomic bomb – to be let loose on Blake. Instead, he decided to assemble an SIS ‘tribunal’ led by Harold Shergold, with support from his close colleague on the Soviet desk, Terence Lecky, and Ben Johnson, a former police officer who had experience in interviewing defectors. White was banking, above all, on Shergy’s calm authority and doggedness to extract the truth from Blake.

Blake arrived at the office of SIS’s personnel department on Petty France, a short walk from Head Office, just before 10 a.m. He was met, as he had expected, by Ian Critchett, Deputy Head of the department. He was not, however, anticipating that Critchett would be accompanied
by Shergold. After cordial greetings, Shergold asked Blake if he would come with him first, as there were a few matters that had cropped up about his time in Berlin that needed to be ironed out.

Then, instead of heading towards Broadway, Blake was surprised to be led through St James’s Park, across The Mall, and up the flight of stone steps by Duke of York’s Column that led to Carlton Gardens. They were heading for familiar ground – No. 2, where he had worked in Y section. It was here that he had sat round a table helping to formulate plans for the Berlin tunnel, and where, more happily, he had first met Gillian. As he followed Shergold into the spacious committee room commanding a panoramic view of the stylish Nash terrace below, he sensed that he was no longer in friendly territory.

Lecky and Johnson rose to greet him, and then Shergold got down to work. It quickly became evident to Blake that this conversation was not going to be about a few minor ‘housekeeping’ problems as he had been led to believe. The questioning, always courteous yet firmly probing, concerned vital operational matters from his time in Berlin – ‘Boris’, the Eitners, the tape recorders in Mickey’s flat, and much else besides.

‘Shergold asked me why I thought the Soviets had wanted to install microphones only after I had left and another officer had taken over. To this I could only reply that I did not have the faintest idea,’ Blake recalled.

It was clear, Shergold told him, that ‘Boris’ was a mere KGB plant. How could Blake explain that? ‘I agreed that the evidence pointed that way, but as to why, well, all I could say was that Mickey had been a convenient link for this purpose.’

Similar questions followed over the next few hours. When lunchtime arrived, and with it a much-needed break, Blake’s uncertain position was further underlined when nobody suggested going to eat together. Instead, pariah-like, he headed out alone to a favourite Italian restaurant in Soho, and anxiously considered his fate.

The afternoon’s session only deepened his unease. Shergold moved
the conversation on from Berlin to Poland, displaying on the table all the SIS documents that had fallen into the hands of the Polish Intelligence Service. Access to these papers had been highly restricted but Blake had been on the distribution list in every case. Was there anything he could tell them about that? ‘I said I couldn’t, and that their guess was as good as mine . . . it was clear to me that they must have a source in the Polish Intelligence Service at a pretty high level.’ As the afternoon went on, the inquisition – for that is what it had become – reached its logical conclusion. Blake was bluntly accused of working for the KGB. ‘This I flatly denied. At six o’clock we broke up and they asked me to come back the following morning at 10 a.m. On the way back to Radlett, I kept turning over in my mind all that had been said that day. Of one thing I was no longer in any doubt – SIS knew that I was working for the Soviets. Otherwise such a grave accusation would never have been levelled at me.’

By now, the reason for the interrogation taking place in Carlton Gardens was clear to him: they had wanted to record the conversation, and it was a far more suitable place to set up the necessary equipment than the cramped offices in Broadway.

That evening, Blake kept up the agonising pretence that all was well. Over dinner with his mother he continued blithely to discuss plans for the weekend in Shemlan. As he reflected on the day’s events, he concluded: ‘I was in deep trouble, but I thought I could still save myself.’

Day two of the interrogation again focused on the Polish documents and the likelihood that they had been photographed and passed on to the Soviets by someone in the Berlin station. Shergold led the way again, piling up small pieces of additional evidence, accumulating them into a substantial case. Once more, Blake was accused, quite straightforwardly, of being a Soviet agent. ‘It wasn’t hostile,’ Blake recalled, ‘but it was persistent. I continued to pretend I knew no more than they did. Somehow, I still hoped to get out of it.’

At lunchtime Blake took his mind off the interrogation for a while
with a walk over to Gamages, a department store at Holborn. In the ‘People’s Popular Emporium’, he ordered a mosquito net his wife had requested, ensuring it would be delivered in time for his weekend journey to Lebanon, though he felt ever more pessimistic about his chances of being able to deliver it in person.

That afternoon, Shergold was interested in exploring any ideological motives Blake may have had for his treachery. When and how did his loyalty to Marxism and the Soviet Union begin? How had it taken such firm root? Blake managed to survive this line of questioning and, at the end of the day, returned once more to the flat in Radlett in utter turmoil: ‘These were, without doubt, the most difficult hours of my life. Knowing that I was in serious danger, that, whatever happened, life would never be the same for any of us, I had to pretend to my mother that all was well.’

On Thursday, 6 April, day three of the interrogation, Shergold decided to adopt a different technique. He had come round to the view that Blake was as much an emotional traitor as a professional one, and what was needed was something to spark his sense of moral indignation. ‘Whether by luck or by planning, they hit upon the right psychological approach,’ Blake recalled. What they said to him was this: ‘We know that you worked for the Soviets, but we understand why. While you were their prisoner in Korea, you were tortured and made to confess that you were a British intelligence officer. From then on, you were blackmailed and had no choice but to collaborate with them.’

After hours of relentless questioning, met throughout by a solid brick wall of answers, Shergold, Lecky and Johnson were astonished by Blake’s reply.

When they put the case in this light, something happened which went against all the dictates of elementary common sense and the instinct of self-preservation. All I can say is that it was a gut reaction. Suddenly I felt an upsurge of indignation and wanted my interrogators and everyone else to know that I had acted out of conviction, out of a belief in Communism, and not under duress or for financial gain.

This feeling was so strong that without thinking what I was doing I burst out ‘No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets and offered my services to them of my own accord.’

Blake’s account of his interrogation was first told in his autobiography in 1990 but, years earlier, in 1964, when discussing this pivotal moment while in Wormwood Scrubs prison, he gave a slightly different explanation for his outburst. In that account, there was no ideological outrage, but rather a curious, inverted moral reasoning. Fellow prisoner Kenneth de Courcy recalled Blake’s words: ‘If I denied what I’d done, I would have had to live with a lie on my lips, and I couldn’t have tolerated myself for doing that.’

Whatever the impulse behind its collapse, the wall suddenly came crashing down. Shergold and his team had won a confession, or at least the beginning of one. Then, after the hours of pent-up tension, Blake began to unburden himself in extraordinary fashion: ‘I explained, in great detail, why I did it and what I had done. Their attitude didn’t change, they continued to be polite, even friendly.’

A confession to an SIS tribunal was one thing but if Blake was to be prosecuted, statements made to police that could be submitted to a regular court of law would be necessary. Special Branch officers Detective Superintendent Louis Gale and Detective Chief Inspector Ferguson Smith arrived on the scene. They told him that there was evidence that he had committed an offence or offences against the Official Secrets Act, and they cautioned him. Blake told them he wanted to make a statement and, over the course of the afternoon, proceeded to confess his treachery. It was 8 p.m. before he told
Gale and Smith that he wanted to stop. They agreed to resume the following day.

A chauffeur-driven car took Blake back to Radlett. He had been given strict instructions not to tell his mother, who had no idea her son was a Soviet agent, anything about what had taken place. He told her only that the trip to Beirut would have to be postponed as he had been asked to leave London for a few days to attend an important conference.

If there was a fleeting moment when he considered trying to escape, perhaps to reach the sanctuary of the Soviet Embassy, he quickly dismissed the idea: ‘It would have been impossible. I was already sure I was being followed. I felt the game was up.’

The next morning, Friday, 7 April, he was back at Carlton Gardens. Gale and Smith arrived at 3.15 p.m. to finish off his statement, which was finally completed by 6 p.m. In the course of the conversation, he also admitted to being in contact with a Soviet intelligence officer in Beirut in November 1960. Gale produced five photographs of Soviet officials in the Lebanon and asked him to pick the right man. Blake pointed to Nedosekin.