The Greatest Traitor (35 page)

On Tuesday, 18 April, Blake was back in Bow Street Magistrates Court, again in front of Sir Robert Blundell, and again in conditions of complete secrecy. This time, however, the press were fed the bare bones of the hearing and, for the first time, the case of George Blake entered the public domain: ‘Secrets Charge in Guarded Court’ was the headline on the third page of the
Daily Mirror.

Six days later, Blake made his third and final appearance in Bow Street, this time to be sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Under the front-page headline ‘A Secret Trial At The Old Bailey’, the
Mirror
reported that Blake – described as a ‘government official’ – would be the first defendant since the war to have his case heard entirely in private. After the 95-minute hearing, the paper pinned up outside the court
revealed that Blake faced three charges under Section One of the Official Secrets Act: one allegedly committed between April 1955 and April 1959; the second between April and June 1959; and the third between June 1959 and September 1960. It was stated, through his solicitor, that he reserved his defence.

Bill Cox visited Blake in Brixton jail the following day and then, on Thursday, 26 April, he went to Chester Row to meet Gillian and her mother. He asked Blake’s wife if she could think of any as yet unspoken motive for her husband behaving as he had. She did not answer immediately but, on 1 May, Gillian sent a letter to Cox thanking him for his visit and offering her thoughts on her husband’s relationship with Iris Peake, and how this might have affected his mood as he set off for Korea. She told Cox she believed that the end of the affair with Iris – who was now Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret – had added to Blake’s ‘restless state of mind’ as he left for his SIS posting in Seoul.

On Tuesday, 2 May, Gillian came up from Sussex to pay her first visit to Brixton jail, together with her mother-in-law and John Quine. It was only from his visitors that Blake learned his trial at the Old Bailey would take place the following day: ‘Nobody had told me, and I was quite unprepared. On the other hand, I reflected, what was there to be prepared about? Whether I would be found guilty or not guilty? That had been settled by my confession. That left only the sentence.’

‘It was very emotional and he was heartbroken by it all for my sake,’ Gillian remembered. ‘It was no different seeing him there, somehow. I didn’t reproach him at all.’

The stage was now set for Blake’s trial in London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. He would be following in the footsteps of a number of other spies who had stepped into the dock of the famous No. 1 Court since the war, notably Klaus Fuchs, similarly charged under the Official Secrets Act.

Fuchs, who gave away the Allies’ atom bomb plans, had feared the worst. ‘What will happen to me,’ he asked his counsel, Derek Curtis Bennett, ‘will I be executed?’ Bennett, astounded by his client’s
naiveté, had patiently explained that the maximum penalty the judge could hand down for violation of the Act was fourteen years.

Jeremy Hutchinson reassured his client in exactly the same way. Nonetheless, Blake spent the night before the trial in a state of anxiety and uncertainty: ‘I didn’t know what my fate was going to be. I was torn between hope and despair.’

16

Trial

A
little less than an hour before the trial was due to begin on 3 May 1961, Jeremy Hutchinson walked down the steps to the waiting room beneath No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey, with a final request for his client.

He knew that the task he faced – to persuade the judge, Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice, to show leniency – was an extremely difficult one which would be made a little easier if the defendant would offer some contrition. ‘He said it would help, in his mitigation, if I would say I was sorry,’ recalled Blake. ‘But there was no possibility of me showing remorse for my actions. I told him it would be dishonest, because if I hadn’t been caught, I would still be carrying on with my activities.’

It was a disappointment, but when Hutchinson stepped into the courtroom to set out his papers, he suddenly had a much more serious issue to grapple with. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, prosecuting for the Crown, told Hutchinson that he now proposed to deal with the whole case in open court, not
in camera
, as previously agreed. In those circumstances, Hutchinson would be prevented from referring to a long list of subjects upon
which his argument depended – first and foremost, Manningham-Buller wanted no mention of the existence of SIS, nor that Blake had been an officer of the Service.

Hutchinson was taken aback by this last-minute request: ‘I had no idea they wanted it held in public. Of course, in principle, I would have liked an open trial. But the conditions they laid down would have meant I didn’t have the freedom to tell George’s side of the story. I conferred with him, and reluctantly – despite the disadvantage that the outside world would not hear a word of mitigation, however constrained – we decided it would be better if it was held
in camera
so I had complete freedom in my address to the judge.’

Manningham-Buller was a formidable adversary for the new young QC. He had built a reputation as an able and hardworking law officer, his ability noted by Churchill, who had, to the surprise of many, appointed him Solicitor General in 1951. In the years that followed, he had proven himself a tough and effective debater in the Commons, and a formidable opponent in the courtroom, though his abrasive style endeared him to few. The sobriquet
Spectator
columnist Bernard Levin bestowed upon him – ‘Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner’ – stuck.

For Hutchinson, the encounter with the Attorney General was to be a bruising one: ‘I demanded to see – counsel to counsel – the actual evidence that this man [Blake] had caused the deaths of large numbers of people as a result of them being named by him to the Russians . . . I heard no evidence, nor did I see evidence of any of these terrible things that were supposed to have happened. I was simply told what the Lord Chief Justice was told; evidence of – maybe – places and names, potential damage, changes of procedure and so on, resulting from Blake’s activities, but never any
hard
evidence that lives had been lost.’ Hutchinson’s new status as a QC made him nervous about creating a fuss: ‘I was bullied into submission over this. If I’d been ten years more senior I might have been tougher, I might have even gone public about it.’

Manningham-Buller’s right-hand man that day was a recent adversary of Hutchinson’s from the
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
obscenity trial. Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC had led that failed prosecution, revealing the extent to which he was out of touch with modern times by wondering, during his opening statement, whether this was a novel ‘you would even wish your wife or servants to read’.

Hutchinson might also have had cause for concern over the judge. On the face of it, Parker was a welcome change from his irascible and domineering predecessor, Lord Goddard, who had always made his decidedly conservative political and social views quite plain. By contrast, Parker appeared to be unassuming and tolerant, at least in the early months of his tenure. Himself the son of a famous judge, he gained a double first in science at Cambridge, and initially contemplated a career as a geologist before settling for the Law. Such was his reputation that scores of convicted offenders appealed to his court hoping for reduced sentences. Parker quickly dashed those hopes – in fact, more often than not, he and his colleagues increased the punishment. In a series of speeches in North America and Britain, he proposed harsher sentences – criticising the ‘indiscriminate commuting of death sentences’ – and also showed himself to be a keen advocate of corporal punishment.

Society was slowly changing, but deference was still very much the order of the day in 1961, and that did not just mean
to
the ruling class – the ‘Establishment’ – but also
within it,
by one group of ‘Old Boys’ to another. Judicial independence from government was unusual and Parker was not about to buck the trend. In a speech to the organisation Justice in 1960, he made it very clear where he stood: ‘The courts must recognise that national policy requires a measure of administrative freedom,’ he told his audience. ‘They have a positive duty to be the handmaiden of administration, rather than its governor.’ In other words, to enact state power, rather than protect citizens from it.

So, with a rough and ruthless prosecutor – the Government’s representative in court – and an illiberal judge, both in undoubted,
if unstated harmony, Hutchinson faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Blake stepped into the dock of No. 1 Court just before 10.30 a.m. and as his gaze swept round the courtroom, he spotted some familiar faces in the public gallery – the Chief, Sir Dick White, John Quine, and other SIS colleagues. Also present were Roger Hollis, the Head of MI5, and Sir Theobald Mathew, Director of Public Prosecutions. Small details lodged in his memory: ‘One thing that disappointed me was that the judge had a small wig on, much smaller than I expected. And I was puzzled as to why, instead of sitting in the middle of the dais, he was sitting on the left of it.’ What also struck him was the stark contrast in physical appearance between the two principal lawyers: ‘I liked very much my intellectual, ascetic-looking counsel, who compared very favourably to the Attorney General, to whom I remember taking an intense dislike. I thought he looked very gross, with red, wobbling cheeks and bulging eyes, over-indulgent looking.’

The Clerk of the Court, Leslie Boyd, read out the five charges. It was now clear that each related to a different period of Blake’s employment with SIS, but the same charge applied to all five periods: ‘that for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State, you communicated to another person information which might have been directly or indirectly useful to the enemy’. To each charge, the Clerk asked Blake if he pleaded guilty or not guilty. To each one, Blake replied simply: ‘Guilty.’ Then Manningham-Buller got down to business.

The prosecutor’s task seemed straightforward enough; after all, as he told the court right from the start, Blake’s confession had been ‘complete and detailed’. But he had no intention of quoting from it: ‘Its contents – except for very short passages to which I propose to refer – must remain secret.’ The same cloak of concealment extended to Blake’s job description. ‘He has been employed in the Government’s service, both in this country and overseas,’ was all Manningham-Buller would say.

What he was prepared to reveal from Blake’s confession was the
chronology of his ideological switch: ‘In his statement, Blake says that more than ten years ago his philosophical and political views underwent a change, and in the autumn of 1951 he held the strong conviction that the Communist system was the better one and deserved to triumph. To quote his own words, he resolved to join the Communist side in establishing what he believed to be, on balance, a more just society.’

The court heard that, for the preceding nine and a half years, Blake had been working as an agent for the Russians, delivering a wealth of information to them. Manningham-Buller again reiterated that he was unable to publicly reveal the nature of that information but emphasised that, in his confession, Blake had admitted passing to the KGB officers any interesting official document he could lay his hands on.

He had access to information of very great importance. Although he held responsible positions, his employment fortunately did not give him any access to information or documents relating to secret weapons or any nuclear or atomic energy, but it is the case that he has done most serious damage to the interests of this country.

Then Manningham-Buller made his case for handing Blake the stiffest of sentences. Referring to the recent Portland Spy Ring trial – in which he had also prosecuted, and over which Lord Justice Parker had presided – he commented: ‘That was a grave case but that this is an even graver case is, in my submission, clearly shown by the confession made by the accused.’ Gordon Lonsdale, the mastermind of that espionage group, had been handed a twenty-five-year sentence – might Blake be given more?

Manningham-Buller’s address had taken just eight minutes.

Then, referring to his conversations with Hutchinson about holding the case
in camera
, Manningham-Buller invited Parker to move into closed session so that ‘matters may be referred to which would be prejudicial to the National Safety’. The judge replied: ‘Mr Attorney, Mr Hutchinson, I have a very strong dislike, I think we all have, of
hearing anything
in camera
, but you are satisfied, are you, it would be better?’ In restrained language, Hutchinson’s response nonetheless showed the frustration he felt at this course of action having been forced on him at the very last moment: ‘That is the choice I have had to make in the last ten minutes. I had no idea until then that these proceedings were going to be held in public. Having had a word with my client, he wishes, despite the disadvantages in many ways to him, that I should have complete freedom in addressing your Lordship on all matters.’

It was 10.40 a.m. when Parker ordered the court to be cleared of press and public, and Jeremy Hutchinson stood up to deliver his speech of mitigation. It would last fifty minutes and tell a compelling story of a flawed man’s life in a turbulent period of history – an eloquent
apologia
for Blake’s actions. Until now, more than fifty years on, what Hutchinson said has remained unknown to anyone who was not in the courtroom during that hour.

First of all came recognition of the scale of his client’s crimes: ‘It is perfectly clear, of course, that any man who pleads guilty to an offence of this kind must be looked at by any court, indeed by any Englishman, with distaste, and therefore I cannot claim any sympathy from your Lordship, but I do ask some patience and some understanding.’ Hutchinson also wanted to establish from the start that this should not be any kind of ‘show trial’.