The Greatest Traitor (45 page)

Although tired, Randle was entitled to feel a sense of elation that the job was now all but done. Instead, as he gazed at the East German border post with its high fences, searchlights and watchtowers manned by guards with machine guns, he began to wonder, somewhat despondently, about the nature of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and the future Blake faced. Gone were the pristine autobahns of West Germany, in their place a potholed, poorly maintained road with no hard shoulder. ‘There was a tangible sense of having entered an alien and hostile territory,’ was Randle’s perception.

On he went, now a day and half without sleep. Eventually, at around 11.30 p.m., he crossed the bridge over the River Elbe near Magdeburg, the spot where they had agreed Blake could emerge from his hideout for the final approach to the East German checkpoint near Berlin. Blake crawled out and took his place in the seat behind the driver; the children, exhausted after the day’s adventures, were happy to clamber into bed and soon fell asleep. The distant lights of the East German checkpoint near the city rose into view. With about a mile to go, the van drew up and they prepared to part. Blake, feeling very emotional, told Michael and Anne: ‘It’s fantastic what you two have done. Believe me, I will never forget it or do anything that could put you or your family at risk. We should be celebrating in champagne. One day I hope we may be able to do so.’

Randle stepped down from the vehicle into the road while Blake buttoned up his long overcoat and donned his trilby hat. The two men shook hands for the last time, and then Randle got back inside and drove off towards the checkpoint.

Blake watched the rear lights slowly fade away into the night. He
waited a while by the side of the road, giving the van plenty of time to reach the border and clear it, before he himself set off towards it. So it was with a sense of apprehension as well as exhilaration that he began to walk in the direction of the barbed wire and the bright arc lamps.

He knew he faced a difficult task, turning up on foot in the dead of night. The story he was about to tell these young, suspicious border guards was an utterly incredible one. They would take some convincing.

20

Moscow

A
t around 2 a.m. on the morning of Monday, 19 December, Sergei Kondrashev was taking part in a high-level meeting at the KGB residency in Karlshorst, East Berlin. It was interrupted when the duty officer burst in with a remarkable story to tell.

A man had just turned up at the East Berlin border post demanding to meet a Soviet representative – not just any official, but someone senior from Soviet intelligence. The stranger did not appear to be a German citizen, even though he spoke the language well. He was surprisingly well informed about the security and geography of the area; also most persistent in his entreaties, despite the scepticism of the guards. They had finally been persuaded to summon a young officer from the Soviet command post positioned between the East and West German checkpoints. The stranger then revealed to this officer exactly who he was, and how he had arrived there in the middle of the night: his name was George Blake, and he had just been dropped off by friends on their way to West Berlin. Remarkably, the Soviet officer had not heard of the notorious spy, so the enormity of what he was told was lost on him. But he was sufficiently impressed by the man’s calm
manner and compelling narrative to decide to alert his seniors back at KGB headquarters.

The intelligence chiefs gathered round the conference table at Karlshorst were instinctively suspicious: it seemed too incredible to be true. Perhaps it was a trick by Western intelligence? Fortunately, there was no one better equipped to discover the truth than Blake’s former handler from those days in London a decade ago, who, by sheer chance, happened to be in Berlin on a visit from Moscow.

Kondrashev jumped into a chauffeur-driven car and, after an hour and a half, reached the checkpoint. On arrival, a guard pointed the KGB officer towards the room where the visitor was resting. When Kondrashev walked through the door, a bearded man, dressed casually in jeans, shirt and jumper, put aside his breakfast of sandwiches and coffee and rose to greet him. Despite the growth of facial hair and the passing years, Kondrashev immediately recognised the man with whom he had strolled through the suburbs of London over a decade ago. ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ he shouted excitedly, and rushed forward to embrace Blake.

Kondrashev accompanied Blake straight back to Karlshorst, where he was given a comfortable villa in the compound and treated like a conquering hero: ‘The comrades seemed especially pleased that I had chosen their city in which to surface. Though I never for a moment thought I would be turned away or not looked after well, I had not expected such a warm welcome.’

Gentle debriefing took place over a succession of convivial lunches and dinner parties and, every day, one of the officials assigned to look after him would take Blake’s measurements and head off to West Berlin to buy him a new set of clothes, as his KGB minders wanted him to look and feel at his best for his arrival in the Soviet Union. At this stage, Blake was not allowed to venture far. Security remained exceptionally tight up to the moment, a fortnight later, when a special aircraft flew him to the Soviet capital as the KGB
feared Western agents might discover his whereabouts and try and snatch him.

In fact, an MI5 report filed just a few weeks later suggests that Blake’s arrival in Germany did not go unnoticed in Western intelligence circles. It read: ‘An extremely delicate source had indicated that shortly before Christmas an unnamed man arrived in East Berlin who was considered important enough to be met personally by the Deputy Head of the KGB. This individual possessed only the clothes he stood up in. The possibility that this man was BLAKE clearly cannot be discounted’.

The Intelligence Services received the first concrete proof that Blake was safely abroad and beyond their reach in early April. He sent a series of letters – all postmarked Cairo, 31 March – to his mother Catherine in Hertfordshire, his sister Adele in Bangkok, the daughter of his mother’s employer Mrs Christine Rose (just in case Catherine’s letter was intercepted), another relative in Holland and finally, to Philip Deane, his old colleague in Korea, who was now living in Canada.

In the letter to his
Allerliefste Mammie
(dearest mother), Blake assured her that everything was fine:

At long last I am able to write to you to let you know that I am well and in complete safety so that you need not worry about me any more . . . I am sure that you are the first to rejoice that I am a free man again and that soon we shall be able to see each other again . . . I would have written much earlier but in the very special circumstances in which I found myself it was impossible to get in touch with you, longing though I was to do so. Even now, for reasons over which I have no control, I cannot tell you exactly where I am but that will not be for long and soon I shall be able to write more and arrange for us to be together again in freedom so that I can make it up to you, at least in some measure, for all the suffering you have been through because of me . . .

He signed off: ‘All love and many kisses, from Poek; PS. Please give a big kiss to Anthony from me on his tenth birthday’.

The Cairo postmark was, of course, a red herring. The KGB had arranged for one of its agents to post the letters from there to throw MI5 and the SIS off the scent. Much wild speculation was generated as a result in the following days and weeks, to the great satisfaction of the Soviet authorities. Back in Moscow, the object of all the confusion was firmly ensconced in a ‘safe’ flat in the centre of the city.

Another of Blake’s old handlers, Vasily Dozhdalev, was assigned to look after him in his first few weeks in the capital, though, in normal circumstances, he would have been considered far too senior to be Blake’s minder, commanding as he did his own department at the Lubyanka. ‘God forbid that the West would sniff out early on that he was in Moscow, so he was incognito for some time,’ said Dozhdalev. The KGB officer took him for a haircut at a barber’s shop in Izmailov Square – ‘his hair had grown very long while he was in hiding, not the fashion in those days’ – and in the evenings he would shepherd his charge on long walks in the park areas around the Boulevard Ring.

The KGB flat was far beyond Blake’s expectations. It had four spacious rooms with high ceilings, good-quality mahogany furniture, crystal chandeliers and oriental carpets. A live-in housekeeper, Zinaida, and her daughter, Sofia, kept the place tidy and prepared his meals.

Such was the concern of his masters about the possibility of him being kidnapped or even assassinated by Western agents that Blake was never allowed to stray far – certainly for the first six months or so. He was made to avoid large hotels, restaurants, theatres, anywhere visited frequently by foreigners. He was given a sizeable allowance but little opportunity to spend it. For much of this time he was holed up in the flat, ‘leading, in many ways, the same existence as in Hampstead when we were in hiding’.

When he was able to venture out of his comfortable surroundings and into the mix of daily Soviet life, Blake, like many Westerners, struggled to adapt to the strictures of a Communist society. This was
the Brezhnev era, a time of stagnation, and Moscow in the mid-1960s was a monochrome place, in both look and character. Old women, mostly clad in black from head to toe, led the long, fractious queues at stalls and shops, where many foodstuffs were in short supply and lacking in quality and variety. Blake observed the rudeness and indifference of the people to one another in public, continually frustrated as they were by the inefficiencies of the State and the great, enveloping blanket of bureaucracy that spread itself over every facet of daily life.

He felt his spell in prison had prepared him well for conditions in Russia: ‘In a way, Wormwood Scrubs acted as a kind of airlock which made the transition easier and the rough edges less painful. After prison, it was such a wonderful experience to be able to get up in the morning and dispose of one’s day as one thought fit, to go wherever one wished, that it made the lower standard of living and other disadvantages inherent in the Soviet Union much less difficult to accept.’ And away from the miserable-looking crowds and the ‘cold, ugly and impersonal modern buildings’, Blake was entranced by Old Moscow, with its charming backstreets, fine old palaces and churches with golden and blue domes.

But all the while, he retained some lingering hope that, somehow, Gillian and the boys might join him in his new life. Nine months before his escape, she had revealed that she had met a man while on holiday in Cornwall and wished to marry him. Divorce proceedings had been instigated but were adjourned in November 1966 while Blake was still in hiding in Hampstead. On 18 March, news arrived, through the columns of
The Times
, that the divorce had finally been granted in his absence. The newspaper reported that Gillian had been granted a decree nisi because of Blake’s ‘cruelty’. Mr Justice Orr had made his judgement guided by a case heard in 1956 – quoted by Gillian’s counsel – in which it had been ruled that ‘conviction of a spouse for treasonable conduct may amount to cruelty or constructive desertion’. Gillian was given custody of Anthony, James and Patrick. Though not unexpected, this caused Blake ‘a great deal of grief’. He missed his family enormously
but knew full well that, even if it had been possible for her to join him, Gillian would have struggled to settle into Soviet life.

His marriage now formally over, the other key friendship in his life was also beginning to deteriorate. Blake and Bourke, by now sharing the same flat, had begun to quarrel.

The British Embassy, a striking pre-Revolution mansion that once belonged to a wealthy sugar merchant, was located in one of the most commanding locations in the whole of Moscow. It stood on the Maurice Thorez Embankment – named after the long-time French Communist Party leader – and looked directly across the River Moskva to the golden domes of the Kremlin. At 5.20 p.m. on Monday, 4 September 1967, just as the Embassy was preparing to close its doors for the day, a scruffy, unshaven man, ‘looking like someone coming in straight off work’, arrived at the front gate and asked the guard if he could speak to an official. He had a story to tell, he said, adding elliptically: ‘I am the man you’re looking for.’ The guard ushered him into the waiting room of the mansion building and went to summon the most senior diplomats he could find.

Bourke had clearly put on weight after nine months of being wined and dined by the KGB, but he had lost none of his beguiling charm. In his report of the incident to the Foreign Office, Anthony Williams noted that he had a ‘squarish face, dark curly hair and a ruddy complexion . . . he speaks English with a soft, pleasant Southern Irish brogue and is clearly not unintelligent.’ The men who arrived to conduct the interview were First Secretary Peter Maxey, his colleague Brian Fall and the Consul, Leslie Sturmey.

Bourke had come to them to ask for refuge in the Embassy – asylum, effectively – and, after that, he wanted their help in obtaining the necessary documentation to leave the Soviet Union. Without equivocation, he confessed to having planned, engineered and carried out Blake’s escape. He did not reveal all the details, merely assuring them with characteristic bravado that it had been ‘child’s play to get out of
Wormwood Scrubs in those days’. He emphasised that there had been no involvement by the KGB, and that, indeed, the Soviets had known nothing of Blake’s flight until their arrival in East Berlin. He explained his motives – that he felt Blake’s sentence was inhumane, and that Blake had persuaded him that he was not guilty of treason and had not betrayed a large number of British agents to the KGB.

To have Britain’s second most wanted man sitting opposite them, confessing his guilt, was one thing, but the diplomats listened in amazement as Bourke then span a dubious story of how Blake had turned against him, and was now plotting murder. Bourke explained that he had become disillusioned with exile in Russia – he was ‘a fish out of water’ – and had gone to Blake and told him that he felt the time had come to return to the United Kingdom and ‘face the music’. Blake’s immediate, startled response had been that it would be best if the Irishman remained in the Soviet Union for a lengthy period – say, five years – before making his return but that he would talk to ‘Stan’, their KGB colleague, and put the request on his behalf.