The Greatest Traitor (46 page)

That conversation between Blake and ‘Stan’ had taken place just three days before Bourke turned up at the Embassy. Williams’ dramatic second-hand account of it to his Foreign Office masters read as follows:

The KGB officer arrived and Blake took him off in the corridor leaving Bourke on his own in the living room in order, as he understood it, to persuade the KGB officer to let Bourke go. Bourke, according to his account, was suspicious and listened at the door. In this position, he heard Blake asking that Bourke should
not
be allowed to go, and with some alarm he noticed a significant emphasis, in particular on something to the effect that ‘If he gives trouble you will have to give thought to what other steps you might have to take’. It was this latter comment which particularly prompted Bourke to seek assistance in repatriation.

Bourke gave the diplomats a sample of his handwriting to establish
his identity, even though they were by now convinced that he was who he claimed to be. Nonetheless, he was destined to go away disappointed. He was an Irish citizen and the Embassy would first have to contact Dublin to see if it was possible to issue him with a fresh passport, which would take at least a week. As for asylum, that was out of the question. As Bourke rose to leave, he told Sturmey, with some melodrama: ‘I must now face the music. If you don’t see me again, I would like you to pass it on – that I done it myself.’

While Bourke was having his interview Embassy officials had noticed an increase in the number of Soviet militiamen in the vicinity. After the Irishman left the premises by the eastern gate, he was observed being stopped by soldiers and asked to produce his papers. Some short time after this, having apparently satisfied them, he was seen walking westwards. That was the last the British Embassy saw or heard from Bourke.

In his concluding remarks on this curious episode, Anthony Williams observed: ‘If Bourke’s appearance yesterday was KGB engineered, and the aim to embarrass the Embassy, it failed. On the whole, my feeling is that Bourke’s approach to us was a genuine if naïve attempt to escape from a situation which looked ominous to him . . . the motive is of a one with the old lag who returns to prison as the safest and warmest place he knows.’

By that stage Bourke was patently disenchanted with life in Moscow, despite all the comforts that had come his way as the man whose heroic actions had recovered one of the KGB’s greatest assets. He had landed on Saturday, 7 January, just over a fortnight after Blake’s arrival, his own faultless escape having taken him via Paris, Berlin, through Checkpoint Charlie, and eventually into the protective arms of the Soviets. In the ensuing months his minders did all they could to keep him happy, supplying him with good food, drink and the company of attractive women. To occupy his restless mind, they found him a job as an English translator for Progress Publishers.

Bourke, however, missed the freedom and the familiarity of London and Dublin life. When he was not writing, he had liked nothing better
than to take up a chair in the corner of a pub, a whiskey in his hand, and regale an appreciative audience with stories of his exploits; there was no equivalent outlet in this drab city. The ubiquitous, shabby little kiosks on most street corners were a poor substitute for a good pub, even though their customers had a similar capacity for drink as he did. ‘The Russians don’t drink themselves under a table – they drink themselves under a snow bank,’ was how he derisively described the street scene on a winter’s day.

In Moscow, his substantial allowance of three hundred roubles a month (£30 a week) enabled him to dine out at the best establishments, but nearly always in a carefully controlled fashion, and often in the company of Blake and their KGB minders. When he evaded the attentions of his watchers and ventured into local restaurants, he discovered they all had identical printed menus, and the unappetising fare comprised two basic dishes – a kind of Beef Stroganoff, and a scrawny fried chicken. The gregarious Irishman, like Blake, found ordinary Muscovites distant, even unfriendly. He observed many of them playing chess on miniature boards – everywhere it seemed, even on buses. They kept their heads down, not necessarily by inclination, but out of anxiety at being seen engaging with a foreigner.

When he and Blake had been forced together for that month in Pat Pottle’s flat, they had tolerated each other because of what they had been through and achieved together, and because of the anticipation of the endgame. To Bourke, it now felt as if he was imprisoned in a different way, and the man sharing this particular ‘cell’ was someone with whom he had very little in common. More than that, he began to perceive, rightly or wrongly, with some bitterness, that Blake had merely used him to make his escape, and was now quite prepared to discard him.

Gone was the ever-ready smile, the patient and understanding disposition, the willingness to listen and sympathise. Blake was now sullen, intolerant, arrogant and pompous. The George Blake we had all known in Wormwood Scrubs had been a completely false image, deliberately and calculatingly projected for his own long-term benefit. In Moscow, Blake had suddenly, dramatically, reverted to type.

Over time, Bourke’s disillusionment with his old friend knew no bounds. Now he was ‘the vainest man I had ever met in my life . . . more than vain, a complete narcissist, unashamedly in love with his own image . . . he had great delusions of grandeur and loved to strut about the flat in his crimson dressing gown, a glass of champagne held delicately between his fingers.’

By contrast with Bourke’s revulsion and scorn, Blake’s own reflection on the parting of the ways was less personal, and more magnanimous:

Sean had neither the ideological commitment to Soviet society nor the imperative need to adapt to it which I had. I knew I would have to spend a great part, and possibly all of my life in this country, and was intent therefore from the outset on looking on the positive side of things and making the best of it . . . Sean’s approach was not unnaturally quite the opposite.

He had been reluctant to come here in the first place and wanted to leave again as soon as possible. He was determined from the start not to like it here and latched on to everything negative, which could confirm him in his intention. For this I could not and did not blame him.

Blake was constantly mindful of protecting the identities of the Randles and Pat Pottle, and, to that end, did his best to persuade Bourke to stay in Moscow for as long as he could bear it: ‘This he strongly resented and he never forgave me for not taking his side.’

After the visit to the British Embassy, Bourke spent several days sleeping rough in Izmailovsky Park before he returned to their flat.
Given his state of mind and his approach to the British government, his KGB minders thought it prudent to remove both him and Blake from Moscow. The warring odd couple therefore embarked on a Grand Tour of the Soviet Union, starting off in Leningrad before moving on to Vilnius (Lithuania), Odessa (Ukraine), Sochi (on the Black Sea coast), Yerevan (Armenia), Tashkent and other towns in Uzbekistan, before returning to the capital.

Bourke’s mood calmed somewhat after this month away. An MI5 source reported seeing him in a Moscow theatre just before Christmas, looking ‘fairly prosperous and happy’. It improved further the following year when he started a relationship with a young university language student called Larisa. He met her on one of his frequent sojourns in the Warsaw Hotel, where he was made to stay when Blake’s mother arrived to take up residence with her son in the flat. Later on he was allocated an apartment of his own. By this point his relationship with Blake had healed to the extent that they would meet regularly once or twice a week for a meal and a discussion.

In the autumn of 1967, however, with the help of his twin brother, Kevin, Bourke finally obtained a one-month visa to enable him to travel back to Ireland. Once there, he would begin a legal battle against the British authorities’ attempts to extradite him to stand trial for his part in the Blake escape. He would also finish work on his book about the whole saga, which he had long seen as his ticket to fame and fortune. He had attempted to smuggle a portion of the manuscript out of Moscow in August – via his brother – but the authorities had thwarted him and confiscated it on the way to the airport.

On Tuesday, 22 October, when Bourke landed at Amsterdam en route to Dublin, the press was out in force, eager to hear the full story from the inside. He made sure they had it, chapter and verse.

Bourke’s departure coincided with significant changes to Blake’s own situation. His mother’s lengthy visits were a source of great comfort, but because of security considerations, he remained socially rather
isolated. For instance, it would be nearly two years before he could visit the Bolshoi Theatre, because of fears that a foreigner would spot him and report his presence to Western agencies. But by the autumn of 1968, however, he was beginning to settle into his new life. In particular, he had started a relationship with Ida, a woman thirteen years his junior, who he had met in the spring while on a cruise on the River Volga.

Ida had studied mathematics and physics as a student but, like Blake, she was a good linguist, and at that time she was working as a French translator at Moscow’s Central Mathematical Economic Institute (TsEMI), located in a former mansion house in the Neskuchny Gardens, the oldest and one of the grandest parks in the city. She was an effervescent type with a love of the outdoor life – a swimmer, skier and long distance walker – and so not unlike Gillian. Blake eventually married her in 1969 and was introduced to her wide circle of friends, which helped bind him more fully into Russian life.

For some time after his arrival in late 1966, he had been extensively debriefed by the KGB. He also wrote essays and papers about the workings of SIS, but there was only so much analysis he could usefully provide, and he soon hankered for more challenging work. Early in 1969, he was given a position as a Dutch translator at the same publishing house that had briefly employed Bourke. He regarded the job as far from stimulating and, anyway, most of it was carried out in isolation at his flat, when he really craved company, particularly of the intellectual kind.

The scale of the KGB’s infiltration of SIS during the 1940s and 50s meant that Blake had joined an extended family of expat British spies and traitors in Moscow, and it was through such a route that he was to be saved from boredom. However, the fortunes of the three members of the Cambridge Five spy ring had been mixed. Guy Burgess, who had arrived with Donald Maclean in 1951 died of liver disease in August 1963, aged only 52, long before Blake’s arrival. By temperament and
lifestyle he was never suited to the Communist way of life, and he missed Britain badly – the pubs, the intellectual badinage, the ease of casual homosexual encounters. He refused point blank to learn the language and thus assimilate himself properly into Soviet life.

Maclean was quite different and had approached his exile in Moscow with a fierce determination to reshape himself to the needs of an alien environment. Like Burgess, he had been a heavy drinker, a near alcoholic in Cairo, but over time he gave up drink almost entirely, only on rare occasions pouring himself a glass of Scotch. He steadily mastered the Russian language, being able to read and write it fluently after just four years. As well as belonging to the Communist Party, he was also determined as far as possible to live the life of any ordinary member, and so foreswore many of the luxuries he was entitled to as an
apparatchik
– the luxury
dacha
and the official car.

He was no unthinking convert, however, and among the highest quarters of the party, Maclean’s views were regarded as unorthodox and unwelcome. He held the old men of the Brezhnev regime in contempt, often criticising the Arms Race as wasteful and damaging to the economy, and also lamenting the lack of political freedom. Indeed, he was friendly with a number of leading dissidents and, when they were jailed, even donated part of his salary to help their families. Yet this did not prevent Maclean from gaining a senior position at one of Moscow’s leading think tanks, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, known as IMEMO. Here he established himself as one of the preeminent experts on British foreign affairs, even writing a short book entitled
British Foreign Policy Since Suez: 1956–1968,
which was also published in the United Kingdom.

It was Maclean who found Blake a job at IMEMO, freeing him from his dull translation duties. Blake soon fell under the spell of a man whom he felt to be a kindred spirit: ‘There was a strong Calvinistic streak in him, inherited from his Scottish ancestors and this gave us something in common.’ But it seemed much more than a mutual liking for each other’s company and shared intellectual interests.
Maclean was only nine years older, but became something of a father figure. Visitors to Blake’s flat or
dacha
in later years would be struck by two photographs on the table by the side of his chair in the sitting room: one of his mother, the other of Maclean.

When Maclean died in 1983, as a mark of the esteem in which he held Blake, he bequeathed to the younger man his vast library of books, including a collection of Trollope, Macaulay’s
History of England
, Morley’s
Life of Gladstone
, and the memoirs of various Prime Ministers, including Macmillan and Eden. He also left him something else – his old tweed flat-cap, its inner lining frayed and stained. For many years afterwards, Blake wore it.

Blake always thought Maclean only spied ‘out of a sense of duty’ but believed Kim Philby, the third member of the Cambridge Five, saw espionage more as a vocation, while also relishing the adrenalin rush from intrigue, and the heady sense of hidden power. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not until the spring of 1970 that Blake and Philby finally met. They had both worked at Broadway during the war, albeit on different floors and in very different roles, and both had been in Beirut in 1960 and 1961: Blake at MECAS, Philby reporting for
The Economist
after being forced out of the Service amid suspicions over his loyalty. Nonetheless, it was not until they were each invited to a lunch party given in their honour by the KGB hierarchy that they eventually sat down together.