George Blake
In 1956 the Eden government’s folly led it to collude with France and Israel in bombing and invading Egypt in a bid to retake control of the Suez Canal. The failure at Suez led to Eden’s supersession as Prime Minister by Harold Macmillan, and to a mood of national demoralization. ‘A people zealous in imposing themselves, their beliefs and their institutions upon others, as the British were in the last century, may lose heart when they can impose themselves no longer,’ Michael Young wrote four years after the Suez affair. ‘In such a situation a whole people may freeze into insularity, like a melancholic who has withdrawn into himself.’ In the altered mood after 1956, Young recognized, ‘Britain needs Europe even more than Europe needs Britain. It is out of the dialectic relationship between discontent in Britain, and union with Europe, that progress will come, towards a more lively country.’ The preference of older generations, the less educated and the xenophobes for ‘wooden-headed jingoism’ seemed to Young ‘suicidal as well as morally disgraceful’.37
It was against this national background that the case of the SIS turncoat George Blake @ Behar developed. The public narrative that was promoted at the time of his trial and reiterated in his memoirs tells how he was captured by the communists in North Korea in 1950 and spent three years in captivity, during which he was indoctrinated with Marxist theories and was shocked, he said, by the relentless bombing of Korean villages by American Flying Fortresses. He converted to communism, and worked as a Soviet spy after his return to SIS in 1953. For some two years he used a German miniature camera to take about 200 exposures of documents that crossed his desk. In 1955 he was posted to the SIS station in West Berlin. There he filched details of American, British and West German spy networks in East Germany. On the basis of his material some 500 agents in East Germany were detained in April 1955: some forty of them were killed as a result of Blake’s betrayals. He had previously betrayed the Anglo-American tunnel in Berlin, which began tapping East German official telephone conversations in May of that year. Some 368,000 telephone conversations were recorded before the East Germans staged an accidental discovery of the tapping system in April 1956. It took until 1958 for all these recordings to be transcribed in offices at Clarence Gate in the Regent’s Park. In 1959 Blake was posted to an SIS section from where he recruited British businessmen, students and tourists travelling to the Soviet bloc, placed interpreters, microphones and bugged telephones in targeted situations and solicited diplomats from Warsaw Pact countries. All these activities he betrayed. Every document of significance that crossed his desk was photographed by him and sent onwards to Moscow.
A class-bound rigmarole was spun as an explanatory narrative for Blake. His memoirs, written in Russian retirement, put his objection to class distinctions foremost among the reasons that made him receptive to his reading of Marx’s Das Kapital and Lenin’s The State and Revolution while in captivity in Korea. He professed to loathe individual competitiveness, whether in sports or beauty contests, as well as the ‘sheer snobbishness’ of the English. His complaints about the ‘class consciousness’ of his official surroundings signify no more than the Marxist fixation with class analysis at all costs. It sounds as if Blake was parroting similar lines, learnt by rote, to those instilled into that infinitely less important spy, Marshall. Historians have followed his explanations too credulously, as if his professed discomfort with SIS’s pride of caste excused his espionage and as if there was not comparable pride in counterpart Soviet organizations. Blake supposedly hoped to marry Iris Peake, daughter of the Minister of Pensions, Lord Ingleby, and granddaughter of the Earl of Essex. She is described as ‘upper-crust’, their relationship is said to have splintered when it hit ‘the immovable British class-system’, and Blake’s rejection as a suitor ‘sharpened his resentment of the British establishment’.38
Probably the true narrative is completely different. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, with a Dutch mother and an eminent Egyptian communist as an admired cousin, Blake worked for the Dutch resistance as a courier after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The Dutch resistance was riven with communists, and the likeliest story is that when he came to England in 1942 he had already discussed working for Moscow. In 1944 he became a junior member of the Dutch Section of SIS. Why and when he was activated by Moscow to spy on SIS is not yet clear. It is unlikely to be in the circumstances or at the date that have hitherto been given.
The Polish intelligence officer and triple agent Michael Goleniewski, codenamed SNIPER in Washington and LAVINIA in London, defected to the USA in January 1961, and provided evidence that led to the arrest in England of the Portland spy ring and of Blake. For five days in April 1961 Blake was interrogated by a team of three: Harold (‘Harry’) Shergold, Terence Lecky and a former police officer, Ben Johnson. Shergold had been educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before working as an assistant master at Cheltenham Grammar School in 1937–40. He had served as an officer in SIME in 1941–6 and as an SIS officer in Germany monitoring Soviet Russia in 1947–54. Lecky had been educated at Winchester and Clare College, Cambridge (where he was a modern languages scholar) before SIS postings in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. These were not the class-bound dunderheads or clubland boobies imagined by Whitehall’s critics.
Blake was allowed to return to his mother’s flat at Radlett, when the first day’s interview was suspended at six in the evening, and asked to return next morning at ten. His interrogation remained courteous and unthreatening, but he had no doubt that SIS knew that he was working for the Soviets. After lunch on the third day, Thursday 6 April, Shergold’s team told Blake that they believed that he had confessed under torture, when he was a prisoner in Korea, to being a British intelligence officer and had then been blackmailed into espionage. ‘I felt an upsurge of indignation,’ Blake claimed in his memoirs. ‘I 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!”’ On Friday 7 April Blake was taken into informal custody for the weekend. He was driven in a car with Ben Johnson and John Quine, head of SIS counter-espionage (formerly posted in Tokyo and Warsaw), with Shergold in a second car and police escort cars before and aft, to a Hampshire village where Shergold’s mother had a cottage. Shergold’s wife Bevis (who had been an intelligence servicewoman in the war and competed as a shot-putter and discus-thrower at the Olympic Games of 1948) received them. In the evening Blake made pancakes for his Special Branch guards. He shared a bedroom with Quine, the cottage was ringed by Special Branch officers, and a police car drove slowly behind when he went for walks with Shergold or Quine. This bizarre situation struck the captive as ‘endearingly English’.39
Dick White, who had been moved from Director General of MI5 to Chief of SIS in 1956, thought Blake’s admissions to Shergold, Lecky and Quine showed instability and self-importance: he judged Blake to be more a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist than a master-spy. Quine, who had known Blake for years, thought him too unbalanced to merit prosecution. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon he was driven to an SIS safe-house at East Sheen, and on Monday 10 April he was taken to Scotland Yard for arrest. White was concerned that Blake might withdraw his admissions and force the open testing of the evidence against him. ‘We can’t go through the agony of our operations being presented in court,’ he told his SIS staff. ‘If he isn’t prepared to plead guilty, we’ll just put him on a plane to Moscow.’40
A month later Blake became the first SIS officer to be tried for treason. He appeared before Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice, who had been privately told of the forty-odd executions attributed to Blake’s betrayals. The public were shocked and uncomprehending when Parker passed what seemed a savage sentence of forty-two years in prison. �
�Naturally, we can say nothing,’ Harold Macmillan noted on 4 May. ‘The public do not know & cannot be told that he belonged to MI6 – an organisation which does not technically exist. So I had rather a rough passage in the H of C.’ He invited the leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, to a confidential briefing together with three Labour Privy Councillors, Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, Emanuel Shinwell and George Brown: ‘I only hope the last one will not chatter too much in his cups.’ Ten days later Macmillan noted of the Blake case, ‘The Press has been terrible, without any sense of responsibility. They want sensation. Also, since the Press is tired of me & the Govt, and since I refuse to run after the Press Lords, they are all attacking me. We are said to be exhausted, ageing, & practically in articulo mortis.’ At his meeting with Gaitskell and the Labour Privy Councillors, Brown ‘was sober (it was 11.30 a.m.) but had clearly been pretty bad the night before. I told them the facts of the Blake case & that I intended to appoint a small committee to enquire into the whole question.’41
The committee appointed to report on security procedures and communist penetration in the civil service was chaired by the jurist Lord Radcliffe. After Radcliffe had submitted his final report to Downing Street, but before its publication, Macmillan again briefed Alexander, Brown and Shinwell on terms of sworn Privy Council confidentiality on the established facts. Brown, who, noted Macmillan, ‘was so rude that I could have kicked him out of the room’, promptly broke his Privy Councillor’s oath and leaked all he heard to Pincher of the Daily Express. He complained to Pincher of an Establishment ‘cover-up’ which had to be exposed, and added that his duty to the Labour party, which was using real or factitious security concerns to injure the Conservative government, overrode his duty as a Privy Councillor. Pincher however attributed Brown’s betrayal to ‘hunger for personal power’. The Labour party began calling for the appointment of a minister of security, regardless of the totalitarian connotations which other people heard in such a job title. The Tories countered privately that no politician of any ability would take such a benighted post: his only purpose would be to deflect the blame from the Prime Minister on to himself whenever a security scandal broke; he would be a lightning-conductor or fall-guy putting his hopes of political promotion at risk.42
The parliamentary performances of George Brown were bent on damaging the Office and diplomats against whom he nursed tormented prejudices. As Foreign Secretary in 1966–8, he evinced an obsessive resentment of the phrase ‘Her Majesty’s Ambassador’ as applied to dignify people whom he regarded as his subordinates. ‘He’s my man,’ Brown used to say both contemptuously and possessively of ambassadors. He was so sexually suggestive when drunk that Martine de Courcel, Claude Pompidou and Jacqueline Couve de Murville would not sit next to him at Paris banquets. One of Brown’s nastiest traits was his public humiliation of his admirable wife Sophie Levene with such shouts as ‘Shut up! You’re nothing but an East End Yid.’ In a generation of alcoholic frontbenchers he and the Tories’ lazy, emollient Reginald Maudling were the most blatant. ‘Man for man, most people would, I imagine, prefer to entrust the Foreign Office to, say, Maudling than George Brown,’ Donald Maclean wrote in exile.43
After Radcliffe’s report had been published in 1962, Burgess telephoned Driberg, who obligingly regaled the Moscow line to newspaper readers. ‘All that I read of what is going on in England now and the letters that I get from friends in the Establishment’ – Burgess emphasized these words to Driberg – ‘make me delighted to be here. These letters show me what a ghastly state of collective neurosis people in Britain are living in.’ He was discouraged from thoughts of returning to England, he told Driberg, by ‘this new outbreak of McCarthyism in England – the Radcliffe Report and all that’.44
Blake was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 with the help of a ladder made of knitting needles. The escape was organized by an alcoholic Irish labourer and two Committee of Nuclear Disarmament campaigners who thought his forty-two-year sentence was inhumane. The KGB had no part in the plot. According to Markus Wolf, Blake’s peculiar sadness, which Maclean and Philby were spared, was to outlive the Soviet Union. After 1990 he was marooned in an adopted homeland which had discarded the cause to which – perhaps from the age of eighteen – he had dedicated his life.
Class McCarthyism
Philby in his insincere, scheming memoirs denigrated the security services as a posse of placemen, parasites, mediocrities, cretins and snobs. Other writers have been keen to follow him in depicting SIS as an ‘upper-class preserve, effete, riddled with class prejudice, only too ready to cover up when one of their members came under suspicion’. Tim Milne commented on such caricatures, ‘Well, it makes more interesting reading than the truth, which is that in Section V [of SIS] at any rate we were a mixed but mostly middle-class lot.’ Overseas agents included journalists, commercial representatives of English businesses in foreign capitals, bank and shipping clerks: usually they had military or naval experience simply because most men of their generation did after the war of 1914–18. Often they were recruited because they were good linguists or had lived abroad and knew foreign countries.45
‘The Old Boy Network came under heavier fire, following the Burgess and Philby affairs,’ wrote David Footman. He conceded that the old system permitted abuses, ‘but at least it gave to many of us a code which we valued’ and ‘enabled the British Empire to be run, on the whole successfully, for a great many years, with far less personnel and far less talent than would otherwise have been needed’. Such still, small voices of calm were not much heard in the 1960s. The excitable clamour of such men as John le Carré was all too audible (it was always men who raised the din against the Establishment: women knew that there were more basic structural prejudices, more offensive social and economic and legal inequities and more impenetrable workplace barriers than class). In 1968 le Carré, in an influential essay on Philby, depicted ‘the Establishment’ as ‘stupid, credulous, smug and torpid’, as behaving with ‘grotesque ineptitude’, and thus ‘a microcosm of that “great capitalist class” now in the process of internal disintegration’. For him vain, murderous Philby was ‘the spy and catalyst whom the Establishment deserved’.46
Moscow scored a huge success in the decades after 1951 in discrediting the government apparatus of London. Forty years of well-spun revelations about the Cambridge spies, the propaganda element in the Marshall, Vassall and Blake cases, contributed to a Marxist presentation of a ruling class in retreat, taking the wrong decisions, preferring the wrong people. This was accentuated in the Profumo affair. The Secretary of State for War had enjoyed a short affair in 1961 with a young woman named Christine Keeler. In January 1963 she was induced to say, by journalists who had bought her story and wanted value for money, that she had simultaneously been the lover of a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy named Eugene Ivanov. The sex with Ivanov was a male journalists’ fantasy; but the story was virile enough to be used by Macmillan’s political enemies to belabour his government and the civil service.47
Thus the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Normanbrook, ‘a real old Establishment figure’ standing at the acme of Whitehall, was the target of the Sunday Mirror’s front-page headline ‘Who Runs This Country, Anyhow?’ at the height of the Profumo press stunt in June 1963. It attacked ‘Lord Normanbrook of Chelsea’, as he had become earlier that year, for his supposed inadequacies in responding to the (non-existent) security risks of Profumo’s involvement with Keeler. Normanbrook was damned for being accountable neither to parliament nor to the people. ‘Is it safe for the Mandarins of Whitehall, who know so little of life outside their own narrow world, to wield such influence?’ Elsewhere in the ‘Who Runs This Country?’ issue of the Sunday Mirror the ubiquitous Crossman claimed that the British people were stuck with ‘an Establishment still dominated by the mandarin mind which despises the expert and the technician and relies on a genteel amateurism out of date even in Edwardian Britain’. This class-bound dilettantism was the cause of the successive
‘security scandals which have disgraced Macmillan’s regime’. The journalist and former SIS officer Malcolm Muggeridge, who loved making mischief, revelled in the Profumo affair. He saw its indignities as the culmination of a series of episodes that had begun with Burgess and Maclean – ‘all calculated to undermine the repute, not just of Upper Class individuals and circles, but of the class system’. Muggeridge was both puritanical and sexually vain: his middle age had been full of serial adulteries; his juices were now drying, and within a few years he became sexually abstinent, a Catholic convert and a shrill opponent of the Permissive Society. His disapproval of other people’s pleasures was already evident by 1963: ‘the Upper Classes’, he told Sunday Mirror readers, ‘have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy’. He had a particular dislike of male homosexuality, and on another occasion called Inverchapel ‘a well-known paederast’.48
Enemies Within Page 58