On one occasion, Wesseling had a curious conversation with Blake that, in hindsight, took on a greater significance:
There was at the time the discovery of a British naval officer [Henry Houghton] passing secrets to the Russians. George discussed that case at length with me, and he told me, ‘You know, this is really, really small beer’. I said, ‘Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s not so small, betraying your country in that way.’
But he merely said, ‘No, those sorts of people are paid, and the real spies are those who are not paid and do it for conviction.’ Of course at the time, I had no idea he was referring to himself.
In Wesseling’s view, Blake had few equals on the Arabic course: ‘He was the best student, probably because of his blood, his father, but also because he was very intelligent – he was the star of the class. He was admired by the younger students for his ability, but also for his strong, original opinions on most matters.’ Not everyone shared Wesseling’s high opinion of Blake, though. John Coles – later Sir John, Private Secretary to Mrs Thatcher and Head of the Diplomatic Service – thought him ‘a dull swot’: ‘He was always walking about with those word cards, checking the English on the front with the Arabic on the back. He answered questions with a broad smile, but did not have anything very interesting to say.’ Coles did recall a group outing, which gave a surprising glimpse of Blake’s true state of mind:
We had formed a dining club called, I think, ‘The Mountain’ . . . the normally punctilious Blake had turned up very late for one of our dinners, probably because he was seeing some agent somewhere in the city. We further remembered going on to the Casino Du Liban and playing roulette.
Blake had bet on single numbers. More, he had won a pile on one number and immediately put all the proceeds on another number. It takes a real gambler to do that. And that of course is the point. We were watching someone who was engaged in a lifetime gamble and got his excitement from living on the edge. But it had not struck us so at the time.
Blake may have been away from operational work, immersed in study, but the KGB remained eager to stay in touch with their prize. Soon after his arrival in Lebanon, he made contact with the organisation’s Head of Station in Beirut, Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin. There was little information Blake could pass on, but the two men decided to meet once every two months regardless, and Nedosekin gave him a telephone number on which he could be reached in the event of an emergency.
What Blake did not know was that SIS was equally keen to keep an eye on him. All the while, a couple of his fellow students – who were really British agents – were doing their level best to monitor his movements. They were placed there in Beirut because, back in the summer of 1960, although Terence Lecky had provisionally cleared him in the mole hunt, doubts persisted. Lecky and his colleagues retained Blake on their shortlist of three as the candidate for the traitor in their midst, and wanted him isolated and kept under surveillance until they could completely prove his innocence – or guilt. So although Blake believed he had won a battle to be sent to Shemlan, the reality was that his employers had eventually been equally keen for him to go there.
Oblivious to the scrutiny, his studies were progressing smoothly. He had passed the tests at the end of the first term with flying colours and, as Easter approached, he was revising hard and hoping for even better results in the second set of exams.
After the Easter break, students were due to head off for month-long placements with Arab families in various parts of the region, where they would have to speak the language daily and would hopefully build up their confidence and expertise. With Gillian expecting their third child, the Blakes had to come up with a different plan: George would spend his placement with a Lebanese family in the nearby village of Souk El Gharb, and it was agreed that his mother would come out and look after the boys while Gillian was in hospital.
Seemingly free of the intrigues of London and Berlin, indulging his passion for languages, and soon to be a father again, perhaps, for the first time since his posting to Korea, Blake began to appreciate a modicum of peace.
Back in Broadway, what had once been mere doubts about Blake were hardening into near certainty: SIS’s most respected Soviet specialist, having studied the evidence provided by Goleniewski and Eitner, was now ready to confront the man he was ‘90 per cent sure’ was the traitor. Blake’s nemesis would be Harold Taplin Shergold, known to colleagues and friends as ‘Shergy’, an intelligence officer of a retiring disposition, but possessing an outstanding intellect, great drive and complete moral integrity.
Shergold, born in 1915, was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, before becoming a schoolmaster at Cheltenham Grammar School. When war broke out, he joined the Hampshire Regiment, but quickly switched to the intelligence corps. He eventually joined the Combined Service Interrogation Centre, based in Rome, from where he was attached to the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy. So obviously effective were his skills that he was put in charge of all interrogations from the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt to Cassino in Italy. Shergold chose to join SIS in 1949, and, as the pace of the Cold War quickened, was posted to Germany, where he earned a reputation for running agents with calmness, persistence and authority. In 1954, he was brought back to Head Office to manage agent networks in the Baltic States.
Of no great height, slim, with open features and a high forehead, Shergold’s ‘bright eyes and compressed vitality suggested intelligence, competence and tight restraint’. He was revered by his colleagues in Broadway. ‘In the office he seemed to be utterly reliable. You believed what he said, you listened to his every word. He was a real leader of the very best sort,’ said an SIS officer who was one of Shergold’s protégés in the 1960s. ‘He led because of what he was, he was “all of a piece”. He could be very tough – but he was also very loyal to his staff.’
Shergold was a very private man, rigidly separating work from personal life. He was never in danger of breaching the intelligence officer’s dictum that ‘a secret is for life’. Few photographs of him exist; he was to be particularly irritated – and only reluctantly acquiesced – in April 1961 when his CIA colleagues persuaded him to pose with them and the defector Oleg Penkovsky for a picture. Few colleagues knew his wife Bevis, who was an Olympic discus thrower and shot putter at the 1948 London games; nor did they know of Shergy’s lifelong charity work for Guide Dogs for the Blind. When he died in December 2000, not a single newspaper ran an obituary.
Goleniewski’s other British mole, LAMBDA 2, had already been unmasked by MI5 as Harry Houghton, a clerical officer at the Underwater Weapons Establishment in Portland. Houghton, a heavy drinker and black marketeer, was recruited by Polish intelligence while on the staff of the British Naval Attaché in Warsaw in 1952. Back home, he was in an office where sensitive documents about submarine warfare regularly landed on his desk. He started to routinely pass these secrets on to Polish spies, who in turn passed them on to the Soviets. Houghton also recruited his girlfriend, Ethel Gee, a filing clerk at the base, to help with his spying. The MI5 investigators on their trail stumbled on a much bigger enterprise – in fact they uncovered a whole spy ring.
Their surveillance established that Houghton and Gee were regularly in touch with a businessman called Gordon Lonsdale, who leased jukebox machines, and an antiquarian bookseller named Peter Kroger, and his wife Helen. Lonsdale and the Krogers were revealed to be ‘illegals’, Soviet spies who had been living in England under deep cover for several years. Lonsdale was in fact Konon Trofimovich Molody, the son of two Soviet scientists, who was selected as a potential foreign intelligence officer from childhood. He had established his fictional identity in Canada, where he obtained a passport in the name of a ‘dead double’. Peter and Helen Kroger were in reality Morris and Ethel Cohen, longstanding American KGB illegal agents. At the Old Bailey on 22 March, Molody was given a twenty-five-year sentence, the Cohens twenty years, and Houghton and Gee were each sentenced to fifteen years.
&nb
sp; Now it was SIS’s turn to trap LAMBDA 1, and by the time of the Portland Spy Ring trial, Shergold felt he had assembled all the pieces of the jigsaw. The Golenieswki material had all been re-evaluated, and documents known to have fallen into KGB hands painstakingly cross-checked and cross-referenced with every report that had landed on the desks of SIS officers in Berlin during the period 1955–59. There was one common denominator – one man who appeared to have had access to them all. Then there was the Eitner evidence. One clue, above all others, persuaded Shergold of Blake’s treachery: why had the microphones and recorders in Horst and Brigitte’s flat only been installed after Blake had left Berlin? Surely it was because the KGB had no need to listen covertly to his conversations: he was already one of them.
Easter was approaching. Dick White, the Chief, who had been closely briefed on Shergold’s findings, was worried that any delay might risk the possibility of an internal leak. The Lebanon was not a secure place for an interrogation and so he wanted Blake brought back to London as quickly as possible. Letters were despatched to Nicholas Elliott, the SIS Chief of Station in Beirut, disclosing that Blake was a suspected Soviet mole and urging the officer to tell him that he should return to London immediately, on the pretext of discussing a future posting. The second letter was for Elliott to hand personally to Blake.
When the letters arrived, Elliott was shaken by the revelation. Like many other senior figures in SIS, he had regarded Blake as a most promising officer. Nonetheless, he quickly got to work, contriving an apparently random encounter with the suspected traitor at which he could relay the request from Broadway. That meeting took place on the evening of Saturday, 25 March.
Earlier that day, Elliott’s secretary, a friend and former work colleague of Gillian’s, went to the hospital in Beirut where the Blakes’ youngest son, Jamie, was being treated after catching pneumonia. The boy was out of danger, but his mother was sleeping in the hospital with him, while Blake was visiting. The secretary told the couple she was going to see the production of Charley’s Aunt by the local British drama group that evening. She had a spare ticket and wondered whether Blake would like to accompany her? Blake was reluctant at first, pleading pressure of work – his end-of-term exams were just a few days away – but Gillian persuaded him that it would be good to take a break from his studies, so he eventually acceded.
Blake and the secretary enjoyed the first act, and then decided to go to the bar during the interval. There, they encountered Nicholas Elliott and his wife Elizabeth. ‘In the course of conversation, Elliott drew me aside and said he was glad I happened to be there as this had saved him a trip up the mountain to see me,’ recalled Blake. ‘He had received a letter from Head Office with instructions for me to return to London for a few days’ consultation in connection with a new appointment. It suggested that I should travel on Easter Monday so as to be available in London early on Tuesday morning.’
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
The 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.’
The Greatest Traitor Page 25