Similar questions followed over the next few hours. When lunchtime arrived, and with it a much-needed break, Blake’s uncertain position was further underlined when nobody suggested going to eat together. Instead, pariah-like, he headed out alone to a favourite Italian restaurant in Soho, and anxiously considered his fate.
The afternoon’s session only deepened his unease. Shergold moved the conversation on from Berlin to Poland, displaying on the table all the SIS documents that had fallen into the hands of the Polish Intelligence Service. Access to these papers had been highly restricted but Blake had been on the distribution list in every case. Was there anything he could tell them about that? ‘I said I couldn’t, and that their guess was as good as mine . . . it was clear to me that they must have a source in the Polish Intelligence Service at a pretty high level.’ As the afternoon went on, the inquisition – for that is what it had become – reached its logical conclusion. Blake was bluntly accused of working for the KGB. ‘This I flatly denied. At six o’clock we broke up and they asked me to come back the following morning at 10 a.m. On the way back to Radlett, I kept turning over in my mind all that had been said that day. Of one thing I was no longer in any doubt – SIS knew that I was working for the Soviets. Otherwise such a grave accusation would never have been levelled at me.’
By now, the reason for the interrogation taking place in Carlton Gardens was clear to him: they had wanted to record the conversation, and it was a far more suitable place to set up the necessary equipment than the cramped offices in Broadway.
That evening, Blake kept up the agonising pretence that all was well. Over dinner with his mother he continued blithely to discuss plans for the weekend in Shemlan. As he reflected on the day’s events, he concluded: ‘I was in deep trouble, but I thought I could still save myself.’
Day two of the interrogation again focused on the Polish documents and the likelihood that they had been photographed and passed on to the Soviets by someone in the Berlin station. Shergold led the way again, piling up small pieces of additional evidence, accumulating them into a substantial case. Once more, Blake was accused, quite straightforwardly, of being a Soviet agent. ‘It wasn’t hostile,’ Blake recalled, ‘but it was persistent. I continued to pretend I knew no more than they did. Somehow, I still hoped to get out of it.’
At lunchtime Blake took his mind off the interrogation for a while with a walk over to Gamages, a department store at Holborn. In the ‘People’s Popular Emporium’, he ordered a mosquito net his wife had requested, ensuring it would be delivered in time for his weekend journey to Lebanon, though he felt ever more pessimistic about his chances of being able to deliver it in person.
That afternoon, Shergold was interested in exploring any ideological motives Blake may have had for his treachery. When and how did his loyalty to Marxism and the Soviet Union begin? How had it taken such firm root? Blake managed to survive this line of questioning and, at the end of the day, returned once more to the flat in Radlett in utter turmoil: ‘These were, without doubt, the most difficult hours of my life. Knowing that I was in serious danger, that, whatever happened, life would never be the same for any of us, I had to pretend to my mother that all was well.’
On Thursday, 6 April, day three of the interrogation, Shergold decided to adopt a different technique. He had come round to the view that Blake was as much an emotional traitor as a professional one, and what was needed was something to spark his sense of moral indignation. ‘Whether by luck or by planning, they hit upon the right psychological approach,’ Blake recalled. What they said to him was this: ‘We know that you worked for the Soviets, but we understand why. While you were their prisoner in Korea, you were tortured and made to confess that you were a British intelligence officer. From then on, you were blackmailed and had no choice but to collaborate with them.’
After hours of relentless questioning, met throughout by a solid brick wall of answers, Shergold, Lecky and Johnson were astonished by Blake’s reply.
When they put the case in this light, something happened which went against all the dictates of elementary common sense and the instinct of self-preservation. All I can say is that it was a gut reaction. Suddenly I felt an upsurge of indignation and 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 of my own accord.’
Blake’s account of his interrogation was first told in his autobiography in 1990 but, years earlier, in 1964, when discussing this pivotal moment while in Wormwood Scrubs prison, he gave a slightly different explanation for his outburst. In that account, there was no ideological outrage, but rather a curious, inverted moral reasoning. Fellow prisoner Kenneth de Courcy recalled Blake’s words: ‘If I denied what I’d done, I would have had to live with a lie on my lips, and I couldn’t have tolerated myself for doing that.’
Whatever the impulse behind its collapse, the wall suddenly came crashing down. Shergold and his team had won a confession, or at least the beginning of one. Then, after the hours of pent-up tension, Blake began to unburden himself in extraordinary fashion: ‘I explained, in great detail, why I did it and what I had done. Their attitude didn’t change, they continued to be polite, even friendly.’
A confession to an SIS tribunal was one thing but if Blake was to be prosecuted, statements made to police that could be submitted to a regular court of law would be necessary. Special Branch officers Detective Superintendent Louis Gale and Detective Chief Inspector Ferguson Smith arrived on the scene. They told him that there was evidence that he had committed an offence or offences against the Official Secrets Act, and they cautioned him. Blake told them he wanted to make a statement and, over the course of the afternoon, proceeded to confess his treachery. It was 8 p.m. before he told Gale and Smith that he wanted to stop. They agreed to resume the following day.
A chauffeur-driven car took Blake back to Radlett. He had been given strict instructions not to tell his mother, who had no idea her son was a Soviet agent, anything about what had taken place. He told her only that the trip to Beirut would have to be postponed as he had been asked to leave London for a few days to attend an important conference.
If there was a fleeting moment when he considered trying to escape, perhaps to reach the sanctuary of the Soviet Embassy, he quickly dismissed the idea: ‘It would have been impossible. I was already sure I was being followed. I felt the game was up.’
The next morning, Friday, 7 April, he was back at Carlton Gardens. Gale and Smith arrived at 3.15 p.m. to finish off his statement, which was finally completed by 6 p.m. In the course of the conversation, he also admitted to being in contact with a Soviet intelligence officer in Beirut in November 1960. Gale produced five photographs of Soviet officials in the Lebanon and asked him to pick the right man. Blake pointed to Nedosekin.
Dick White and his colleagues were in a dilemma. Blake’s unequivocal confession, welcome though it was, had been unexpected. Despite his statement to the police, they felt there was still much more they could extract from him, as he seemed in the mood to reveal anything and everything about his years as a KGB mole. As a result, instead of locking him up in a prison cell straightaway, Blake was driven under police escort to a small village in Hampshire, where Shergold and his wife Bevis had a cottage. Joining him on the journey were Ben Johnson and John Quine, Head of R5, the counter-espionage section of SIS which worked closely with MI5. It was a highly unusual way of treating a self-confessed traitor. Although Blake was being subjected to prolonged interrogation, to an outsider it might have looked like a weekend party among friends.
Special Branch officers ringed the house and every time Blake went for one of his numerous walks with Quine or Shergold, a police car followed slowly behind. At night, Quine shared a bedroom with
Blake, listening sympathetically as the confessor poured out his worries about his family’s future. Above all, they wanted to understand the motivation for what he had done. It was a strange weekend, as Blake remembered: ‘I particularly remember one afternoon which I spent in the kitchen making pancakes with the old grandmother. I am something of a specialist in this, and when it was suggested we should eat pancakes, I offered to make them.’
Throughout, as Shergold, Lecky and Quine learned of the full extent of Blake’s activities, they relayed their discoveries back to Broadway. In turn the Service liaised with Government ministers – including Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, whose brief covered the intelligence services – to formulate a plan of action. They were in uncharted territory. The old ploy of offering a traitor immunity from prosecution in exchange for full disclosure of his crimes surely did not apply: Blake was willingly, it appeared, offering up all his secrets. On the other hand, charging and prosecuting him in open court would have the disadvantage of exposing the Service to public attention and possible ridicule. Moreover, if Blake underwent a change of heart and decided to retract his confession, then that exposure could be exponentially disastrous.
Blake himself was contemplating a far worse fate: ‘I thought I might well be got rid of, even though it wasn’t British practice to assassinate people.’
He was driven back to London on Sunday afternoon and taken to an SIS safe house in Vicarage Road, East Sheen. Here, it appeared to him that his future was finally decided. ‘There had been frequent conversations in the house over the weekend, conducted in another room so I couldn’t hear what was being said,’ he recalled. ‘Then, in the course of Sunday night, while we were having supper in the kitchen, there was another telephone call. From the reaction of my colleagues I could see they weren’t best pleased with that; they had expected something different.’
A decision had now been made. At just after 7 a.m. on Monday, 10 April, Detective Superintendent Gale and Detective Chief Inspector Smith arrived at Vicarage Road. This time, they told Blake they were arresting him on a charge under Section One of the Official Secrets Act, 1911. He was driven to New Scotland Yard, where he was formally charged and cautioned, and then on to Bow Street Court, where the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Sir Robert Blundell, had organised a special hearing in circumstances of exceptional secrecy.
This was a closed hearing to which none of the usual court reporters had been invited. No official notice was posted afterwards and, apart from the Magistrate’s clerk, Blake and the Special Branch officers, no one witnessed the proceedings. It was as if they had never happened. In a matter of ten minutes, Blake was remanded in custody for a week. He was then taken immediately to Brixton prison, where he was put in a room in the hospital wing.
In the following days, his mood ranged from cautious optimism to utter despair. In his bleakest moments – even if he now realised that assassination was a far-fetched idea – he still wondered if he might face execution: ‘I believed that the maximum sentence for the offences I’d committed was fourteen years. On the other hand, I didn’t exclude the possibility – because I didn’t know so much about British law – of there being somewhere on the books an old law, dating back to the Middle Ages, which had never been abrogated, which would enable them to sentence me to death.’
While Blake spent his first night in jail, back in Shemlan, steps were being taken to inform his unsuspecting wife. ‘April 10 had been a lovely day, and although it was only 8.30 p.m., I had dozed off in my armchair,’ Gillian recalled. ‘Having helped Khadijh get Anthony and Jamie to bed, I was pretty tired. I was expecting my third child in six weeks’ time. Funnily enough, I had felt extremely restless all day. In fact, I was thinking of going down to Beirut to do some shopping, just for something to do.’ Instead, she received an unexpected visit from a couple called the Everitts, representatives of the British Embassy, who told her to stay in as a ‘Foreign Office official’ would be coming to see her that evening. She was surprised, but heartened, as she had heard no news from Blake since his departure for London a week before.
That evening she opened the door to John Quine, whom she had never met but knew was a close colleague of Blake’s. She thanked him for taking the trouble to come, but could sense embarrassment in his halting reply. So she poured them both a drink and sat down to listen to what he had to say: ‘First of all he asked me if I knew anything at all about what had happened, and quickly discovered I didn’t. Then he began to unveil a story of treason and duplicity that left me horror-struck. Horror at what had happened to our life, horror at what George had done to my country and to the Office. Horror – but not disbelief.’
Despite the shock of learning that her husband was a Soviet spy, she did not doubt what she was being told: ‘Clearly it was hard to believe, but I didn’t think for a moment that they’d made a mistake. I didn’t think, “They must have got hold of the wrong man, or this can’t be true” – even though, of course, I had no idea he was working for the Russians. As I thought back to George’s background, and to the six and a half years of our very happy married life, it all seemed to fit in somehow.’
Quine searched the house for evidence that could help the prosecution, and he found Blake’s diaries for 1946 to 1960 – the only years missing being the period when he was in Korea. The Everitts returned to pick him up at 11.15 p.m. Both they and Quine offered to stay the night but Gillian declined the offer: ‘I was just longing for them to go, and in the end everybody went off. I took some sleeping pills, which had a wonderfully tranquillising effect and made me feel quite out of this world, though I felt a bit like that anyway. But I didn’t sleep much.’
Next day, she started to pack up and get the children ready for a hasty return to London. Rather than risk being cornered by the press at her parents’ home in London, it was felt she should instead stay with friends in the country. John Quine and one of her friends from the Embassy, who was an old schoolmate, accompanied her on the journey home.
Meanwhile, at MECAS, word had begun to spread that Blake was facing some sort of charges of treachery – to the consternation of his fellow pupils. ‘The younger students in particular looked up to him and held him in great esteem. So they all got together to write a letter, a petition, to the Foreign Office, saying there must have been a mistake and George was innocent,’ recalled Louis Wesseling. ‘They took it to Alan Rothnie. To be quite honest, I don’t know if it was ever sent – but it was certainly written.’
In Brixton prison, Blake’s spirits were lifted by hearing the extraordinary news on the radio that Yuri Alexeyevitch Gagarin, the young Soviet cosmonaut, had become the first human being in space after his Vostok 1 craft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April. The Daily Mirror called it ‘The Greatest Story of Our Lifetime’. The carpenter’s boy from the small Russian village of Klushino had spent 89 minutes travelling in his capsule above Africa and South America. ‘It was a great boost to my morale . . . I experienced it as a confirmation that I had not laboured in vain, that I had helped those who were in the vanguard of progress, who were opening up new horizons and leading mankind to a happier future. I felt then that it showed Soviet society was ahead,’ Blake recalled.
Meanwhile, in Whitehall and the Inns of Court, careful preparations were being made for his trial – for how, exactly, the Establishment should present the case to the outside world. The strategy they settled on was, in short, to cover up as much as possible.
On Saturday, 15 April, Edward Heath chaired a meeting of Foreign Office and other government officials to come up with a plan of action for handling the media. They considered two options initially: first, to claim – or rather pretend – that Blake was a temporary but genuine member of the Foreign Service; or, secondly, to admit right from the start that he was not actually a Foreign Office employee and so imply that he was a spy. The former was swiftly ruled out, as ‘it would produce another Burgess and Maclean case with incalculable effects on the Foreign Service’. Unfortunately,
the alternative was also rejected. Heath and Dick White believed that it ‘would produce immediate grave repercussions in the Lebanon and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East, and would also destroy the valuable protection deriving from our traditional refusal to comment on intelligence matters’. Finally, they decided that government press offices would merely be instructed ‘to be as non-committal as possible’.
The notes of this meeting also show that a decision to try Blake in camera had already been taken in principle by that weekend.
To reinforce the Government’s approach, the D-Notice system was put into action. Launched in 1912 as a supposedly voluntary code that asked news editors not to publish or broadcast items that might endanger national security, in reality it had the force of law as few newspapers dared to ignore it. The D-Notice Secretary in 1961 – as he had been since 1945 – was the amiable 74-year-old Rear-Admiral Sir George Thomson. No stranger to espionage stories, in the preceding two decades he had blocked quite a few, although he had also allowed one or two through, usually if he believed they could flush out some information that would be of benefit to the intelligence services. On the whole, he maintained a very friendly relationship with most newspaper editors and so, when he sent out a notice to them on 1 May (pointedly ignoring the Communist Daily Worker), he could be assured of their co-operation.
The notice explained that ‘Blake is an employee of MI6 [SIS], and therefore comes under ‘D’ Notice dated 27.4.1956, requesting you not to disclose the identities and activities of employees of MI5 and MI6, nor any mention of the association between MI6 and the Foreign Office’. Just in case that proved insufficiently persuasive, Thomson went on: ‘In addition, for your personal and confidential information, there is special reason for requesting your co-operation in this case in that the lives of MI6 employees are still in danger’.
The Greatest Traitor Page 26