The Greatest Traitor

by Roger Hermiston

  ‘I’m just calling to say that I have been to the party and thrown the bait to our friend, who has taken it hook, line and sinker,’ said Bourke, in the coded language he had adopted for these occasions. ‘I have him now standing beside me.’ Randle was too overcome to reply. He sank back into his chair and curled up in a ball, quivering with emotion and sheer relief. When he recovered sufficiently to congratulate Bourke, he was told that there was one minor problem: Blake’s wrist was almost certainly broken, and would need attention from a doctor.

  The family meal that followed took on an atmosphere of celebration, even though Randle’s in-laws were oblivious to what had happened. While driving back home, they listened to a radio news bulletin that led with the news of Blake’s escape. It was a salutary moment. ‘The announcement hit me like a blow in the stomach,’ was Randle’s memory. ‘It was like wakening from an exciting but frightening dream to find it was actually happening.’

  Back at the house, Randle received two disconcerting phone calls from journalists. Both reporters had made the connection that Randle had been in prison with Blake and asked if he knew anything about the escape. Feeling very uneasy, he denied it, but worried that if journalists could so quickly find a link between them, then so could the police.

  At 28 Highlever Road, the mood was one of unconfined elation. Bourke and Blake raised their glasses to drink a toast to each other, the Irishman uttering appropriate words from Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Mischief thou are now afoot – take what course thou wilt.’ They then settled back to watch the BBC evening news at 9.45.

  The measured tones of newsreader Peter Woods announced the main story: ‘High drama in West London tonight. George Blake, the double agent who was serving forty-two years’ imprisonment, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London this evening.’ After details of his crimes and sentence, Woods read out a statement from the Home Office: ‘Blake was missed from his cell at seven o’clock, when all the prisoners were locked away for the night. A search was made of the prison grounds but no trace of Blake could be found. He is, therefore, presumed to have escaped.’ Woods finished by telling viewers that a careful watch was being maintained at all airports and harbours, and East European embassies were also being kept under observation. He concluded: ‘News is still coming in of this dramatic escape, and we will keep you informed.’ The delicious incongruity of Woods talking about this extraordinary nationwide manhunt, when here was the subject of it, less than a mile from where the presenter was speaking in Television Centre, was not lost on the two friends.

  Euphoria at their success, laced with copious amounts of brandy, had given the evening an unreal, fantastical mood that neither man was eager to break. When they did turn in, Blake found it difficult to sleep, his wrist becoming increasingly painful as the alcohol wore off. Bourke just kept muttering ‘Christ, we’ve done it’ as he turned and turned on his mattress on the floor.

  Escaping from the Scrubs had, in a sense, been the easy part, though. Fleeing the country would be a far more challenging and complicated affair.

  19

  Hiding

  The criminal underworld had mockingly, though with a degree of grudging respect, nicknamed him ‘Whispering Grass’. Shaw Taylor, with his mellifluous voice and amiable manner, had been helping reel in the wrongdoers ever since his programme, Police Five, was first broadcast in 1962. When the former actor introduced it as usual at 3 p.m. on Sunday, 23 October, there was little doubt about which crime he most wanted the public’s help in solving. ‘A few moments ago we received a report from Scotland Yard of a couple of clues about the escape on which they hope Police Five viewers might be able to help,’ Taylor told his audience.

  One of the leads detectives were following up concerned the homemade rope ladder. The knitting needles reinforcing the rungs of the device had been identified as Milward brand, size thirteen, twenty in all. ‘Now I wonder if there is a shop somewhere that sold at least ten pairs of size thirteen knitting needles, all in a go?’ Taylor asked his viewers. In fact, police would visit a total of 412 establishments in the next few weeks in their search for shopkeeper who might identify Blake’s accomplices.

  As for the pot of pink chrysanthemums, it had been established that the flowers were fresh, bought on Saturday from a branch of F. Meyers Ltd. ‘Maybe they were used as a marker, maybe they were used as an excuse for hanging about by the wall at that particular time?’ mused Taylor.

  An offer of help soon came from an unusual quarter. Upon hearing about the spy’s escape, Mr J.L. Taylor, Secretary of the Institute of Psychical Studies near Bath, had immediately contacted Leslie Newcombe, Governor of Wormwood Scrubs, saying: ‘It would be of interest to our research into a process of locating individuals by a method of map divination (akin to water divining by map) if we might include George Blake in our current programme of readings.’ Taylor claimed that the Institute’s research into ‘this use of the earth’s electro-magnetic field’ had resulted in a 70 per cent success rate. ‘Should you feel disposed to give the method a trial,’ he wrote, ‘and could forward to us the necessary sample (a few hairs from the man’s hairbrush, or a well-worn shoe or cap), we would include the sample in our programme of readings and report the result in 48 hours – the time required for testing readings for consistency.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scotland Yard declined the offer, and no item of Blake’s head or footwear was put in the post.

  Meanwhile, more conventional police techniques were reaping few rewards. At Wormwood Scrubs almost all the prisoners had clammed up in the traditional tribal manner, and the widespread respect for Blake made their omerta even harder to crack. Nonetheless, whispers about Phil Morris’s involvement reached the ears of investigators. In his first interview, Morris claimed he had last seen Blake on Saturday morning, and as for the afternoon, he had either been in his own cell or playing banjo and having a ‘sing-song’ with others on the second floor. When police came back for a second round of questioning, however, Morris realised they were on to something and was forced into a more aggressive defence:

  Blake never asked any favours. I have no ideas. It’s nothing to do with me . . . People drop notes in boxes to get you in bother . . . I don’t know anything about two-way radios. I don’t know about Sean Bourke having anything to do with it. I’m not in the frame and don’t know who is. Blake never visited me in my cell. I don’t remember him having his last visit. I didn’t have my light out that night . . . I don’t take any barrow or tools out.

  As detectives started to plough their way through the list of 328 inmates in D wing that Sunday, just a mile away, at 28 Highlever Road, the subject of their inquiries was in need of urgent medical attention. A combination of adrenalin and brandy had masked the pain but when Blake woke up on Sunday morning, his wrist had swollen and he was in serious discomfort. Bourke left him alone in Highlever Road, reading the front-page accounts of his escape in the Sunday papers, and travelled to Randle’s home at Torriano Cottages in Kentish Town to discuss the problem.

  Bourke’s impatience exhibited itself once more: despite the manifest dangers of identification, he wanted to take Blake to hospital to have the wrist set. Randle counselled caution, and said he would ring round his friends and try to find a doctor who could be trusted to do the job. After a hectic day on the phone, Randle finally found a suitable candidate. Accompanied by ‘Matthew’ and ‘Rachel’, the couple who had suggested him, and in a state of some apprehension, Randle journeyed by bus to the doctor’s home to try and persuade him to help. The task proved easier than expected. Once it became clear to the doctor that he would be dealing with Blake, he seemed remarkably unperturbed. Although he made clear his dislike of Communism and Communists, he told them he had been impressed by what he had heard about Blake’s work for the Dutch resistance, and expressed sympathy for the effect those wartime experiences might have had on Blake as a young man.

  A major problem remained; the doctor had no plaster at home with which to make a cast. For
tuitously, Michael Randle had a close friend who worked in the make-up department at BBC Television Centre, where they used plaster bandages on actors who played the parts of characters with broken limbs. After another fruitful phone call, Randle and the doctor headed off to Wood Lane to pick up the plaster of Paris. Ten minutes later, at about 8.30 p.m., they arrived at Highlever Road.

  Randle was surprised but delighted to see Pat Pottle already there. Blake had been unaware of Pottle’s involvement in the conspiracy, and had welcomed his support in the preceding hour or so as an increasingly excitable Bourke had become fixed on the reckless idea of taking him to hospital.

  By way of cover, the doctor invoked the Hippocratic Oath, saying to Blake: ‘Normally you should go to hospital to have the wrist set. However, I understand that for some reason or other you are allergic to hospitals. Therefore I consider it my duty to help you.’ He then warned him that he had not set a broken wrist for ten years, and that to a degree the operation was bound to be makeshift. He recommended an x-ray and further attention as soon as possible.

  Over celebratory drinks that night, the plotters decided that Bourke’s bedsit was no place to hide out in the long-term. On Tuesday, 25 October, Blake was moved to the home of ‘Matthew’ and ‘Rachel’. It was with some reluctance that they took him in, guaranteeing him the room only until Saturday.

  Then he was on the move again, this time with Bourke, who had previously remained at Highlever Road. The new venue looked far more promising – a maisonette in a large house in Nevern Road, Earls Court, in West London, boasting ‘high ceilings, sash windows, a splendid marble fireplace, comfortable armchairs and a TV set’. It belonged to John and Marcelle Papworth, a couple who moved in the same radical circles as Randle and Pottle.

  John Papworth – gangling, flamboyant and white-haired – had grown up in an East End orphanage, been involved with radical politics and then the Labour Party, but he was, at that time, editing a pioneering environmental magazine. It was he who had agreed to make the apartment available as he and his wife were at their cottage in the Cotswolds that weekend. A week on from the escape and it looked, finally, as if Blake and Bourke had found at least a semi-permanent hideout from where they could plot their way out of the country.

  It all went wrong when Marcelle returned on Sunday. Her husband had not informed her about the two new guests and when she discovered one of them was the nation’s Most Wanted Man she was horrified. At a further meeting with both of them later in the evening Papworth also expressed dismay at Blake’s presence: ‘When you said, Michael, that you had two people you wanted me to shelter, I assumed they were American army deserters or something of that kind. I never dreamt for one moment that you were referring to George Blake. This house really is not safe for him and his friend.’ He further explained that he had a secretary who worked there during weekdays, and that there were frequent visitors, but nevertheless agreed that Blake and Bourke could stay for just two more days.

  The following evening, Monday, 31 October, Randle and the two fugitives were confronted with an astonishing story that propelled them on their way yet again. Papworth came into their bedroom, saying he had something to tell them: ‘My wife is undergoing a course of analysis. This requires her to be absolutely frank with her analyst and not to conceal anything from him.’ Randle recalled the ensuing conversation:

  We looked at him blankly. ‘Are you saying,’ George asked, maintaining his composure with a visible effort, ‘that she has told him about us?’

  ‘Yes,’ [John] replied. ‘Everything. There’s no point in it if she isn’t completely frank. You must understand, of course, that what she says to him is in the strictest confidence.’

  George had gone very pale (I’m sure I had too!). His voice was thin and reedy, and he struggled to retain his self-control. ‘And what did the analyst say when she told him?’

  ‘Oh, he said that she was imagining it, and that it was because there had been so much publicity about the escape of George Blake.’

  Unwilling to trust in the sanctity of the analyst’s couch, Blake and Bourke headed straight upstairs to pack their bags.

  Already they felt restless following a dramatic front-page story in the Evening Standard a few days earlier announcing ‘Blake’s Escape Car Found’, followed by further reports that weekend. They said a two-tone green Humber Hawk had been seen in the vicinity of Wormwood Scrubs at 6.30 p.m. on the night of Blake’s escape, and that detectives had found fibres from a blue prison uniform on one of the seats. Bourke’s connection with the escape had also been made public in a Daily Mirror report: ‘A prisoner at the jail who was allowed out to work each day has been “gated” while the escape plot is being investigated. Police are searching for an Irish friend of Blake who was released from Wormwood Scrubs last August’. Late editions of the evening papers on Saturday went further and described a ‘33-year-old man from Limerick’.

  Just as worrying, that same Monday, the Daily Mirror indicated that the police now believed Blake was hiding out in London. The first theory, the paper said, was that he had already been whisked out of Britain and was now in the Soviet Union or another Iron Curtain country, but the second ‘strongly backed by Scotland Yard, is that he is still in London – possibly not far from the jail in Shepherd’s Bush . . . the area has an enormous cosmopolitan area. Whole streets cater for an army of wandering workmen, who stay a week at a time . . . Blake could be hiding in any of these.’

  This was all too close to the mark, even if Blake and Bourke were no longer in the Shepherd’s Bush area. Michael Randle now began to think seriously about taking the two men into his own home in Kentish Town, perhaps building a false partition, a kind of ‘priest hole’. Pat Pottle then came to the rescue. His was a bachelor flat in Willow Buildings, Hampstead, and, although small, had three bedrooms. Pottle spent the whole of Tuesday, 1 November bolstering its privacy and security – putting up net curtains and installing sturdy locks in time for Blake’s arrival in the evening. When he saw his new hiding-place that night, Blake was delighted. ‘You’ve turned this place into a fortress,’ he told Pottle. ‘You know, it’s the first time I’ve felt really secure since I escaped.’

  It would be another week before Bourke joined them. He had been back in his original hiding place in Highlever Road, keeping his head down except to buy food and papers. He had also been busy at his typewriter, bashing out an early draft of the events of the previous two weeks – indeed the past year – for a book he was putting together about the escape.

  Even Bourke, insouciant and impetuous though he was, recognised that to linger too long in West London, when the police were busy accumulating clues about the escape, was reckless. On Tuesday, 8 November, he joined Pottle and Blake in Willow Buildings. Now that they were all finally settled, the conspirators could start work on a plan to get the ‘master spy’ and the ‘Irishman’ (as the papers were labelling them) out of the country.

  Cranks and crackpot theories abounded during those first, frenzied weeks of the Blake Escape. At times it must have seemed to the police as if Blake had disappeared into The Bermuda Triangle, so little idea did they have of his whereabouts. Wild theories supported by MPs were similarly unhelpful, such as the one put forward by a ‘responsible citizen’ and reported in a letter from Conservative Keith Joseph to the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, suggesting that the country was ‘ringed by Russian ships for a few days before Blake got away. They could use rubber rafts and land without any fuss.’

  In Parliament on Monday, 24 October, two days after Blake’s escape, Ted Heath and the Conservatives had set out to make life as uncomfortable as they could for Jenkins. They had serious questions to raise about the neglect of security in the nation’s jails, but they also saw this as their chance to stock up some significant political capital against a promising minister whose successful liberal agenda was anathema to their party. Jenkins hoped an immediate announcement of an independent investigation into prison security to be chaired by Lord M
ountbatten, and including the Blake escape in its remit, would quieten his critics. The Tory benches were far from satisfied, pressing instead for a specific inquiry into Blake’s breakout. By the end of the debate, still intent on that assurance, they took the unusual step of tabling a censure motion against Jenkins. The debate on the Home Secretary’s competence and strategy was set for a week’s time.

  In the meantime, the Tories had more detailed questions to put on whether Blake’s escape had imperilled national security. On Thursday afternoon, 27 October, Heath and his Shadow Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Home, met Harold Wilson, Foreign Secretary George Brown, and Jenkins in the Prime Minister’s office in the House of Commons. Wilson reassured them SIS and MI5 had carried out exhaustive enquiries and had so far concluded that Blake’s disappearance had put no one’s life in danger. Moreover, what Blake knew was now five or six years out of date. Of greater concern was whether the Soviets would use Blake as a propaganda tool, by parading him on television, or lauding his arrival in Pravda. Even here, though, Wilson told Heath that Sir Dick White, Head of SIS, believed publicity relating to Kim Philby would be more damaging to the national cause than anything regarding Blake.

  Wilson, emollient as ever and with his political antenna twitching as always, proposed that rather than listen to him parroting the words of the Chief, why didn’t Heath and his colleagues return next Monday – the morning of the censure debate – and hear a briefing from the Head of SIS himself?

  The conversation resumed at 10.30 a.m. on Monday, 31 October, with the same group in attendance, along with Dick White. C was a past master in soothing the troubled brows of politicians. He told the gathering he doubted whether the Russians had got Blake. Whereas Gordon Lonsdale had refused to answer any questions during his interrogation, Blake had admitted everything very fully, so his ideological masters had ‘no obligation towards him’. White did not rule out the possibility, however, that Blake might have been given some money by the Soviets and ‘left to work out his own future’. He told his audience that Blake had had no access to any state secrets since September 1960. On the damage to the working practices of SIS, White conceded that Blake’s activities had ‘been of considerable danger to us’, but said full account had now been taken of all the information to which he had access, and successful counter-intelligence measures had subsequently been put in place.