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.
Philby had been in poor shape for some time. After the breakdown of his relationship wit
h Donald Maclean’s wife, Melinda, in 1968, he had resumed drinking heavily, and lived a bored, empty kind of existence, drifting between his Moscow apartment and a holiday home by the Black Sea. He had coped better than Burgess with the constraints of Soviet life, although, like him, he did not bother to try and learn the language. Unlike Maclean, he appreciated the trappings of the elite and enjoyed being shown some deference as an intelligence officer of standing. He claimed – not always convincingly – that he did not miss England, ‘except for some friends, Colman’s mustard and Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce’, but on most days endeavoured to keep in touch through The Times and the BBC World Service.
In July 1970, Blake and his wife were responsible, quite by chance, for introducing Philby to Rufina Ivanova Pukhova, a Russian-Polish woman more than twenty years his junior, who became his fourth wife later that year. The Blakes had managed to get tickets for a performance of a touring American ice show at the Luzhniki Sports Complex. Ida invited Rufina along – she was a friend and colleague at the same institute – and it seems the original idea was to pair her off with Philby’s visiting son, Tommy. When they all convened at his flat later that night after the show, the older Philby seemed much taken with Rufina. The Blakes were keen to matchmake: ‘My wife and I thought a friendship with an attractive woman would relieve his loneliness and make him drink less, and so decided to encourage further meetings.’ A few weeks later they invited Philby and Rufina on a driving holiday to Yaroslavl, a beautiful city of churches and theatres on the Volga, built to the design of Empress Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, during which the romance became more serious. The Blakes were among a small group of family and friends present at Philby’s registry office wedding in December.
The Blakes and the Philbys maintained their friendship for several years, but the two spies were to fall out in spectacular fashion late in 1975. Over a weekend at Blake’s dacha, Philby’s eldest son, John, had taken a series of photographs which Blake had been reassured would be kept private, but one, a shot of the two men and their wives having lunch, quickly found its way into the Observer magazine. Blake was wounded by this breach of trust, and incensed by the ensuing publicity in the British press.
His anger was only compounded by a simmering, suppressed resentment that Philby and Anthony Blunt had, compared to him, been treated so leniently by the British establishment. He always suspected that Nicholas Elliott, the SIS officer who had given him the order to return to London from Shemlan, had also been sent out to Beirut, two years later, to warn Philby not to return. These suspicions betray the feeling of inferiority that had troubled Blake since first joining SIS: ‘It was probably because I was of foreign origin, and I could more easily be made an example of. They also didn’t want yet another spy scandal. They were members of the Establishment and I was not.’
Despite the rift, when Philby died in May 1988, Blake attended his funeral, held with full military honours at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow.
On Sunday, 15 February 1970, just over three years after his arrival in Moscow, Blake was finally permitted to step in from the shadows and take his place in the spotlight. Izvestia, the mouthpiece of the Soviet government, published the first of a two-part interview with the spy, with the second part following two days later. In it, he recounted his life story and provided much detail on the workings of SIS and some of his own operations for the KGB. The first article took the reader through his life from boyhood in Rotterdam, resistance work in the war, escape through Europe to Britain – ‘London welcomed Blake rather coldly; strict interrogations followed’ – and his early days in SIS. The second would furrow more brows at Broadway as it detailed various bugging operations Blake claimed SIS’s Y section had carried out in a number of European capitals. He also went into rather indulgent detail about the Berlin tunnel.
The KGB was clearly determined to sow mischief among their Western opponents. Blake described ‘how the intelligence agencies work against one another’, claiming that SIS and the CIA were spying on France, Sweden, West Germany and Japan. In particular, he said, British intelligence was ‘constantly and actively engaged in studying the work of French intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies’. While he was in Berlin, he claimed, the Service had maintained a card index of French agents for ‘the purpose of determining which of them could be used by SIS’. He also claimed that the SIS station in Paris was actively spying on its host country, seeking information on the French military, as well as the country’s atomic energy programme, and he explained how SIS routinely placed agents in the BBC, and in companies that sent representatives to Socialist countries.
As well as hailing the achievements of their agent and embarrassing the British, there was also an announcement: the ‘selfless work’ of Mr George Blake had been rewarded by two of the highest state medals – the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner.
With the political and intelligence establishment looking favourably on him, the restrictions on Blake’s life gradually lifted. The KGB remained nervous about allowing prize assets like Blake and Philby to travel, still fearing they might flee back to England and deal a propaganda blow to the Kremlin, but carefully controlled holidays in countries like East Germany and Hungary could be arranged, and so it was that Blake’s minders finally gave in to his requests for a vacation abroad. They sent him to the Baltic island resort of Usedom in East Germany, where the KGB’s sister service, the Stasi, had a retreat.
Blake made four or five trips to the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s and 1980s, usually at the request of Markus Wolf, head of the foreign intelligence section of the Stasi, who invited him to lecture trainee agents and help instil a ‘sense of belonging and tradition within the Communist espionage community’. The two of them enjoyed each other’s company, being of a similar age and sharing the same intellectual interests, and the German particularly appreciated Blake’s ‘British habit of understatement’. Yet the German spymaster – dubbed ‘The Man Without A Face’ because he guarded his identity from Western intelligence for so many years – found Blake very reticent in discussing the seedy aspects of the espionage business: ‘It struck me that Blake suffered terribly under his reputation as a callous agent and wanted to be regarded as an idealist. Despite his commitment to the Soviet cause, I also had the feeling that he refused to accept that he really was the traitor his country considered him to be.’
Hero or traitor, life was looking brighter for Blake. A son, Misha, was born in the spring of 1971, and the family had by then acquired a pleasant dacha in a KGB compound an hour out of Moscow. His work at IMEMO was becoming more stimulating and he was assuming the role of the institute’s Middle East expert.
In the early 1980s, his fervent and long-maintained hope that he would be reconciled with his first family also looked as if it might be realised. Blake’s mother had continued to see Gillian and her grandsons in England and Holland, so George had not gone without news or photographs of the boys. When they reached their early teens, Gillian told Anthony, James and Patrick the full truth about their father and in 1983 his middle son, James, then aged 24, expressed a wish to see him. A meeting was arranged in East Germany, where the young man and his grandmother travelled, joining Blake, Ida and Misha, who were holidaying at a resort on the Baltic coast.
Blake was apprehensive – not only had he abandoned his son, but now the boy knew he was a traitor: ‘It was a complete gamble how we would take to each other for he did not remember me, of course, as he had been only two when I disappeared from his life.’ He recounted his whole life story, leaving nothing out, and hoped that his son would understand what had led him to act as he did. He sensed James’s disapproval, but also a certain understanding of his motives: ‘It constituted in no way a barrier between us . . . we got on extremely well.’
After this success, his two other sons – Anthony, aged 28, and Patrick, 23 – followed in James’s wake and came to Moscow twelve months later. This time, the ice took longer to bre
ak, but the thaw set in when Anthony noticed that his younger brother had inherited some of Blake’s mannerisms, despite never having met him.
Gillian had allowed the boys to make up their own minds about their absent father, to her considerable credit: ‘My wife had never spoken to them about me in any disparaging terms [and] my mother had always discussed me in a normal way.’ Moreover, both boys were committed Christians and Blake felt this also gave them something in common.
The early 1980s were a time of change in the Soviet Union, and of a limited degree of optimism. The grey old men in the Kremlin – Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko – disappeared into history’s backrooms to be replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev and his efforts to dismantle lingering Stalinist values and structures: this was the era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Blake shed no tears for the outgoing regime. Although deeply committed to Communism, he agreed with Gorbachev that the system had to be developed in a democratic way. For Blake, the whole Soviet experience had to be re-assessed, even the hitherto sacrosanct status of Lenin.
Possibly the new spirit of openness lay behind Blake’s first ever television appearance in April 1988, on the late night chat show, Before and After Midnight. At the commencement of the twelve-minute interview he was introduced as ‘an outstanding Soviet secret serviceman . . . an honorary member of the state security service who has been awarded the Orders of Lenin and the Combat Red Banner’. At the age of 65, he appeared relaxed, wearing a grey suit, open-necked shirt and cravat. Speaking in fluent, slightly accented Russian, his answers betrayed none of the Stalinist hyperbole of his newspaper interview seventeen years previously, when he had claimed he betrayed Britain to help in ‘exposing and interfering with imperialist aggression and subversion’. Instead, in easy, conversational mode, he admitted to the watching audience that adjustment to life in the Soviet Union had not been easy, with ‘a different country, different traditions and even a different society’. He offered few details about his new family or his work, apart from saying: ‘My life has been amazingly good, beyond my expectations.’
The Greatest Traitor Page 36