Blake’s quest for his book royalties appeared to be over when he lost a decisive, final battle in the House of Lords in July 2000. The British legal system had defeated him, but he was not finished. Next, he lodged a claim in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2001.
Five years later, a panel of seven judges finally delivered a verdict, unanimously deciding that Blake’s human rights had been violated because of the number of hold-ups to his case, despite the fact that some of the delay had been caused by his attempts to win legal aid to pay for his lawyers. The United Kingdom government was ordered to pay Blake £3,500 in damages for the ‘distress and frustration from the protracted length of the proceedings’, plus £2,100 costs and expenses.
‘Britain must pay traitor for breaching his human rights’ proclaimed the Telegraph the next day. ‘MI6 double agent Blake wins damages from Government’ was the less judgemental headline in the Guardian. Contacted by a Daily Mail reporter to be told about the decision, Blake responded in courteous fashion: ‘Oh, that’s very nice. Thank you for letting me know. I didn’t expect anything.’
Forty-five years on, he had finally concluded his courtroom business with the British Government.
The rootlessness that characterised much of George Blake’s life reached its apogee in December 1991. ‘I am once again living in another country, only this time without having actually moved,’ he wrote, three days after the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. He had betrayed one country for another, only to see the latter disappear, having abandoned the very cause that had won him over.
By then, all the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been discredited and removed from power. Blake and other adherents of Soviet ideology had to ask themselves some searching questions. Could they still believe in the teachings of Marx and Lenin and did they cling to the idea that one day, however far in the future, Communism would still overwhelm and supersede capitalism? Blake freely conceded that the dream of a fully functioning Communist society in his lifetime was over. He believed the mistake had been to try and instil it by force, discipline and terror: ‘I would be blind not to see that the experiment has failed. Nobody can seriously claim that we are advancing towards Communism. In fact my wife, who is just back from a visit to Holland, says that the Dutch are closer to a real Communist society – a place of justice, equality and peace.’
In that moment, he seemed to accept that a social democracy with a mixed economy would be the best way forward for the faltering new Russia. He blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union on its over-centralisation.
Unlike the capitalist countries, literally everything was controlled by the central government, from which type of intercontinental missiles should be built to how many buttons there should be on the fly of a pair of trousers.
Every decision was taken in Moscow, and it is humanly impossible for one man – or ten men – to run a country of this size efficiently if every request has to travel all the way to the capital, then right up to the top of the Kremlin, then back out again to the furtherest parts of the empire.
Yet out of the ruins of the Soviet Union, Blake believed one very substantial benefit had been realised.
The most important thing is that the threat of nuclear war has at last been removed. In all our woes, this is something we tend to forget and should, on the contrary, often bring to mind and be thankful for.
In 1991, he was fond of comparing favourably the way Russia dealt with the loss of her empire with the efforts of Britain and France. Britain, he said, suffered conflicts in Cyprus, Aden, Kenya and Rhodesia, as well as ill-advisedly maintaining its long resistance to Indian independence. France’s record, too, was poor, with its long and bloody war in Algeria and several coup d’états. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘this enormous, closely-knit empire has disintegrated without any bloodshed or concerted attempts to hold it together.’
Blake spoke too soon. Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya and clash with Georgia in 2008, among other conflicts, would give the lie to his theory.
Yet despite everything that happened, he remains convinced there is an instinctive yearning for Communism, but that we, as human beings, have to improve before we can fit the model. In 1992 he observed: ‘It’s the highest form of society, but the people who build it must have the highest moral qualities . . . they must really love their neighbours as themselves. Therein lies the crux. Neither in this country, nor anywhere else, have people at the end of the twentieth century grown to the moral stature required to build a Communist society.’
By 2010, his views were not much altered. After a quick jab at the country he reviles the most – ‘The American empire will disappear because everyone who lives by the sword dies by the sword’ – he told Izvestia he still had not abandoned his belief in Communism: ‘I understand now that the Soviet project was doomed. The problem was not the Russians but human nature. Humankind was not sufficiently moral to build such a society. One day – and it may take thousands of years – I believe that the majority of governments will voluntarily choose the Communist model. Without violence, revolution or terror. Maybe it sounds like a Utopia, but I believe in it.’
In 2007, Blake was awarded his latest medal, the Order of Friendship, at gala celebrations for his eighty-fifth birthday. At the ceremony, Sergei Ivanov from the SVR – the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence department – told the audience: ‘It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Britain could have inflicted on it.’ The timing of the award served notice that the habits of the Cold War die hard. In Britain Oleg Gordievsky, one of the most senior KGB defectors to the West, had recently been named a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG). To seasoned espionage watchers, Blake’s award seemed like old-fashioned tit for tat.
Four years later, Georgy Ivanovich, as his Russian family and friends now know Blake, had a minor role in a flattering ‘docudrama’ of his own life, broadcast on late night Russian television. It was called The Choice of Agent Blake, and the 88-year-old former ‘scout’ (as the Russians prefer to call their spies) featured as a narrator towards the end of the 100-minute film. With a young German actor, Marcus Kunze, playing the part of Blake, it starts with a scene set in Wormwood Scrubs in May 1961. A police photographer snaps the obligatory front and side ‘mug shots’ of the new inmate, before the prison officer barks out the words: ‘Prisoner Blake – out for a walk!’ A door is unlocked and the hero led away. The film, which has the feel of a Hollywood B-movie, certainly moves along at pace, and the detail in the scenes of Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs is commendably authentic.
Colonel Blake is now cast as the Grand Old Man of Russian espionage. The film, made with others to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the creation of the foreign intelligence service, is an illustration of the high esteem in which he is still held. He is among the most revered Russian agents, alongside men such as Richard Sorge, the German Communist who spied for the Soviet Union in the Second World War; Rudolf Abel, who worked for the KGB in America; and his SIS colleague, Kim Philby. The accession to power of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man, has surely safeguarded his heroic status.
Invariably every year on his birthday, 11 November, Blake is interviewed by Russian television and a selected newspaper, and asked for his views on the current geopolitical situation. In 2012, to mark his ninetieth birthday, the Zvezda TV channel, run by the Russian Ministry of Defence, broadcast an hour-long documentary entitled The Two Lives of George Blake. Rossisskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper, also chipped in with a rare interview with the spy. After regaling his readers with stories of sipping Martinis in Moscow with Kim Philby, he asserted: ‘I am a happy person, a very lucky person, exceptionally lucky. These days in Moscow have been the calmest years of my life. When I worked in the West, the danger of exposure always hung over me. Here, I feel myself free.’
On this auspicious occasion, there was
also the most fulsome of tributes from President Putin. ‘You rightfully belong to the constellation of strong and courageous people,’ he wrote in a telegram to Blake. ‘You and your colleagues made an enormous contribution to the preservation of peace, to security, and to strategic parity. This is not visible to the eyes of outsiders, but very important work deserves the very highest acknowledgment and respect.’
These days Blake has retreated from Moscow and spends all his time in his dacha in the middle of a pine forest, an hour from the capital. Virtually blind, he can no longer read from that vast collection of books Donald Maclean left him. Otherwise, he is in good enough health for a man of ninety, and still goes for long walks in the woods with his wife, Ida. He relishes the odd glass of vodka, and is particularly proud of his recipe for mulled wine.
Whatever motives first drove his loyalties to switch, once they had done so, Blake was a calculating, conscientious and quite unrepentant traitor. Whenever he has been asked why he betrayed Britain, he has never wavered from the script. He says he spied for Moscow because he had developed an unshakeable belief that Communism was the best way forward for mankind.
Nonetheless, the values and precepts of his Calvinist upbringing still cling to him, especially a belief in predestination. When looking for an explanation of his life, Blake turns, as ever, to the Bible. In the Book of Romans, the apostle Paul says: ‘Nay but, O Man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one lump to honour, and another unto dishonour?’ He maintains he has been formed in the way he is – whether by God, or someone or something else – and it is not for him to question why. He does concede, however, that his has been a strange path.
I would say that I have been an unusual vessel, in that I have been fashioned both to shame and to honour.
Sources
Across the various broadcast and print interviews he has given, George Blake’s own account of his life and times has generally been very consistent. Most of those intended for Western audiences took place around the time his autobiography was published in 1990. I have drawn liberally on that book, No Other Choice, in recounting certain major episodes.
Equally as important – if not more so – are two other fresh sources of information. First, there are the hours of interviews Blake recorded with Tom Bower for the BBC Inside Story documentary, ‘The Confession’, most of which did not make it on to television. These provided considerable detail on Blake’s motivations and actions as an agent of the KGB, as well as valuable reflections on other characters in his professional and private life.
The second new source is a batch of papers lodged with the legal team that represented him at his trial in May 1961, which now reside in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum. They include a fascinating, eighteen-page handwritten paper Blake wrote while on remand in Brixton jail – essentially the story of his life, for the benefit of his lawyers. This treatise provides the best explanation for why he turned to Communism. Among many other crucial insights, it explains how he eventually wanted to give up the spying game and seek a new, safer career in the oil industry. The collection also includes various letters – from Blake himself, from his former wife Gillian (including the one mentioning Iris Peake), and from the two SIS colleagues I have called Mr and Mrs B. Most significant of all, however, is the full transcript of Blake’s trial. The fifty-three-minute speech of mitigation by his counsel, Jeremy Hutchinson, which was heard in camera, can now be read here for the first time.
When quoting Blake in the foregoing pages, I have not always been specific about which particular source has been used, although where I think it is significant, I have provided such details. For example, I should mention that Blake’s story about walking past the beggar one night in Seoul – ‘like the story of the priest and the Levite in the Bible’ – comes from the essay he wrote for his lawyers. The quote right at the very end of the book comes from the documentary, The Confession.
A couple of chapters – those covering his flight to England and his SIS interrogation – have relied largely on Blake’s own account. Somewhere in the vaults of SIS there is a recording of Blake’s inquisition which has been played to new recruits to the Service over the years but which was not made available to me. Had it been so, there might have been a different emphasis to that chapter, but such has been the uniformity with which Blake has recounted those few dramatic days to all manner of people that I do not doubt the essential facts of his narrative.
I should mention one other Blake interview that proved particularly helpful – Phillip Knightley’s in the Sunday Times, in autumn 1990. Knightley and his ‘Insight’ team are experts in this field and produced possibly the best book ever written on the Cambridge Spies, The Philby Conspiracy, which contains a masterly introduction by John Le Carré.
Another key source, which provided a detailed insight into Blake’s life, was the lengthy series of interviews his wife Gillian gave to the Sunday Telegraph in December 1961. They were published over three weekends, but I have learned more by reading the full, unedited transcripts in the papers of Michael Wolff, the freelance journalist who conducted them. These are lodged in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, to which I am grateful for its permission to quote excerpts.
I must highlight three other valuable sources. One is a file, housed at the Ministry of Justice, containing statements from SIS and Special Branch officers (heavily redacted, but illuminating nonetheless) for Blake’s trial in 1961. The second is a voluminous set of Home Office papers, released under a Freedom of Information request in 2008, which is essentially the official record of Blake’s incarceration and includes letters from the prison authorities, MI5, and Blake himself. The third is a Metropolitan Police dossier featuring the full reports of the investigation into Blake’s escape, including prisoner statements.
Among all the books I read during my research, those of Michael Randle and Sean Bourke were invaluable in helping me piece together the story of the plot to spring Blake from jail. As for his time in Korea, I was well served by the vivid accounts of his fellow captives Larry Zellers, Philip Crosbie and Philip Deane. Three other books were invaluable in informing and guiding my thoughts on different aspects of Blake’s story – The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, The Korean War by Max Hastings, and MI6 and the Machinery of Spying by Philip H.J. Davies.
Principal Source Material
The Bower Tapes – from interviews for BBC Inside Story’s The Confession.
Gillian Blake interviews – Churchill Archives Centre, the Papers of Michael Wolff WLFF 1 (1/1).
Blake Papers at Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
CRIM 1/3650 (Ministry of Justice – Blake trial statements).
National Archives – Police reports into Blake escape (HO 278/7).
National Archives – Police inquiry into Blake, including prisoner statements (MEPO 2/10736 and 10737).
Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files – Blake’s 100 agents ‘liquidated’ (MFS – HA11 Counter-intelligence division Nr. 3469).
CIA History Staff/Center for the Study of Intelligence – Documents on the Intelligence War in Berlin, 1946—1961 (Berlin Tunnel documents).
‘The Blake Escape – The Men Who Sprang a Superspy’ (an episode of Thames TV’s This Week), 26 April 1989, for quotes from Phil Morris, Richard Helms and Will Knight.
Other Specific Source Material
National Archives – Soviet officials stationed in UK in late 1940s and 1950s (KV 6/70-73).
National Archives – Royal Patriotic School (KV 4/339).
National Archives – Churchill and bugging (DEFE 13/16 and DEFE 134/352).
National Archives – ‘Plan for Holland’ (HS 6/724).
National Archives – JIC 1947 report on Soviet threat (PREM 8/893).
National Archives – Attlee cabinet meeting on Korean invasion (PREM 8/893).
Dr Elizabeth Hill – Department of Collections, Imperial War Museum (audio interview). Story about her and Guy Burgess from John Costello and Oleg Tsaryev’s Deadly Illusions, reproduced in Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman’s Secret Classrooms.
David Murphy and Sergei Kondrashev discussion – Allied Museum, Berlin.
Charles and Hazel Seymour, Richard Helms, Joe Evans, Jean Meadmore, Kenneth De Courcy, Charles Wheeler, Sir James Easton, Vasily Dozhdalev, Major G.A.Courtice interviews – The Bower Tapes.
Sergei Kondrashev (on Blake’s escape) – Courtesy of the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.
Wilson, Heath and Dick White meeting re: Blake escape – National Archives (PREM 13).
Albert Behar’s war records – National Archives (W0 363/364), material supplied by Fourteeneighteen Research (www.fourteeneighteen.co.uk).
Mountbatten Report on Prison Escapes – National Archives HO 391/5.
Kenneth Cohen – quote from his unpublished memoir, 1982 (courtesy of his son Colin).
Maurice Firth – quote and story from Tom Bower’s The Perfect English Spy, plus other private SIS sources.
Iris Peake – information from Dr Emma Dawnay.
Blake childhood quotes (Dina Regoort and Henrik Dentro) – from E.H. Cookridge’s George Blake – Double Agent.
Websites
www.cia.gov
www.englandspiel.eu
www.fourteeneighteen.co.uk
www.koreanwarexpow.org/info/tigers
www.rotterdam4045.nl
www.naval-history.net
Books
Aldrich, Richard J. The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Overlook Press, 2002.
The Greatest Traitor Page 38