The Greatest Traitor (19 page)

On 2 February 1951, the group of British and French diplomats and journalists was taken aside from the others, and addressed by an elderly Korean army officer, who informed them political conditions had changed and they were being moved elsewhere. Blake, Deane and the others were first taken by bus back towards Manpo. They spent a night in a town through which they had passed during the Death March, receiving, by the standards to which they were accustomed, an evening meal of stunning proportions – overflowing bowls of white rice and soya bean soup, accompanied by pepper and soya sauce.

The next day they walked into Manpo and witnessed the severe damage UN planes had done to the frontier town. In the centre the large concrete railway bridge stood intact, virtually the only structure to have survived. Everywhere else lay the wreckage of scores of homes, shops, factories, and schools. Now and then a ruin would poke up defiantly and incongruously amid the rubble.

On Monday, 5 February, the party was made to walk three miles north on the ice of the Yalu River until they reached a small hamlet called Moo Yong Nee. There, a farmhouse had been requisitioned for them. When they arrived at the doorstep, its occupants were in the process of moving out into the already over-crowded home of a neighbour. The old woman of the house, despite her eviction, smiled and welcomed them into her home. For Blake and his colleagues, this would prove to be journey’s end as far as Korea was concerned. As they settled down to life in the farmhouse, they no longer faced the extraordinary physical privations suffered at the hands of The Tiger in Hanjang-Ni. From now on, the pressure would not be on their bodies but their minds.

9

Stalin’s New Recruit

I
n the Communist Eastern Bloc, the Stalin Peace Prize – or to give it its full, characteristically verbose title, the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples – was belatedly established as a rival to the West’s Nobel Peace Prize. In 1951 and 1952, among the recipients of this dubious award were two Britons, Dr Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, and Dr Monica Felton, journalist, writer, town planner and one time Chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation. Korean and Chinese propagandists were keen for Blake and the other prisoners at Hanjang-Ni to have access to the thoughts of these two luminaries of the ‘Peace Movement’, so copious magazines with pictures of them and articles by both were widely distributed.

After Felton visited North Korea as part of an international women’s delegation in 1951, her criticisms of the United Nations mission would become increasingly vitriolic. She would go to the extreme of likening the UN prisoner-of-war camps to concentration camps in Nazi Germany. She also claimed that whole North Korean families, men, women and children, who had been imprisoned for days without food and water, had then been shot, burnt to death and even buried alive. Tape recordings of her conversations with American Air Force officers
‘confessing’ their part in ‘a crime against the peace-loving people of the world’ were also played in the camps.

Among the more outlandish claims of Dr Johnson – ‘The Red Dean’ as he was known, for his slavish devotion to the Communist Party and, in particular, Stalin – was that the United States was waging a deliberate policy of germ warfare on the North Korean people. His pamphlet on the subject,
I Appeal
, was distributed among the captives.

Blake and his colleagues had now been in captivity for eight months. The propaganda material flowing from these two colourful characters was just a first, small step, a taster of the attempts at political indoctrination that both the Chinese and the Russians would gradually make on them once they were settled in Moo Yong Nee.

This was the first modern military conflict in which one side attempted to systematically convert prisoners of the other to their own ideology. In April 1951, Padre S.J. Davies and his colleagues in the Gloucestershire Regiment were warned by their captor, a high-ranking Chinese officer: ‘You are hirelings of the barbarous Rhee puppet government, but you will be given the chance to learn the truth through study and to correct your mistakes.’ Soon, Davies and his fellow prisoners would be put through the Chinese ‘Lenient Policy’. This was something of a misnomer: if they refused to undertake ‘re-education’ in Marxism-Leninism, they might face the withdrawal of rations of food and cigarettes, beatings or even solitary confinement. As a Chinese officer famously snarled at one group of prisoners: ‘We will keep you here ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years if necessary, until you learn the truth, and if you still won’t learn it, we will bury you so deep that you won’t even stink.’

Blake, Deane, Holt, Meadmore and the others were a completely different proposition from the ordinary soldiers. These were not just diplomats, intelligence officers, or journalists – all of them had an unusual depth of learning that qualified them as intellectuals.

As they began to accustom themselves to a more benign existence
in the farmhouse, there was an increase in the efforts to lure them into an ideological conversion. After receiving the outpourings of Felton and Johnson, they were then given the Communist classics to help while away the long hours of captivity – Marx’s
Das Kapital
, Lenin’s
The State and the Revolution
, Stalin’s
Questions of Leninism
as well as writings from the likes of Engels. In addition, they were supplied with contemporary Russian magazines and newspapers, in which the faults of a ‘corrupt’ Western civilisation were relentlessly analysed and magnified. One of the books described England as being like ‘a pond of stagnant, fetid water where nothing lived, where all was stifled by the green slime on the surface’. America, recalled Deane, ‘was America as seen by one who searched only for horror, soullessness and filth. France, as painted by Ilya Ehrenburg, was a decadent caricature of her great past.’

This was not like an indoctrination session with an interrogator and Deane felt this wealth of propaganda material had far more insidious dangers. ‘The absurd and constant assertion began to leave its mark . . . I felt my thinking processes getting tangled, my critical faculties getting blunted. I could not think and I was afraid,’ Deane remembered. ‘It does not matter what the thought is, its quality is beside the point. If you cannot think, it frightens you by its immense repetition.’

Relief arrived in an unusual form. In one delivery of books there was a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
– a mistake, perhaps, or did the propagandists hope it would be seen as an allegory on capitalist profit? It enabled the captives to leap back into the straightforward, alluring world of a child’s imagination, with good old-fashioned storytelling featuring adventures with drunken sailors, pirates, parrots and buried gold. They drew lots to see who would read it first, and then they all read it over again. ‘It made us light-hearted, so we started dancing lessons,’ recalled Deane. ‘Those of us who could dance taught those who couldn’t. Music was homemade – singing and beating a box to keep time.’

Blake enjoyed
Treasure Island
well enough but, unlike Deane, he
also found succour in
The State and Revolution
and, in particular,
Das Kapital.

The captives’ living conditions were not comfortable by Western standards. Nevertheless, life at the farmhouse in Moo Yong Nee was far removed from the adversity and constant threat of disease and death at the camp in Hanjang-Ni. The Chinese seemed to have taken a conscious decision not to allow their prisoners to die at the alarming rate of previous months and circumstances for both civilians and POWs alike in all the camps along the Yalu River began to significantly improve. Whether it was because of gathering hopes of a ceasefire that summer and they did not wish to have their reputation sullied by accusations of prisoner neglect, or because they wanted as many converts as possible coming out of their ‘political study sessions’, remains unclear.

Blake and his colleagues were given padded clothing to see them through the rest of the winter, and the food – although lacking in variety – was a good deal better than the previous starvation rations. The building they lived in had four rooms and a kitchen with a hearth – and the rare luxury of a warm fire. The electricity supply was eventually restored in May.

As winter turned to spring, Blake and Holt would wander out into the field behind the farmhouse and sit on low green mounds in a small family graveyard, where the two of them would read and talk. Holt’s eyesight was very poor and had deteriorated further because of malnutrition. Worse, he had lost his glasses while dashing for cover when American fighter columns attacked targets close to the column of prisoners on the Death March. He asked Blake to read to him, and together they embarked on
Das Kapital.
In the weeks that followed, the book provoked much discussion between them as to the merits of a socialist society.

Holt had at one stage considered stepping down from the Foreign Office to pursue a political career, but was unsure as to which party he
would join. Because of his background and upbringing he would have been a natural candidate for the Conservatives, but Blake inferred from their dialogue that Holt’s sympathies lay more on the left of British politics. He enjoyed listening to the older man’s advanced and occasionally unorthodox views, and admired his detached and objective approach to world affairs: ‘For example, he believed the British Empire was in terminal decline, and he was convinced that humanity was entering a new stage – that of communism. He didn’t welcome it because he was too much of an individualist to enjoy living in a communist society but he certainly had admiration for what the Soviets had achieved in Central Asia, in raising the living standards of those in former colonial territories. He compared that achievement to what the British did in India.’

Holt’s cogent expression of his ideas was inadvertently helping to dismantle the final barriers in Blake’s mind on his road to full conversion to Communism and, from there, to ultimate betrayal. But it seemed to Blake that when Holt and other prisoners criticised Communism, it was always about the form it took, and never about its real spirit.

In the autumn of 1951 that form was still the dominant figure of Joseph Stalin, who was starting to ponder a new, dangerous theory that fitted in well with his increasingly virulent anti-Semitism: that a group of Jewish doctors was plotting to murder Kremlin leaders. Not a whisper of this latest expression of his paranoia would be heard by the outside world for many years. The prevailing view in the West was that the ailing dictator was a dangerous adversary, but an admirable leader of his people, despite his flaws. Clues to the real nature of his regime were still mostly well hidden.

Blake was perturbed by the cult of personality in the Soviet Union. He later acknowledged that many of the manifestations of Communism were repellent, and accepted great crimes were committed in its name:

But these were not an essential part of its creed, which itself represented the noblest aims of humanity and in many respects sought to put into practice the virtues preached by Christianity.

I felt that if a movement was motivated by such aims it was more likely to achieve them than if it had no aims at all, or very vague ones, and that therefore in the long run, in spite of stumbling and backsliding, Communism was likely to establish a more just and humane society than Capitalism.

In this written justification he made for his treachery to the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, nine years later, Blake made it sound, in the semi-religious language he tended to deploy, as if he had embarked on a path of repentance and then sacrifice.

I had become profoundly aware of the frailty of human life and I had reflected much on what I had done with my life up to that point.

I felt that it had lacked aim and had been filled mostly with the pursuit of pleasure and personal ambitions . . . I then decided to devote the rest of my life to what I considered a worthwhile cause, to sacrifice to it not only possibly my life and liberty, but more so my honour and the affection and esteem of my friends and relatives, to live no more for myself but only for this purpose.

His final decision to embrace Communism and then act upon it may well have been taken after reading
Das Kapital
in a cemetery in Korea, but the reality was that this was just the last step on a long journey along the road to treachery, which had begun many years before.

Everything he was about to do he would later justify on the grounds of belief alone, but even the purest of ideological spies have other reasons. Blake’s were contempt for the British class system of
which, on occasion, he had been a victim, a dislike of the competitive society, virulent anti-Americanism and a deep religious conviction that blended well with Marxism. In addition, a fascination with the secret world had grown in him since childhood, and since his teenage years he had been leading a double life, in one form of intelligence or another, playing a part, deceiving others, living his life – bluntly – as a professional liar.

Besides, what was there to hold him back? The bonds of allegiance to his country had inevitably been weak, despite his father’s loyalty and passion for a distant Britain. Blake had spent just three years of his life on English soil, and viewed his nationality with a degree of detachment. In later life he would explain that ‘I feel above nationality. I don’t approve of national feelings. Loyalty to humanity, loyalty to a human cause, loyalty to religion is higher than loyalty to country.’

And there was something more – a certain quirk of personality – a desire to be in control. ‘He was a secret man, it was not easy to know what he was thinking. But I had the strong sense that he liked to exercise power, not just be passive and subservient,’ was Jean Meadmore’s later assessment. Blake’s first wife Gillian would put it even more succinctly: ‘I think George liked to be the power behind the scenes. He didn’t want power for himself, for his own sake, he didn’t want people to say “That’s George Blake”. He wanted to manipulate the strings and know what was going on.’