The Greatest Traitor (34 page)

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’.

All SIS employees had by then been informed that there was a mole in the organisation. A coded telegram had been sent out to every station around the world, the first part reading ‘THE FOLLOWING NAME IS A TRAITOR’. After deciphering, the second part spelled out the letters G-E-O-R-G-E-B-L-A-K-E.

The news came as a huge shock to the Service and, like the students at MECAS, many of Blake’s former colleagues at Broadway simply could not accept it. ‘I’m having difficulty persuading some of the staff that he’s a traitor,’ White told senior colleagues at the time.

Over at ‘The Fort’ – Fort Monckton, SIS’s principal training centre on the south coast at Gosport, in Hampshire – all work was abandoned after an emotional meeting. The Head of Training called all the recruits together. They were told that their futures were uncertain, and that he now had to tell them something he never in his life thought he would have to say: there was a traitor in the ranks. He had been unmasked, and his name was George Blake. The recruits watched as he promptly broke down and wept.

Blake’s solicitor was Albert Edward Cox, known to all as ‘Bill’, from the firm Claude Hornby & Cox in Great Marlborough Street, which had built a reputation for specialist criminal work, particularly the more glamorous society cases. Cox’s tall figure was a familiar one around the central London criminal courts. He had contracted the debilitating disease spondylolysis shortly after joining the Scottish Regiment in the war, damaging his vertebrae and giving him a distinctive stoop.

Blake’s barrister was Jeremy Hutchinson QC, who had only taken silk a couple of months earlier. The previous October, he had been a member of the defence team that successfully defended Penguin Books on a charge of breaking the Obscene Publications Act over the publication of the full, unexpurgated version of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Hutchinson and Blake, who had both served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the war, hit it off immediately. ‘I was enormously taken by him. He had great charm,’ recalled Hutchinson.

What he emphasised to me were two things. One was the behaviour of the Americans on the ‘Death March’. He felt they were so spineless, and so corrupt, and so third-rate in every way, and he took terribly against them. They were wimps, you know, in his view.

The other was Marx. He read
Das Kapital
from cover to cover and he said it was a remarkable book and completely convincing. He said, ‘I had a lot of time to think, and it seemed to me a basis for a better world.’ I think he was completely genuine – that was the impression I got. I didn’t feel he was trying to justify himself in any way.

Communism was a religion, and remains a religion, and he had that kind of mind, and became obsessed by something that was idealistic. That’s what gave me my enthusiasm for doing this case; it wasn’t a squalid money arrangement with the Russians, and it wasn’t a sexual thing like old Vassall [the 1962 Admiralty spy]. I accepted it was a true conversion and he had that kind of mind that would be 100 per cent committed, and that his spying was based on this absolute religious conversion.