The Greatest Traitor (47 page)

Philby had been in poor shape for some time. After the breakdown of his relationship with 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 break, 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.’

Of his escape from Wormwood Scrubs, he remarked: ‘I was very lucky in that there were some good people who sympathised with me, people inside and outside jail, and who were ready to help me.’ As ever, he conscientiously avoided any comment that might expose his friends back in England, but by now, the tide was coming in for Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. Before very long, Blake would be forced to reveal the part they had played in securing his freedom – and make a stand on their behalf.

21

Endgame

T
hirty years after he had stood in the dock charged with betraying Britain to her Cold War enemy, George Blake was once again back in the Old Bailey’s famous No. 1 Court. This time, however, the man who had once been the anxious defendant of May 1961, awaiting the Crown’s punishment for crimes ‘akin to treason’, was a relaxed witness for the defence. Now there was no wooden seat amidst a sea of suspicious eyes, but the solitary comfort of an armchair in his Moscow flat. The sober suit and tie had been replaced by the navy blue blazer and knotted silk scarf. A bald head and neatly trimmed beard succeeded the clean-shaven, tanned face and longish brown hair.

Blake’s ‘virtual’ presence at the Old Bailey on Tuesday, 25 June 1991, came towards the end of the trial of Michael Randle and Pot Pottle, who had finally been charged with helping him to escape from Wormwood Scrubs, and then conspiring with Sean Bourke to harbour him and prevent his arrest.

As his voice echoed around the historic courtroom to a spellbound packed gallery. The three-minute video recording ran on three screens at points North, East and West of the oak-panelled room, so that everyone would have a clear view of the star turn. Flanked by
Randle and Pottle’s lawyers, Blake read slowly and deliberately from his text.

Back in 1961, the court had determinedly and deferentially avoided any mention that a secret organisation (SIS) was fighting a clandestine war against the Soviets, so there was delicious irony in the opening remarks of the former ‘foreign office official’. This time, everyone would know the unvarnished truth. ‘I was a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service from August 1944 until the date of my trial in May 1961,’ Blake told Mr Justice Alliott and his court. ‘I was engaged in secret, subversive operations directed against the Soviet Union, the socialist countries and world Communism. It was my task to attempt the recruitment of Soviet citizens, and in particular members of the Soviet intelligence services and those of other socialist countries.’

Yet again, however, he was determined to challenge the general perception of the human cost of his treachery: ‘It was said that my actions led to the deaths of British and other agents. I can confirm that at my trial it was never alleged that in working for both the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Soviet Intelligence Service, I was ever responsible for the death of agents. However, I do not deny that I disclosed the identity of a number of agents to the Soviet authorities.’

He then devoted the rest of his statement to refuting suggestions that the KGB had been involved in his escape, or that Randle and Pottle had received any financial reward for their efforts: ‘There was never any doubt in my mind that they acted as they did out of purely humanitarian concern, and specifically because of the length of my sentence. I say this as they repeatedly commented on the harshness of the sentence.’