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Filling the spy ranks with legions of non-membership comes with its share of risk. The process is counter-intuitive, putting the stock of skills and abilities above the potential trade-off of loyalty and divergence. Eventually, such a recruit might find a closely watched set of principles.
The son of a Sephardic Jew and a Dutch Protestant might well count as excellent material for British intelligence, but George Behar was doomed in Britain and the toast of the now-defunct Soviet Union. George Blake, as he came to be known, along with that other great British exporter of betrayal, Kim Philby, was always convinced that in order to genuinely betray you had to belong. This membership came in loyalty to the Soviet Union. As Russian President Vladimir Putin solemnly declared on Blake’s passing this month, “The memory of this legendary person will be forever preserved in our hearts.
The underground world of Rotterdam-born Blake started early. He joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, serving as courier after obtaining a set of false papers. Under British instruction, he traveled through Brussels and Paris to unoccupied France, and made his way through neutral Spain, enduring a period of three months’ imprisonment before traveling to Britain via Gibraltar. in January 1943. A stint with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve led to his enlistment in the ranks of the British intelligence services in 1944. There he was tasked with deciphering the coded messages of the Dutch resistance.
After the war, his intelligence record followed the pattern that would lead to his imminent conversion. He was responsible for keeping an eye on the Soviet forces occupying East Germany, a task at which he excelled. He took Russian lessons in Cambridge. Then came the Communist states in the east: North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Far East. Stationed in South Korea just before the outbreak of the Korean War in November 1948, he was given the Herculean mission to create networks within North Korea itself. In June 1950, he was captured by DPRK forces and interned with a coterie of diplomats and missionaries.
The 34-month internment period proved critical. Blake asserted that his push for the Communist cause came during this time, a reaction to particularly brutal methods of warfare, especially those used by the US Air Force. “It made me ashamed to belong to these top technical countries that are fighting against what seemed like helpless people. The destruction of Korean villages and a Karl Marx reading regime granted him alibis for the cause. “I felt better for humanity if the communist system prevailed, that it would end the war.
The gullible might think so, but Rebecca West, in her eminently interesting study of betrayal The meaning of betrayal, suggests a conversion during his stay in the Dutch metro. Blake himself remained cryptic in his last days. “It is no longer particularly important to me whether my motivations are generally understood or not,” he told the BBC’s Gordon Corera a decade before his death.
On his return to England in 1953 as a free man, Blake had already been recruited as a Soviet agent. His status as a full double agent was asserted upon his stay in Berlin, where he was sent in 1955 with the mission of recruiting Soviet double agents.
For nearly a decade, Blake passed on information to his plentiful and wealthy KGB managers. According to an American estimate, 4,720 pages of documentary material reached the Soviets between April 1953 and April 1961. He unmasked 40 MI6 agents in Eastern Europe. High-ranking officers working for Western agencies such as General Robert Bialek, Inspector General of the People’s Police in East Germany, were captured, suffering death or imprisonment.
Blake’s work also enabled the Soviets to achieve success against the US Central Intelligence Agency. The late CIA Affairs Officer William Hood is convinced that Blake was instrumental in unmasking Peter Popov, a GRU officer, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence service and, it turns out, a CIA agent.
The biggest of the hits, however, came in the CIA’s Berlin Tunnel exhibit, which featured eavesdropping on three Soviet communication cables, an operation that lasted 11 months and 11 days in 1955-1956. Conducted in conjunction with British intelligence, Operation Gold involved the digging of a 1,476-foot-six-foot-diameter tunnel from West Berlin into the eastern communist sector of the city. Blake had prior knowledge of the tunnel, but the Soviets made a decision to prevent its initial exposure so as not to raise suspicion on their precious mole. The discovery of the project was duly conceived as an accident; British and American intelligence has been left out, supplied with a mine of unnecessary disinformation.
Blake’s loss came with the defection of Polish secret service officer Michael Goleniewski. When recalled to London, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to five counts of transmitting information to the Soviet Union, in violation of the Law on Official Secrets. The case turned out to be exceptional in a few respects. There was the severity of the sentence: 42 years. There was the breach of convention: the appeal by Lord Chief Justice Hubert Parker to then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to discuss the case. Even Macmillan was shocked by this decision. “The LCJ handed down a savage sentence – 42 years!” The Lord Chief Justice saw the opportune moment as Blake had, in his opinion, rendered the best efforts of the British intelligence services unnecessary.
The conviction came as a brutal shock to Blake, who expected a 14-year sentence. It also served to inspire support for his cause. “As a result, I found a lot of people who were willing to help me because they thought it was inhumane.”
He wouldn’t be disappointed. In 1966, with the help of two anti-nuclear activists, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, aided by Sean Burke, a colorful Irish petty criminal, Blake escaped London’s Wormwood Scrubs. Bourke and Blake were both smuggled out of Britain and into East Germany. Blake’s final destination would be the Soviet Union, where KGB colonel rank, awards, and membership awaited.
The British establishment has been left in shock. Randle and Pottle then justified their actions to save Blake with a “vicious and indefensible phrase, reflecting no credit to British justice but rather Cold War obsessions, and the hypocrisy and double standard of spying on ‘Our’ side and ‘theirs’. “Spying for the Soviet Union was” no more reprehensible, morally or politically, than much of the activity of Western intelligence agencies. ”
A CIA note on Blake’s escape is sour. “The facts of the escape proved beyond any doubt that it was designed by the Soviets. The boosting effect on the morale of Soviet spies around the world can be easily imagined. Once in the espionage business, everything must have a sinister design, an architectural basis on which to reap success and failure. One could always blame these other worthy agents of history for incompetence and complacency. Journalist Philip Knightley, an accomplished spy student, points to a third: opportunity.
The exploits of the Cambridge Plateau – Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Philby – have sullied British intelligence. But Blake has proven to be more devastating than all of them, although measuring this contribution is an almost impossible task. The British Secret Service, as Andrew Boyle concludes, was embarrassed both by the harsh court condemnation against Blake and the fact that his case “was and still is making SIS the laughing stock of the world.” The skillful spy foiled the SIS and the CIA; the KGB gave it deserved recognition. If it hadn’t been for Blake’s confession – SIS having allowed him to maintain close ties with the Soviets – he might never have been caught.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne. E-mail: [email protected]
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