Politics
A jailbreak out of an Ealing comedy
Published 09 October 2000
Pat Pottle, one of the duo who sprang the Soviet spy George Blake from prison, died last weekend. Nick Cohen recalls his extraordinary story
At about six o'clock on Saturday 22 October 1966, George Blake, allegedly the most dangerous double-agent in the history of MI6, made what was undoubtedly the most audacious escape in the history of the British prison system. He wriggled through the bars of his cell in Wormwood Scrubs and reached the yard. A helpful rope ladder hugged the prison wall. He was up and over in a minute.
Blake was an outsider, with a Jewish father and a Dutch mother. There hadn't been the faintest chance that the political and espionage establishments would accord a man with such an unsound background the privileges of Anthony Blunt and offer him immunity in return for telling all he knew. He had been tried, in camera, for warning the Russians about a tunnel packed with eavesdropping equipment that the British and Americans had planned to drill under the Soviet embassy in Berlin. In 1961, the maximum penalty for breaking the Official Secrets Act was 14 years. But the Lord Chief Justice was so appalled that he twisted the law, added together three offences of defying official secrecy, and gave Blake 42 years.
Naturally, the KGB was credited with springing its former agent. Who else but a frighteningly cunning enemy could have pulled it off?
At the very moment when these thoughts were rushing through the minds of every spook and hack in London, Pat Pottle, a shambolic young member of Bertrand Russell's Committee of 100, the direct-action group that broke away from CND, was enduring a rather tricky interview with a Hampstead grande dame. Pottle and his friend and comrade, Michael Randle, had arranged to borrow her house while she was away for the weekend. She returned, looked around and asked: "Pat, who are these two people you have brought to the house, and why are they hiding in my cellar?"
"Well," replied Pottle, "one of them is George Blake."
"George Blake," she screamed. "George Blake!"
The knowledge that the most wanted man in the country was a house guest was too great to bear. The next day her husband told Blake how she had sobbed to her psychiatrist that she couldn't cope.
"Are you saying that she told her psychiatrist about us?"
"Oh yes. Everything. It doesn't work if she isn't completely frank."
Blake, as the traumatised wife discovered, had not been freed by the Kremlin, but by Pottle, Randle and Sean Bourke, a reckless petty criminal. Pottle and Randle had met Blake and Bourke when were jailed for their part in a demonstration at an American base. They liked the spy - as did most of the prisoners and guards - and decided to free him from a 42-year stretch that would turn him into a vegetable. With the aid of a home-made rope ladder, they got him out. Obviously, he couldn't stay with Mr and Mrs Hampstead. He needed a safe house - and a succession of bedsits was found. He needed a disguise - and Pottle and Randle tried, without great success, to turn him black by dosing him with a drug called Meladinin and putting him under a sun-lamp. They got him to the East German border in the back of a Commer Dormobile, and delivered their passenger to a stunned Stasi. The greatest escape of the cold war was more Ealing comedy than John le Carre. Much more.
Pat Pottle died of cancer a few days ago. One of nature's dissidents, he was remembered with affection by everyone who had seen his warm, rumbustious sympathy for the underdog, which was manifested in deeds as well as words.
It would be easy to relegate his life to history. Who now knows or cares about the Committee of 100? Many of the causes Pottle fought for seem as remote as Commer Dormobiles. Pottle and Randle kept theirs on the road for a while, and used it to smuggle samizdats to the Czech underground fighting the Soviet stooges - the very ones whom Blake wasted his life supporting. They occupied the Greek embassy to protest against the colonels' coup of 1968 and were among the first to organise opposition to racism, after Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech. Thankfully, the colonels, neo-Stalinism and Powell are all gone. Yet, one episode in Pottle's life has a contemporary ring.
Pottle's and Randle's moment of jailbreaking was the worst-kept secret in libertarian circles for years, but it seemed as if the authorities knew nothing. Their cover was blown in 1989 by Montgomery Hyde, a writer on espionage. Barrie Penrose, a former member of the Committee of 100 and a reporter who had taken Murdoch's shilling, pursued them with the zeal of the apostate in the Sunday Times. Conservative MPs and the right-wing Freedom Association joined the paper in demanding their prosecution. The Tory government agreed with the reactionary mob. Pottle and Randle published what amounted to a 298-page confession - The Blake Escape, a defence and explanation of their actions. Their conviction was guaranteed. What could go wrong?
From the moment the trial opened, it was clear that pretty much everything could go wrong. An old Scrubs prison officer was called formally to identify them as ex-inmates who had known Blake. He duly did. As he left the box, he winked at the defendants and said: "Good luck, lads."
"Disregard that," the judge shouted at the jury. They ignored him. Nor were they impressed when they heard that Special Branch had known everything since 1970, but decided not to go after them because they were "small fish".
The case began to look like what it was, the appeasement of rightist hysteria by supposedly independent law officers. The judge told the jurors that they could only consider if Pottle and Randle were guilty in law. They had no other choice. He was rebuked by Pottle in a magnificent speech from the dock. No judge, no prosecutor, no force on earth could stand between English jurors and their conscience, he said. They were free to ask if it was morally right to go along with governments and spies who "lie, cheat and manipulate" and to acquit him.
Pottle turned in the dock and pointed to the steep steps to the cells: "They lead to a sewer called the British prison system. To send a man down them for 42 years is a death sentence. I have no apologies to make and no regrets."
The court erupted. My Observer colleague John Sweeney forgot about the laws of contempt, and bellowed at the jury: "You can't convict a man after a speech like that." They didn't.
The next day, the press condemned a "perverse" verdict. It was nothing of the sort. The jury had decided to have no part in a show trial. They put justice before the law, as juries have done for centuries.
Authoritarian politicians have always hated them for this, which is why Jack Straw, Lord Irvine and every second creep you meet in Whitehall wants to slash the right to trial by jury - and why we need successors to Pat Pottle to fight them with humanity and resolution.
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