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2 May 2013

Reviewed: The Greatest Traitor – the Secret Lives of Agent George Blake by Roger Hermiston

A perfect spy.

By Simon Heffer

The Greatest Traitor: the Secret Lives of Agent George Blake
Roger Hermiston
Aurum Press, 384pp, £20

George Blake is now 90. He has lived for so long beyond the events for which he became notorious that he seems almost detached from the person of the same name who betrayed his country to the Soviet Union. If size is what matters, he is the greatest traitor in our recent history: no one else in his line of business has ever received anything like a 42-year sentence. That, though, is what the lord chief justice gave Blake at the Old Bailey in May 1961, on five counts of passing secret information to the Russians. The judge imposed the maximum of 14 years on each of the five counts but made three of them run consecutively. Blake, his supporters and even many of those who deplored him thought the sentence was excessive. He – and they – had expected a single stretch of 14 years.

But this was the height of the cold war, just three months before the Berlin Wall went up; Blake was a member of the Secret Intelligence Service; and the five counts were really just the tip of the iceberg. An urban myth has it that the judge, Lord Parker of Waddington, was secretly told that 42 British agents had lost their lives as a result of Blake’s treachery, hence the sentence. What is beyond doubt, as Roger Hermiston writes, is that Blake undermined much of what Britain was trying to do in the field of anti-Soviet espionage in the late 1950s. It is estimated Blake betrayed the activities of 400 MI6 operatives to the Russians.

Hermiston’s book tells Blake’s backstory in fascinating detail. He was half Dutch and part Jewish, born George Behar in Rotterdam in 1922. His Dutch mother married an Egyptian-Jewish man who was a naturalised Briton. Young George’s father died when he was in his teens and he was farmed out to an exotic uncle in Cairo. By the time war broke out, he had added English and a smattering of Arabic (a language he later studied in more depth) to his Dutch but returned to Holland to find that his mother and sister had escaped to England. Behar (he became Blake later) joined the resistance after the Nazi invasion and behaved with great heroism: the climax of which was an escape across Belgium, France and the Pyrenees into Spain and thence to Gibraltar and Britain.

Like James Bond, Blake joined the navy and, like him, was spotted as suitable for intelligence duties. He picked up some German and was in Berlin after the Nazi defeat; but he recognised the importance of Russia in the postwar world and did an intensive course in that country’s language at Cambridge in 1948-49. He was sent to Korea as hostilities broke out in 1950 and held captive for more than two years by the North Koreans.

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It was at this time that he was “turned”. Blake had always been religious and Hermiston suggests that his path to communism had been by way of a religious-style conversion. While in Korea, Blake formed a loathing of the Americans, he said, because of their bombing of Korean civilians. He was unmoved by the atrocities North Koreans inflicted upon some of their American captives, which Hermiston details. He and the Soviets made contact and he agreed to work for them. Blake’s views on the subject show an alarming naivety and a blithe disregard for the consequences for his fellow operatives of his betrayal.

Blake and his fellow captives returned from North Korea to a hero’s welcome. A spell in Germany allowed him to pass significant amounts of information to the Russians, notably about the tunnelling and surveillance system the British and Americans put in place in Berlin. Blake and his family moved to Lebanon in 1960 where, among other things, he had intensive training in Arabic. Yet he was already under suspicion and being watched and a Polish defector confirmed that he was a double agent.

It seems that Blake was resigned to 14 years but the infliction of so long a sentence forced him to consider escape. With the help of an Irish chancer and two peace activists, who had met him in Wormwood Scrubs while serving short sentences for public order offences, he finally accomplished that escape in October 1966; and, after hiding in various safe houses, he was spirited out of the country in a Dormobile just before Christmas that year.

Blake turned himself in to the Russians in East Berlin and, eventually, was used as a great propaganda coup by his spymasters. His 46 years (so far) as their guest provide the book with something of an anti-climax. Hermiston tells the story well; but, perhaps because he feels constrained by official secrecy, he never properly describes the damage that Blake caused. Blake is a folk hero to some people, as was shown in 1991 when the belated prosecution of the two peace campaigners who assisted his escape ended in an acquittal. He was the servant of a repressive and murderous regime and his role in it was to retard the cause of liberty and democracy. Good though Hermiston’s book is, a better account of the evil that Blake did remains to be written.

Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily Mail

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