SECRET WORLD OF SPIES
JUST before Christmas 1966, Michael Randle, along with his wife and kids, hid George Blake under the seats in the back of their campervan and drove him across the Channel to an East German border checkpoint.
His KGB controller, Sergei Kondrashev, then arranged Blake’s onward journey to Moscow.
Originally an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service or, unofficially, MI6, who had been captured by North Korean soldiers in 1950, Blake returned from captivity to work for Soviet as well as British intelligence.
He betrayed many agents who were later executed, including a network in East Germany, as well as informing the Soviet authorities of the existence of the Anglo-American listening tunnel under Berlin.
Arrested after intelligence received from a Polish defector, Blake’s sentencing in May 1961 led to the appointment of the
Radcliffe Committee on Security Procedures in the Public Service.
According to the official history of MI5, Moscow Centre considered Blake, codenamed DIOMID, so
important that only his controller had been permitted to know his real identity or that he was MI6.
As the existence of the SIS was not officially admitted to in 1966, on his escape Blake could not be identified in that way in Parliament or the British press, though the foreign media were less concerned.
But his prison escape received sensational media coverage and caused a good deal of public, as well as official, alarm.
Initially it was just assumed that he had been sprung by Soviet or Eastern Bloc authorities.
Harpist
Special Branch even received a tip-off that he was being smuggled out of the country in an instrument case which belonged to a harpist with the Czechoslovakia State Orchestra.
Evidence suggests arrangements were made by Blake himself, with much assistance from sympathetic fellow inmates at Wormwood Scrubs.
He had been a model prisoner, helping other prisoners with literacy classes.
But prison authorities had always considered him a “unique prisoner not to be trusted.”
According to the prison’s deputy governor: “This man must always be under the closest supervision. He is a security risk in every sense of the word, caution always.”
Blake himself had always denied being a traitor, insisting instead that he had never felt British, saying: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.”
His escape was a cause of embarrassment as well as alarm, not least for the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, as it was the latest in what seemed like a long list of high-profile escapes on Jenkins’s watch.
They included Great Train Robbers Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs in 1964 and 1965, a group of 13 prisoners with violent records who escaped on June 25, 1966, while being moved from Winchester to Parkhurst, and six prisoners from Blake’s own wing of Wormwood Scrubs, whose escape on June 5 had led to tightened security.
Jenkins’s tenure as Home Secretary had produced a notable series of liberalising legislation, for which he faced much criticism from the Conservative Opposition.
He also faced extreme consternation from the Metropolitan Police because of his refusal to restore the death penalty, abolition of corporal punishment in prisons, and his call for the recruitment of black police officers.
And the shooting of three policemen in London’s Shepherd’s Bush on August 12, 1966, increased press hysteria.
An effective Parliamentary performance by Jenkins, and a weak one by Tory opposition leader Edward Heath, meant that the Government defeated a motion of censure easily.
Axeman
It also won subsequent votes on capital punishment and a Criminal Justice Bill, just before, as Jenkins later pointed out in his memoirs, 10 more prisoners escaped from prison in December 1966, including Frank Mitchell, the “Mad Axeman”.
“My nerve,” Jenkins wrote, “was a bit shaken.”
For Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour
Government, the Blake case was part of a much bigger legacy of espionage cases inherited from his Tory predecessors.
In the early 1960s, PM Harold Macmillan had been faced with a series of espionage cases, including the Portland Spy Case in 1961.
That was when Ethel Gee and Harry Houghton, their Soviet controller “Gordon Lonsdale”, Konon Molody, and spies “Peter and Helen Kroger”, Morris and Lona Cohen, were convicted of spying.
Then there was Blake himself, John Vassall, a clerk in the Admiralty
arrested in September 1962, and the defection of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge spies, in 1963.
In addition, the Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis, told Macmillan in the spring of 1963
that his deputy, Graham Mitchell, was under investigation as a Soviet penetration agent.
That investigation, like the subsequent
suspicion of Hollis himself, proved groundless.
All this caused a major headache for Macmillan, so that the Profumo affair in 1963, a sex scandal which looked like but was not an espionage case, was the last straw, and a major factor in the PM’s resignation.
At the same time, there was increasing evidence of Soviet
espionage activity within the UK, a problem that was to grow during the 1960s and culminate in the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers in 1971.
For the Harold Wilson Government, taking office in 1964 meant taking on the management of imprisoned spies and ongoing cases, as well as tackling the Soviets
about their “unacceptable activities”.
It was an unwelcome legacy to take on, as there was initially a great deal of Labour suspicion of the security
and intelligence services.
Sinister
In that context, the escape of George Blake seemed sinister as well as alarming and there is still a lot we do not know about him, despite the publication of his memoirs.
When Randle and Pottle published their book about the escape in 1990, the press called it a “Boy’s Own Yarn that came true.”
But neither Blake’s career, nor his escape, was a laughing matter.
When he died on Boxing Day last year, aged 98, in Moscow, the official RIA Novosti news agency first reported his death citing Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency.
It said: “We received some bitter news, the legendary George Blake passed away.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself an ex-KGB agent, expressed his “deep condolences” to Blake’s family and friends.
In a message which was published on the Kremlin website, the Russian leader noted Blake’s “invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic parity and maintaining peace on the planet.”
To rub salt in British wounds, Putin added: “Colonel Blake was a brilliant professional of special vitality and courage.”
Blake is buried, with military honours, at Moscow’s Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.