The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What makes British spies become double agents?
That question haunts a new biography of the traitor George Blake – which comes troublingly close to letting him off the hook
THE HAPPY TRAITOR by Simon Kuper
288pp, Profile, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £8.19 ÌÌÌÌÌ
When the death of George Blake in Moscow made front-page news a month ago, I wondered how many younger readers had ever heard of him. And the older ones were probably just surprised (as I was) to learn that he had still been alive until then. This was a man who last hit headlines in the 1960s – first when convicted as a Soviet agent in 1961, and then when he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs five years later.
The story of that escape is perhaps the most famous thing about him. Naturally, the authorities assumed that he had been sprung by a fiendishly clever Soviet operation, but the real story was more like something from an Ealing comedy. Inside the prison, a friendly convicted burglar removed some window bars; an ex-prisoner standing in the street – a wild Irishman whose police record had begun with a theft of bananas – threw a rope ladder over the wall; and Blake was then looked after, and driven to East Berlin in a camper van, by two “peace activists”.
Whisked off to Moscow, Blake settled into an uneventful life as an analyst for Soviet intelligence. He acquired a Russian wife, and had jolly social occasions with Kim Philby. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he sometimes agreed to speak to western journalists. Perhaps the last major interview he gave was with the British-Dutch writer Simon Kuper, on condition that it be published in Dutch, with English publication only after Blake’s death; hence this book, a biography that draws on many sources but keeps coming back to that interview material.
Blake himself was British-Dutch, and rather more the latter than the former. He was born in Holland, to a Dutch mother and a Levantine Jewish father (with British citizenship); as Kuper notes, Blake’s five years in prison would be the longest period he ever lived in the UK. A teenage member of the Dutch resistance, he made it to England, joined the Navy, and ended up in the Secret Intelligence Service. In 1948, he was sent to Seoul, and he was there when the South Korean capital was overrun by the invading North Korean army in 1950. At some point during the lengthy captivity that followed, he agreed to spy for the Russians.
Why? It’s the elementary question that haunts the biography of every traitor. Blake himself offered various explanations. His claim to have been converted by reading Marx’s Das Kapital – the most grindingly dull famous book ever written, which could convert you only to catatonia – must have been made for Russian ears. The idea that another book won him over, Carew Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism, is even sillier; one key part of the author’s argument was that you could not have communism without secret police and concentration camps.
Kuper is happy to throw those explanations into the mix, but he does try to dig deeper. As a teenager, Blake had embraced a strict form of Dutch Calvinism. His faith in God may have faded, but his desire for a vocation, a demanding role in a cosmic scheme of things, never left him. What did leave him, as he contemplated the weakness of post-war Britain, was the idea that the UK could play any kind of grand role in the world. He wanted to be part of something powerful. As for simple self-interest: well, it’s true that he did not switch sides for money. But he had endured a long captivity, with no end in sight, and switching offered some assurance of a way out. Kuper’s claim that he acted “on grounds of principle alone” seems overconfident.
Released at last in 1953, Blake was quickly reabsorbed into “the firm” in London. He was soon hard at work, photographing at least 4,600 pages of documents – including long lists of British agents and sources behind the Iron Curtain – and passing them to his Russian handlers. Stationed in Berlin from 1955, he was privy to most of the secrets of British and American intelligence there. The most extraordinary of these involved digging a tunnel far into the Russian sector of the city, to tap the telephone cables of the Red Army and Soviet military intelligence. Thanks to Blake, the Russians knew about this tunnel from the outset; and yet they let it function undisturbed for a year, gathering genuine information, not dezinformatsia, for fear of blowing Blake’s cover.
There are two ways of letting double agents such as Blake off the hook, and Kuper is worryingly indulgent towards both of them. One is the argument, much indebted to Le Carré’s novels, that all Cold War espionage was just a self-enclosed game that disappeared up its own, er, spiral of counter-espionage, counter-counter, and so on. But thinking about the Cold War like this is a luxury of retrospection. At the time, our agents did not know whether or when it would become Hot; getting that real-world information was their highest priority. And in any case, the implication of moral equivalence with a system founded on repression and gulags is simply repugnant.
The other clever-silly argument says that the biggest threat to peace came from one side knowing a lot more than the other; double agents such as Blake evened things up, thereby making everyone safer. Kuper’s argument edges in this direction, though it comes out slightly differently. Because the Russians allowed genuine calls to be tapped (to protect Blake), the West gained much information, including the knowledge that Moscow was not planning a military attack; for this, Kuper insists, Blake must be given credit.
Really, for heaven’s sake. Leaving aside the fact that this emphasis on real-world information shows how foolish the Le Carré-esque theory is, isn’t it obvious that if the secret of the tunnel had not been blown, the West would have acquired not only that reassuring information but much more, for much longer? And if the tapped conversations had given real signs of an impending attack, wouldn’t that have been information worth having? The only difference Blake made was that the flow of genuine information ended, not that it happened.
But I don’t want to end on an anti-Kuper note. He has dug out some fascinating material, including lectures Blake gave to the Stasi in East Berlin in the 1980s. Some of Kuper’s questions to Blake are properly direct, even if they are mostly fended off by the man’s charm and long-practised tactics of deflection. And, above all, Kuper does not fail to remind us of the agents – more than 40 of them – who are thought to have lost their lives because of Blake’s selfgratifying treachery.
Le Carré tempts us to think that all Cold War spying was just a self-enclosed game