Peace-loving cosmopolitan killer
On a ‘remarkably readable’ biography of ‘Diamond’ spy George Blake. Nathan Abrams on a study of women’s Hollywood struggles
The Happy Traitor By Simon Kuper Profile, £14
George Blake, who died at the end of last year, was one of Britain’s most notorious traitors. As KGB agent “Diamond”, his systematic betrayal of MI6 secrets over the eight years before his unmasking in 1961 probably led to the deaths of hundreds of people working for Western intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.
And yet this traitor to Britain wasn’t really British at all. George Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam in 1922 to a Jewish father from Constantinople and a Dutch Protestant mother. In a speech he made to the Stasi in East Germany, Blake remarked on his wartime recruitment to British intelligence: “They didn’t realise that, throughout the war, my loyalty was to the anti-Nazi cause, not to Britain.” In his Times obituary, he was quoted as saying: “To betray, you first have to belong, I never belonged”. This sense of not quite belonging defined Blake. In 2012, living as Gyorgi Ivanovich Bekhter in Moscow, he told a Russian TV documentary: “I’m a cosmopolitan. Maybe I mostly feel Dutch.”
Blake is best known in the UK for his dramatic escape in 1966 from Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he was serving a 42-year sentence for his crimes. The home-made rope ladder, the peacenik co-conspirators, the flit to Berlin hidden in the back of camper van are straight out of a spy thriller (and indeed the story was the subject of Hitchcock’s final, unfilmed script).
But, for Simon Kuper, it seems the escape is the least interesting element of the story. Although The Happy Traitor remains, in part, a spy thriller, it is, above all, an examination of identity focusing on the fascinating character of Behar-BlakeBekhter. Kuper is transparent about his own identification and investment. He describes first reading about the spy in the late 1990s: “I was immediately, selfishly, struck by how similar our backgrounds were. We were both mixes of British, Jewish and cosmopolitan, raised in the Netherlands.”
Kuper worries away at the issue of Blake’s motivation. He dismisses the idea that he was turned by North Korean interrogators during a period of imprisonment as a diplomat in the early 1950s. Instead, he accepts Blake’s own account of a genuine ideological conversion and his desire to help create a better world on the Communist model. He was, Kuper concludes, “a gentle, well-meaning, peace-loving man, who probably became a de facto serial killer” — a naïve idealist rather than a man driven by resentment.
However, there is no doubt he was treated more harshly than the Cambridge spies, for example, whose Establishment credentials worked in their favour. Kim Philby was offered immunity in return for full co-operation, while John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt were never
We were both mixes of British, Jewish and cosmopolitan, raised in the Netherlands’
prosecuted. Perhaps the most telling example of his outsider status came from his adored Cambridge professor, Elizabeth Hill, to whom he attributed his love of Russian. She said she always considered him British, and yet: “there was a slight, greasy look about him, which gave me the idea that he might have some perhaps Jewish blood in him, or perhaps something oriental, tinge of oriental somewhere.”
There have been many words spent on George Blake, including several biographies. But The Happy Traitor is different. Precisely because of Simon Kuper’s own background, he is able to bring in European sources (such as Blake’s speeches to the Stasi and his own interview with Blake in Dutch), to provide a more rounded picture of the man. As such, this is a remarkably readable work that shares with Le Carré that melancholy sense of the traitor’s tragic psychology.