The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia, by Simon Kuper Richard Davenport-hines
The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia: The Extraordinary Story of George Blake
George Blake had a favourite joke about his branch of the Secret Intelligence Service: ‘We used to call our office the Wimbledon Club, because it was all balls and rackets.’
He started work for SIS, or MI6, in 1944, and was employed as a full-time officer from 1947. He stole its secrets for his Soviet spymasters with devastating effect from the mid-1950s, was convicted of espionage in 1961, and sentenced to 42 years. Five years into his sentence he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison.
On Boxing Day last year, he died in Moscow, aged 98.
Blake was born and initially educated in Rotterdam, had a Dutch mother and a Levantine father with a British passport, spent his adolescence in Cairo with a Francophone uncle and aunt who held Italian nationality, worked in Berlin, and spent half a century as a KGB pensioner.
Kuper persuaded Blake to submit himself to interviews by promising to speak in Dutch, which was a rare luxury during the old man’s 40 years in Russia.
Although there are quick flashes of naïveté in Kuper’s first book about espionage, he is a fresh, honest, even bracing appraiser of his wily interviewee.
He has drawn on sources from five countries, notably the archive in Berlin of the Stasi (German secret police).
Blake was a prim, pious, smug and friendless, Calvinist child. He was on a visit to his mother in Rotterdam when Germany invaded in 1940. Instead of returning to Cairo, he joined the Dutch resistance movement, which had a strong Communist presence.
When, some years ago, I was researching a book on Communist penetration agents, I suspected that Blake had been enlisted in the Communist cause by fellow resistance workers, and that his subsequent move to England and involvement with SIS were under Communist auspices.
I received tacit encouragement in this suspicion by one of the few people still alive who was likely to have indirect knowledge of it.
Kuper does not hold this view. He believes that Blake, although a thorough traitor, was not much of a liar. He broadly follows Blake’s set narrative. By this account, the 19-year-old freelance journeyed from the Netherlands, crossed Nazi-occupied Belgium and France and, after an illegal crossing of the Pyrenees, was interned in Spain. Then he was released to Gibraltar, from where he travelled by sea to England.
Arriving in 1943, he anglicised his surname of Behar to Blake. Soon he had been recruited to P8, SIS’S Dutch section. In 1947, at Downing College, Cambridge, he started learning Russian, which he always spoke with a Dutch accent (although he spoke English with convincing upper-crust pronunciation).
He was given a permanent job within SIS, despite smiling too much at breakfast for English tastes, and being too bustling, conceited and voluble.
In 1948, Blake was appointed head of SIS station in South Korea. Together with other members of the British legation in Seoul, he was taken prisoner by North Korean troops in 1950. By his account, he had already been attracted to Communism by reading an SIS handbook on the enemy creed.
Further Marxist texts read in Korean captivity converted him. American saturation bombing, which was indeed murderous, and the vulgarities of American consumerism further turned him against Western democracy.
Blake was a fusspot, but also, like many spies, superabundantly vain. He venerated monarchical dynasties, especially the House of Orange, and in other circumstances would have been the perfect equerry in a royal household.
He told Kuper that his three historical heroes were William the Silent, Wilhelmina (the Dutch queen who spent the Second World War exiled in