The Greatest Traitor (10 page)

Two days later, Blake formally signed the Official Secrets Act. In his buoyant mood, he would have cast his eyes only fleetingly over its characteristically bureaucratic, understated language, including Paragraph 1(a), which read: ‘[If any person] communicates the code word, pass word, sketch, plan, model, article, note, document or information to any person, other than a person to whom he is authorised to communicate it, or a person to whom it is in the interest of the state his duty to communicate it . . . that person shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.’

All he could think of was getting straight down to work, serving his new country and, through that, helping the country of his birth to turn the tide against its German invaders.

Still highly collegiate in its structure and elitist in both its membership and attitude, SIS could be an intimidating organisation, especially for those who hadn’t come from Eton, Winchester, Oxbridge, the Guards or the Royal Navy. It was staffed by very many fair-minded men and women with a strong sense of patriotism and a keen work ethic, but snobbish and patronising behaviour undoubtedly persisted in certain quarters. In wartime, however, this club (or tribe, perhaps?) opened its doors and loosened its attitudes just a little. Exceptional circumstances forced it to bring in useful outsiders like Blake. Even so, those beyond
the Dutch Section who took notice of him often referred to Blake as ‘some Dutch fellow’ or ‘that funny foreigner’.

Not that it mattered much. SIS’s hermetically sealed departments meant that he generally mixed only with colleagues in P8. Blake had, in fact, started his career in Intelligence in exactly the right place. The Dutch Section wasn’t a typical SIS department, and he fitted in well with a mixed bunch of characters under the considerate leadership of Charles Seymour. Though very much the office junior, Seymour valued him greatly for a number of reasons: ‘He brought us a lot of useful addresses for safe houses in Holland, from his time in the underground. He was very good at decoding messages, scrambled or badly sent, as we were getting more and more information from our agents . . . But he’d also been a brave young man, from his experiences fleeing through Europe, and he was a good influence on the young agents we were sending over there. He was of great value in helping prepare them for their missions.’

For Blake, it was a seamless progression from the clandestine life he had been leading for the last four years. ‘I came very naturally into this atmosphere of illegality,’ he later observed. ‘I liked being an Intelligence Officer – I loved the romantic side of the job.’

Colonel Cordeaux and Major Seymour had worked skilfully and effectively to repair the damage to SIS’s operations in the Netherlands, which originated with the disastrous Venlo incident. Soon after the start of the war, on 9 November 1939, at a town on the Dutch-German border, two SIS officers and a Dutch intelligence agent were captured by the counter-espionage section of the
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD) in a clever sting which led to the destruction of much of the agent network in the Netherlands, and quite possibly damaged SIS’s entire espionage operation in Western Europe. From mid-1942 onwards, Cordeaux and Seymour had an intelligence operation in Holland up and running once again, with SIS and the newly-created Dutch Secret Service,
Bureau Inlichtingen
(BI), working effectively together – the Dutch supplying the agents, and the British training and equipping
them. By the time Blake joined P8 in 1944, the section was running five networks reporting through thirty wireless sets.

The famed Dutch secret agent, Pierre Louis Baron d’Aulnis de Bourouill, one of those dropped over Netherlands in 1943, testified to the work of P8: ‘I for one have always felt that the spirit of co-operation and personal friendship from Charles Seymour, sitting there, with his crew of Dutch section, were of very great importance to our success.’

Blake worked hand in glove with his mentor Douglas Child, who had overall responsibility for the training of agents. The two men shared a flat in Petty France, a short walk away from the office. Child provided the technical, wireless training for the new recruits, after which Blake would accompany them to the Parachute Training Centre at RAF Ringway, near Manchester.

Blake had come to realise that his ambition to return undercover to his native land would never be fulfilled. An agreement between SIS and BI meant that no British nationals were to be dropped into Holland as agents. Nonetheless, while at RAF Ringway, he took the opportunity to undertake the training alongside his charges, and experienced a taste of the adventure awaiting them when he joined them for a trial jump. It was exhilarating: ‘I felt myself gently rocking in the air. The relief that the parachute had opened, the light, floating feeling as if I was without weight . . . I thought this is what angels must feel like when they fly through the heavens.’

Blake’s real role, however, was to add psychological comfort, accompanying the nervous agents to the airfield on the night of a dropping operation. He found this a difficult but rewarding experience.

On the way we would stop, first for tea and then for drinks in some cosy old pub. Myself, a girl from the Women’s Services and the agent did our best to keep the mood carefree and usually succeeded in this . . . Just before departure the agent changed into clothes of Dutch origin and I had to check carefully that he had no English coins, letters, bus or cinema tickets, or anything else on his person, which might give him away . . . Then I gave him his false Dutch identity documents, his money, his codes and his transmitting schedules and – if he wished – a lethal pill.

But Blake’s major asset was his facility with languages. By now the Allies were pushing on through Europe following the D-Day landings, and had reached the estuary of the Rhine and Meuse, which separates the Northern from the Southern Netherlands. P8 had taken advantage of this advance to set up a field station in the liberated part of Holland, and a vast amount of material came pouring in from agents, often about German troop dispositions, the locations of headquarters and all manner of other military information. These telegrams were sent in code, and even when they had been deciphered at Bletchley Park, the text was often still badly mangled, with whole strings of words missing. With his thorough knowledge of Dutch, Blake’s task was to go through and ‘stitch’ them together.

SIS and BI continued to develop agent networks and began working effectively with the Dutch Resistance. But Holland’s liberation efforts still faced major setbacks along the way, none more so than ‘Operation Market Garden’, the bold Allied plan to drop 30,000 British and American airborne troops behind enemy lines to capture the eight bridges spanning the Dutch-German border, and from there to drive on into the industrial heartland of Germany.

Blake played a minor role in that fateful operation. He was on duty in the office at Broadway on the first day, Sunday, 17 September, waiting on tenterhooks for a telephone call from SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). Once it came, he was able to successfully despatch a series of telegrams to SIS’s underground organisations in the Arnhem-Nijmegen area, which enabled them to give assistance to the troops of the British 1st Airborne Division, who were about to land. As he recalled: ‘It was a tense afternoon . . . I realised an important operation was afoot, which, if successful, would bring about the liberation of Holland within a matter of days. Then
the call came and I at once sent off the telegrams. I felt as if a spring had been released inside me.’ But it wasn’t to be the decisive moment in this campaign. Indeed, it ended up a catastrophe. Thousands of lives were lost, and as a consequence the people of the Netherlands faced their harshest winter yet at the hands of an occupier bent on retribution.

Those who worked with Blake in this period were still unsure if this capable, serious-minded young man had all the required qualities to make a good intelligence officer. ‘I think he was a bit of a dreamer. He was certainly not technically equipped to be a spy – he couldn’t even drive a car properly,’ was the opinion of Hazel Seymour, Charles’s wife, who worked in another section of the Service. ‘But with his intellectual skills, he would have made a brilliant codist – he had that sort of brain. He also wrote very good, very intelligible reports.’

The Seymours took Blake under their wing. Hazel Seymour was only a couple of years older than him, but was married and expecting a baby, and he felt comfortable in her presence: ‘I had lots of conversations with him. He was fatherless, and he’d been missing his mother; he seemed a little bit lost. He was a very good listener, and always interested in other people . . . He was just a very pleasant, unassuming, quiet, gentle young man. He was someone we liked to have around. I didn’t think he would stay in SIS after the war – I thought perhaps he might have settled down to become a very respectable family man, with a job as a lecturer, perhaps.’

Although he didn’t know it at the time, in April 1945 Blake accompanied to the airfield the last agent to be dropped over Holland. It was a mission that had an unhappy ending: ‘He was a nice, fair boy, just turned eighteen, who was going to one of our groups in the Amsterdam area as a wireless operator. Just before take-off there was a last-minute hitch. But, after a longish wait, the aircraft took off after all . . . Two days later we received a telegram from the group to which the young man had been dropped. He was dead.’ The agent had been unable to free his harness as he came down over a large lake, close to
the dropping site. There was a strong wind that night and his parachute dragged him under. His body was discovered the following day.

As events moved rapidly in the spring of 1945, P8’s office gradually emptied. Major Seymour headed off to The Hague, to re-open the SIS station there, while Commander Child, with no more agents to train, was given a new intelligence job at Naval Headquarters in Germany. When VE Day came on 8 May, Blake was the sole officer on duty.

With little left to do, he wandered out into the excited crowds to soak up the atmosphere of that momentous day: ‘I found myself pushed in the direction of Buckingham Palace, where a surging mass of people kept on chanting: “We want the King! We want the King!” And then, when he and the Royal Family came out on the balcony, started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. The war was over, we had won.’

5

Cold War

I
n the week after the unalloyed excitement and relief of the VE-Day celebrations, the reality of the austere future stretching ahead for many years to come began to dawn on the British people. Widespread wartime restrictions remained and would only get harsher as American wartime aid dried up. Meat, butter, sugar, tea, jam, eggs – there were severe shortages of them all. Clothes were also rationed, and the salutary advice continued to be ‘make do and mend’.

The national hangover was duly reflected in the corridors of power. Jock Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary, recorded in his diary for Monday, 14 May: ‘At No. 10 I found everybody rather strained after a week of violent rejoicing and tumult . . . Victory has brought no respite. The PM looks tired and has to fight for the energy to deal with the problems confronting him. These include the settlement of Europe, the last round of war in the East, an election on the way, and the dark cloud of Russian imponderability.’

A couple of days later George Blake escaped the bleak mood of an exhausted nation when he set out to join Major Seymour and his team in The Hague, to assist with the task of winding down wartime affairs and reconstituting the SIS station. He would be engaged in delicate
work, well suited to his ability to listen patiently and sympathetically to the problems of others. Agents had to be paid off; the fate of those who had disappeared must be investigated; and their widows and orphans taken care of. In collaboration with officers from the
Bureau Inlichtingen
, the Dutch Secret Service, he also had to make tricky decisions about who should be recommended for awards and decorations, and then write citations.

Blake himself, and the rest of his colleagues in the Dutch Section, all received the Order of Orange-Nassau (equivalent to Britain’s OBE) for their work during the war.

In all, the SIS team in The Hague comprised five officers and three secretaries, all of whom lived and worked in a couple of large villas in Wassenaar, an affluent garden suburb of the Dutch city. The larger of the two houses had previously belonged to a Dutch Nazi. Just a fortnight earlier, he had been arrested and taken to a prison camp awaiting trial. The smaller building was used as an office.

Away from Wassenaar, in the wider Dutch population, the privations of war had been far worse than for the British, as George discovered when he went to visit his Aunt Truss in Rotterdam. He borrowed a bicycle with wooden wheels and cycled out to her home, which was some distance from the port: ‘She had become very thin, but otherwise was well. It was a tearful reunion and we talked deep into the night when I had to get back to my ship . . . The next time I came, I drove up in my requisitioned car and brought with me ample supplies of food. My aunt needed these badly after the winter of famine she had just lived through.’

There was really not enough work to do at The Hague to keep the group of SIS officers busy. As Major Seymour recalled: ‘I didn’t really need him [Blake], but I brought him over with me to give him something to do.’ George’s light duties left him with plenty of free time. Still only twenty-two, for the last six years his day-to-day existence had been fraught and highly pressured. Now he was cast into a hectic social scene with a seemingly never-ending diet of high living. From
the largesse of the military powers flowed the best accommodation in luxury hotels and picturesque country houses, rich food in expensive restaurants, and apparently never-ending stocks of champagne and brandy once greedily hoarded by the German Army.

In this bacchanalian-like setting even the quiet, serious-minded Blake threw off his shackles: ‘I too found myself irresistibly drawn into this maelstrom of pleasure. In the words of the well-known hymn, “the world, the flesh and Satan dwelt around the path I trod” . . . It seemed to me that the whole of Europe went mad in that first summer after the war. We had cars, we went to parties, nightclubs, drinking sessions – we were young and we enjoyed life to the full.’