The Greatest Traitor (25 page)

Plenty of extra manpower would be required and the committee did not want to restrict selection to those with a Russian or Slav background. Blake’s notes read: ‘British personnel who had acquired a knowledge of Russian in universities had proved, in practice, to be equally as good at transcribing as native Russians. This would enlarge the recruiting field and diminish security risk.’ It was agreed that the handling of encrypted material would be divided between the National Security Agency (NSA) in America and General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain.

This would by no means be the final meeting on the subject of the tunnel. In conclusion, Blake noted: ‘The discussions were of an exploratory nature. It was agreed that a further meeting could be held on or about 1 February 1954 at which it will be necessary to come to firm conclusions on the future conduct of the operation.’

As soon as the conference finished that afternoon, Rowlett flew back to Frankfurt, where he brought General Lucian Truscott, the CIA’s Chief of Mission in Germany, and Bill Harvey up to date with the latest developments.

After his minutes had been typed up and were ready for limited distribution among CIA and SIS officials, Blake retained the yellow-green carbon copy of the seven-page document for himself. He then arranged for a meeting with Kondrashev. Months before even a sod of earth had been dug from the ground at Altglienicke, the Berlin tunnel was fatally compromised.

On Monday, 18 January 1954 the duties of a cultural attaché came first for Sergei Kondrashev. It was his task to escort Soviet chess grandmasters David Bronstein, Alexander Tolush and Vladimir Alatortsev to the airport for their return flight to Moscow at the end of a politically embarrassing three-week tour of Britain, which had seen them fail to perform at the standard set by the Soviet Chess Federation. They had been vanquished, as it happens, by a British intelligence man – Irish-born Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, chief cryptanalyst at GCHQ. Having seen off the grandmasters, Kondrashev spent some hours ensuring he was not under surveillance before boarding a double decker bus.

A couple of stops later Blake joined Kondrashev on the top deck and, knowing he had little time, gave the Russian a brief résumé of the contents of the package he was handing over. Both men felt distinctly nervous. ‘I told him in broad outline about the Berlin project and pointed out to him the great secrecy with which the operation was surrounded, and the necessity for taking particular care that any
counter-measures the Soviet authorities might take should look natural and not create the suspicion that they were aware of what was afoot,’ Blake recalled.

Kondrashev, too, was not his usual, calm self: ‘I slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of my jacket. I was very tense. I knew how important this thing was and I felt it was burning into my chest.’

Kondrashev alighted several stops later at a prearranged location, where he was picked up by a fellow resident spy and driven back to Kensington Palace Gardens. As soon as he began to examine Blake’s minutes, he realised he had struck gold: ‘When I read it in the Embassy I was flabbergasted. This was explosive material. I could not believe my eyes.’ He sent a coded cable to Moscow that night, reporting that the meeting with
Diomid
had taken place satisfactorily. Such was the importance of the material that it was despatched immediately via the diplomatic courier, sealed in a special steel case and addressed directly to the Head of the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence).

Three weeks later, on 12 February, Kondrashev submitted a fuller report to Moscow Centre under his codename,
Rostov
, summing up the importance of the information Blake had passed on about both the Vienna and proposed Berlin tunnels. His preface to the section about Berlin contained a sentence of monumental understatement: ‘The information on a planned intercept operation against internal telephone lines on GDR territory is of interest.’

Interesting it certainly was. As a participant in further SIS and CIA meetings throughout 1954 and into 1955, Blake continued to keep his masters in the Kremlin informed about progress with the tunnel. CIA Director Dulles gave formal approval for the project just two days after the Blake/Kondrashev meeting on the London bus. The warehouse buildings – one for main operations, a kitchen-dining room for staff, and a structure to house three diesel-driven generators – were then erected in the summer. The dig commenced at the end of August.

Bill Harvey was content that the East Germans had no clue as to what was really taking place on the site. A display of fake radar and electronic intelligence gear was mounted on top of the warehouse, helping to fool the Communists into thinking it was signals intercept equipment aimed at the Soviet airport at Schönefeld.

That autumn, the US Army Corps of Engineers began their construction work from under the main operations building. Essentially, the tunnel they were putting together was constructed as a long tube, using hundreds of circular sections of heavy steel plates specifically cast back home in America and tested rigorously in the desert in New Mexico. Only six days into the excavation, however, potential disaster loomed when it was discovered that the water table was much higher than first thought. There was now serious doubt about whether the tunnel could be built at all as it would lie too close to the surface for safety. Harvey and Rowlett were advised a shallower tunnel could be dug, just nine feet below ground rather than sixteen. Work resumed, and the horizontal section of the tunnel was eventually completed on 28 February 1955. It was 1,476 feet in length; 3,100 tons of soil was removed, 125 tons of steel plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout were used.

Now it was the turn of the British. It was the job of the Royal Engineers to build a vertical shaft from the end of the tunnel to the target cables. This was a tricky task, given the nature of the sandy soil of Berlin, which threatened to collapse everything on top of the diggers. An inventive solution came in the form of a contraption called ‘The Mole’ – a bottomless steel box, the top of which was made up of a series of sideways cutters interspersed with closable rotating blades. When placed vertically in the tunnel, the soil could then be removed slot by slot before the whole device was levered upwards. That work began on 10 March, and it took eighteen days to reach and expose the cables. Then the British continued with the final, most sensitive part of the whole operation – the tap itself.

The biggest worry now was that the Soviets might notice a slight
reduction in power as the tap took place but two jointers from Dollis Hill fashioned what was known in the trade as a ‘high-impedance’ tap – drawing off as little of the signal as possible – without a hitch in a delicate, painstaking four-hour operation.

The first working tap took place on 11 May; intelligence would flow copiously and continuously for the following eleven months.

Thanks to Blake, of course, the KGB had always known the tunnel was coming. They knew almost exactly to the day when the enemy would start eavesdropping. This gave the chiefs at Moscow Centre a dilemma: if they altered or manipulated the nature of the traffic going through cables 150, 151 and 152, the Americans and British would surely realise before long that something was amiss. Did they want to risk compromising the mole who had brought them the secrets of the tunnel – their eyes and ears at the heart of British intelligence?

In the early months of 1954 there had been much talk of treachery in the corridors and offices of Broadway and Carlton Gardens. With his own traitorous activities now underway, Blake was increasingly anxious. His new unease was first prompted in early April by a high-profile Soviet defection.

Vladimir Petrov was a KGB employee based at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, Australia, who feared he was about to be recalled to the Soviet Union, where, in all likelihood, he would be ‘purged’ and shot as an ally of the late but not lamented Security Chief, Lavrentiy Beria. When Petrov’s wife, Evdokia, tried to join him, two KGB officials seized her, bundling her onto a plane at Sydney with the intention of taking her back to Moscow. The striking picture of the rough handling of this clearly distressed woman by two Communist ‘heavies’ travelled all round the world. When the aircraft landed for refuelling at Darwin, officers from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) were on hand to intercept the kidnapping attempt, and freed Evdokia from the clutches of her KGB abductors.

The problem for Blake – and for Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby,
those other KGB moles still in position in England – was that the Petrovs had worked in the Lubyanka for years before moving to Australia. They were familiar with the workings of the KGB in France, Germany and England, and they knew, even if they did not have the codenames or any other specific details, that there had been a network of agents in place in London since the early days of the war.

SIS quickly began to liaise with their counterparts in ASIO, sensing that the Petrovs might have valuable information about Burgess and Maclean, and even Kim Philby, then still under suspicion of being ‘The Third Man’.

Soon, fresh questions were being asked in the House of Commons. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd was understandably cautious in his response: ‘The interrogation is at present in progress, but such information about Messrs Burgess and Maclean which has so far been elicited is of a limited and general character, and it is not yet certain whether it is based on Petrov’s personal knowledge or on heresay. I will consider making a further statement in due course.’

Blake had only entered the fray relatively recently, but could the Petrovs have something on him? ‘The Burgess and Maclean affair, not unnaturally, formed a frequent subject of conversation in SIS and Foreign Office circles and, frankly speaking, it was a subject I did not enjoy,’ he recalled. ‘It was too near the bone and made me feel very uncomfortable. I tried to avoid it as much as possible.’

Writing in his diary, Housing Minister Harold Macmillan revelled in the discomfiture of the Soviet Union, but calculated that the episode might have mixed consequences. The entry for Wednesday, 21 April read: ‘The newspapers are full of the Petrov drama. The account of how the Russian thugs tried to terrorise her and were disarmed at the airport by the Australian police is more like a piece of popular fiction than real life . . . It won’t make the Soviet Government any more tractable at Geneva. I think it will have a good effect at home, where people tend to forget how horrible Communism really is.’

Blake was, in fact, one of those who made his way to the Swiss city,
where high-level talks on securing the future of Korea and ending the war between the French and the Communist Viet Minh in Indochina were taking place. He was not there as an accredited delegate but at the invitation of SIS’s Head of Station in Berne, who wanted Blake and his colleagues from Y section to bug the phones of the Soviet and Chinese delegations.

Their mission was a technical success, but it was completely unproductive in terms of the intelligence produced. The conversations of the political leaders were surprisingly discreet on the matters that counted, so the spies were unable to offer British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden any additional leverage in his negotiations. Instead, the Chinese delegates and Soviet leaders spent most of the time on the phone talking to their wives and children. Blake, listening in to the conversations of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, discovered him to be far removed from the stern, obdurate caricature painted of him in the West: ‘He discussed with his wife the difficulties which their married daughter had in feeding her new baby, in which matter he sometimes tendered practical advice. He also had long talks with his 6-year-old grandson, listening patiently to his detailed accounts of what he had been doing.’

Despite the lack of useful covert knowledge, Eden concluded that Geneva was, by and large, a success: ‘We had stopped an eight-year war and reduced international tension at a point of instant danger to world peace.’ But he and his fellow diplomats had also stored up trouble for the future. Vietnam was granted its independence and elections promised within two years; but in a worrying echo of Korea, the country was divided in two – this time at the seventeenth parallel, with a Communist regime (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) in the North led by Ho Chi Minh, and the southern ‘nation’ (Republic of Vietnam) led by the Catholic Ngo Ding Diem. When Ngo – supported by Eisenhower – refused to authorise the agreed-upon elections to reunify Vietnam in 1956, his decision led to a resumption of the war. This time, the Americans took the place
of the French – and their involvement would prove to be a political, military and humanitarian disaster which continues to trouble the American conscience to this very day.

As the interest over the Petrov case diminished and the hunt for the truth about Burgess and Maclean and ‘The Third Man’ died down for the moment, George Blake’s double life continued. For relaxation he attended a weekly evening Arabic language class at London University. A male colleague from Y section had also joined the course, and after the lecture finished the two would have coffee together in a snack bar near Russell Square, or go back to Charleville Mansions, where Blake’s mother would cook them dinner.

His personal life, meanwhile, was dominated by his relationship with Gillian, which was now developing apace: ‘After my absence in Geneva, it became clear we were both in love and that the natural thing for us to do was to get married.’ Natural perhaps, but Blake, living a most abnormal kind of existence, now found himself faced with a crucial dilemma. The unselfish option would have been to break off the relationship, however much hurt that might cause. The odds on his eventual discovery were high. Irrespective of the stresses and strains that his double life would put on a marriage, the ultimate unmasking, when it came, would have devastating emotional and social consequences for Gillian.

Blake agonised over what course of action to take: ‘I made some feeble attempts to put her off by telling her that I was half-Jewish and that her father, who was the kind of Englishman who had little time for Jews, blacks and dagos, would not like this.’ But Blake’s antecedents did not remotely concern Gillian: