TRIGGERnometry - Hero or Traitor： The Story of George Blake with Simon Kuper

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show

00:00:40.440 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today

00:00:45.720 is a journalist for the financial times and now the author of the happy traitor simon cooper

00:00:51.100 welcome to trigonometry it's an honor to be here this is the very first interview i've done in

00:00:56.080 english about this book and i did not know that you two existed apart from kilkenomics the festival

00:01:01.540 where i always meet you so it's great to see that you are real people thank you very much

00:01:06.280 there are a lot of people who think we're controlled opposition and avatars created

00:01:10.180 by the government so yes we do exist jewish shills and there's all sorts of other options

00:01:14.880 whatever you decide of the political spectrum you hate us from uh but enough about us i mean

00:01:20.000 you've written a brilliant book i've always enjoyed your your commentary anyway uh you've

00:01:24.280 written about football quite a lot and about many other subjects. But The Happy Traitor is a

00:01:30.060 biography of George Blake, the double agent. Before we get into that, tell everybody a little

00:01:36.760 bit about who you are, how are you, where you are, what was your interest in writing this book,

00:01:41.220 and so on. Well, I spent most of my life writing for the Financial Times. I used to write sports

00:01:48.240 stuff, and now I write political and cultural stuff about how the world is coming to an end,

00:01:52.240 as we all know. And I am quite an international person like you, Constantine, and I grew up

00:01:59.580 mostly in the Netherlands. By chance, my dad had a job there. And so about 20 years ago,

00:02:05.920 I read an article in Holland about this KGB agent who was British Dutch in origin. He'd grown up in

00:02:14.780 Holland uh British Egyptian Jewish father and he had ended up George Blake a KGB agent jailed in

00:02:23.700 Brissa and escaped to Moscow and I thought what an amazing story that was the first I heard I must

00:02:28.220 interview this guy one day because I grew up about 20 miles away from him in the Netherlands uh also

00:02:34.480 Jewish also British also speaking Dutch as he did so egoistically I saw a lot of similarities 0.93

00:02:41.340 between me and Blake and then in 2012 I was going to speak at a conference in Moscow and I have a

00:02:48.140 Dutch friend in Moscow who knows Blake who knew Blake and I said would you set me up with Blake

00:02:54.100 and you know the story goes on I could bang on about that but in the end I'm sitting in Blake's

00:03:01.420 dacha listening to this story I mean I was the deal was it was complicated to arrange it with

00:03:08.880 Blake as you can imagine KGB double agents are not always keen to go on the record etc

00:03:13.640 so Blake actually phoned me to interview me first and I was in this Moscow cemetery I was looking at

00:03:19.880 the graves of Chekhov and Khrushchev I can't remember the name of the cemetery it's a well

00:03:24.100 known one in Moscow and Blake calls me and he speaks in this very old-fashioned sort of pre-war

00:03:28.980 Dutch accent we have a nice chat and his issue which he doesn't dare express is he doesn't want

00:03:34.100 me to ask him about Putin, because he's very afraid of Putin. He hates Putin. He thinks Putin

00:03:38.980 is anti-democratic, etc. But he relies for Putin on his pension and his dacha. And so I say, look, 0.55

00:03:46.320 you know, Mr. Blake, I'm not going to, I won't ask you about Putin. I won't ask you about your

00:03:49.500 life, etc. So he says, come on over. And we had a lovely time together. Actually, I have to admit,

00:03:55.020 I really liked the guy, which is something I had to wean myself off in the later writing.

00:03:59.020 and I walked out of his dacha after four hours thinking I was only going to write an interview

00:04:04.780 for a Dutch newspaper he only wanted me to write about it in Dutch and I walked out thinking that

00:04:10.900 was the most interesting interview I've ever done in my journalistic career wow but my kids were

00:04:16.160 quite small at the time so I never had a free moment to myself so only a couple of years later

00:04:19.900 did I think actually you know I'm no longer in the playground every hour of the weekend I could

00:04:26.520 about turning this interview into a book. So then I began to research his life.

00:04:31.300 And the book is A Happy Traitor with Beau Fred. It is absolutely brilliant. He did lead a

00:04:38.100 fascinating life. Why do you think it was that for someone who was actually a very, very mild

00:04:43.820 mannered man, he then went and had this career where he became a double agent, risking his life

00:04:49.840 and also ending many others? I mean, he says himself that to be a spy, you have to kind of

00:04:55.600 like the game, the secrecy, the adventure. And, you know, he was always into kind of dressing up

00:05:01.980 and acting. I mean, even as a child with his sisters, he'd act the pastor. His ambition was

00:05:07.680 to be a Calvinist pastor. He would act Hitler, who was, of course, a big figure on the world stage in 0.84

00:05:13.840 his childhood. And he liked the thrill. So when he's 17, 18, World War II breaks out and he's in

00:05:21.600 the Netherlands having spent a few years with family in Cairo and he joins the Dutch resistance

00:05:26.780 as a teenage courier and he has very exciting times but he thinks I want the big stage and

00:05:33.300 also I want to join my mummy in England she'd fled to England when the war broke out he was very much

00:05:37.240 a mummy's boy and so he escapes through Belgium and France and Franco Spain amazing journey in

00:05:44.760 1942-43 underground through occupied Europe to Britain where he does indeed join the British

00:05:50.560 Secret Services. So he'd always had this kind of yen for adventure for the double life behind this

00:05:57.480 mild-mannered facade. But he was also an idealist. I mean, he starts off with this very pious

00:06:02.920 Calvinist, and he then becomes a very pious communist. Well, actually, this was what I was

00:06:08.720 going to ask you about, because my impression, and correct me if I'm wrong from the book, is that

00:06:12.800 by the time he joins the British Secret Service, he's already a committed communist. Is that correct?

00:06:19.180 that's not what i believe some people have suggested that i don't think so i think

00:06:23.540 in his youth into his 20s he's a colvinist in the war he still thinks well after the war i'm going

00:06:30.980 to become a pastor and he's very anti-nazi anti-hitler he's a half-jewish britain living 1.00

00:06:37.680 in the occupied netherlands so he he very courageously takes the side of the resistance

00:06:42.680 which very few dutch people did and he gets to london and his focus is on winning the war he's

00:06:48.580 not really a british patriot never pretended to be but he you know he's part of the dutch effort to

00:06:53.460 win the war and it's only later when the when mi6 sis as it then was the secret intelligence

00:07:02.420 service send him to south korea as a spy the korean war breaks out in 1950 he is held captive

00:07:10.000 by the north koreans for two years with other british and french prisoners and in that time

00:07:15.260 almost the only reading matter they are sent is Marx and Lenin in Russian.

00:07:20.960 So Marx in Russian translation.

00:07:22.580 Sounds like a modern university campus, Simon.

00:07:25.700 It is like distance learning, it's true. 0.99

00:07:29.540 So you got the good shit in the original language? 0.99

00:07:32.880 Yeah. 0.99

00:07:34.220 Well, he could have read Marx in German as well.

00:07:37.700 Blake was very much a language's man,

00:07:39.560 but he'd learned Russian in a year in Cambridge.

00:07:41.760 He wasn't there with Ken Philby at all.

00:07:44.320 he was there in 1947-48 but he goes to Cambridge he learns Russian he loves the language within

00:07:48.860 months he can read Anna Karenina in the original and so when he's in captivity I mean they had

00:07:53.820 nothing to do for two years a group of highly intelligent men and at one point the Soviet 0.92

00:07:59.180 embassy sent them this package of books they're very excited but there's only one book in English

00:08:03.160 Treasure Island by Stevenson so they think okay well who gets to read Treasure Island first this

00:08:08.780 is going to be the biggest thrill of our lives here. So they draw lots. And so they read Stevenson

00:08:15.440 in turn, and they just keep rereading it. And in the end, the copy is destroyed. And there are two

00:08:20.160 books in Russian, Marx and Lenin. And so Blake and the former British consul in Korea, who's an old 1.00

00:08:26.360 British conservative, read Marx in Russian, discuss it. And the consul says to Blake, you know,

00:08:33.040 I'm an anti-communist, but I believe that Marx is correct, that communism is the future,

00:08:37.920 it will replace the british empire and um i i'm sorry to say that i think communism is going to

00:08:44.500 win and blake was very persuaded by this but we talk about so i mean his ideological indoctrination

00:08:52.160 you might say at this particular point but the seeds of his belief in communism were sowed much

00:08:57.560 earlier in his time in egypt with the disparity between rich and poor that he observed there were

00:09:03.060 many forces pushing him i mean when his father dies they get a letter from the father's sister

00:09:08.620 in cairo and she says well um my brother you probably didn't know it he was jewish that was

00:09:13.660 a huge shock to blake's family never knew father was jewish anyway uh you must be quite poor now

00:09:20.620 that your husband has died she writes to blake's mother so come and live in our mansion in cairo 0.93

00:09:25.080 and i've seen pictures it's an amazing mansion it's now the algerian embassy so blake lives in

00:09:30.500 this fantastic opulence in cairo which was then a kind of european run city and he lives with this

00:09:39.780 jewish family they speak french and they are the richest people in the world and around them the

00:09:46.200 average age of death for egyptians is about 30 i mean it's the circumstances are terrible the family

00:09:52.380 has a kind of textile uh mill on the nile where the workers children are treated terribly and so

00:09:59.540 that I think was definitely something that worked on Blake that he thought well you know

00:10:03.940 the world is unjust but he had grown up believing that communism was the enemy of God

00:10:09.840 and so these influences work on him a bit the British Secret Service

00:10:15.200 facially give him this book which they've written a guy called Carew Hunt had written a book for the

00:10:20.740 British Spy Service called Theory and Practice of Communism the idea being you know communism is the

00:10:25.720 new enemy post-war, so we have to understand communism, what it is. And so Carew Hunt very

00:10:30.500 kind of honestly and fairly tries to describe communism, meaning, you know, this is what we're

00:10:37.000 up against, chaps. But Blake reads his book and thinks, wow, that's very convincing. Communism 1.00

00:10:41.420 sounds just the thing. And so all these influences work on him. He falls in love with Russia and with

00:10:47.580 Russian, again, taught by a very anti-communist Russian-British exile at Cambridge. And so when

00:10:54.300 he starts to read Marx in 1950, all these influences have come together. He's lost his

00:10:59.900 faith in God. He also believes very strongly in determinism. Everything we do in life is determined.

00:11:07.200 God shapes all our actions. And the communists, of course, have a version of that, which is history

00:11:11.900 is determined. There's nothing really the individual can do about it. So he's very much

00:11:16.320 kind of equipped for communism when he meets it head on in Korea. And once then that happens,

00:11:22.440 and he goes back to the UK, where was the moment where he actually started to defect

00:11:29.240 and start to work for the KGB and the Soviets? That happens in North Korea. I mean, it's not

00:11:36.880 quite clear exactly who chats up who. He says at one point he slips a note to the North Korean

00:11:42.780 camp commander who the prisoners called Fatso. So he gives this note to Fatso in Russian.

00:11:48.360 Disgusting bigotry and fad-shaming. 0.92

00:11:50.580 I can't believe in 1950 they didn't... 0.98

00:11:53.180 Oh, unbelievable.

00:11:54.700 Anyway, sorry, Simon, carry on.

00:11:56.040 I think the prisoners were quite thin at that point.

00:12:00.300 Very privileged.

00:12:03.940 They were privileged men,

00:12:05.320 but not at a very privileged moment of their lives.

00:12:07.620 And so at that point,

00:12:08.800 a KGB agent from Vladivostok shows up,

00:12:11.940 a guy called Nikolajnol Lanko.

00:12:15.080 and laenka uh interrogates all the prisoners and he and blake kind of recognize kindred spirits in

00:12:23.180 each other and so laenka says to blake you know you could be a kgb spy and so in 1953 stalin dies

00:12:32.760 immediately there's a big thaw and the prisoners are happily released they go straight to china

00:12:38.160 where they all have a big bath together and they sing nursery rhymes they're related they're given

00:12:42.840 new suits. And in spring 1953, Blake arrives back in Britain. He and the other British prisoners 0.90

00:12:49.520 are given a hero's welcome at RAF Abingdon Airport. And he goes back to the SIS and says,

00:12:56.340 hi guys, here I am. And they say, wow, you're the hero of North Korea. You survived communist

00:13:00.120 captivity. And weirdly, I mean, just two years before, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean had defected

00:13:07.300 to moscow so and kim philby was under suspicion so mi6 knew you know there are some some bad eggs

00:13:16.620 around here and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to check out blake to see

00:13:23.520 whether he might have been turned in north korean captivity they just say welcome back george you

00:13:28.420 know come straight in that's really interesting isn't it simon because as you'll know you know

00:13:32.740 And I obviously know, having grown up in Russia and the Soviet Union, that was not the way that returning heroes were treated in the Soviet Union.

00:13:40.920 If you came back from abroad having been held in captivity, you'd go straight into a gulag and be interrogated and they'd make very sure that you weren't an enemy spy.

00:13:50.180 But that didn't happen. And by this point, he's already been turned.

00:13:53.780 So he goes back into MI6 and at this point he starts being a double agent. Is that right?

00:13:58.220 He starts being a double agent. So he walks around with this camera strapped between his legs every day at work, a little Minox camera. And at lunch, all the other spies go to their clubs on St. James's and, you know, go out for big lunches, as posh people did in the 50s.

00:14:14.220 and he um photographs all the documents and then he meets his kgb handlers on you know the top

00:14:23.560 flights of buses in the london fog on corners in belsize park deserted surrey railway stations and

00:14:29.680 he hands them all these documents and they really like it and he tells them that the uh the ally

00:14:36.080 the western allies us uk have built a spy tunnel under berlin to listen to soviet telephone calls

00:14:42.420 So he blows the Berlin's bite on even before it goes into operation, 0.78

00:14:45.580 which is the kind of main Western listening device of the 50s.

00:14:49.820 And so, yeah, he's giving the Soviets amazing stuff and he is never suspected.

00:14:54.160 Because in many ways, he was actually, I mean, take aside the fact that, you know,

00:14:58.840 he sent hundreds of people probably to their deaths.

00:15:01.740 In many ways, he was a perfect employee, wasn't he?

00:15:05.580 Yeah, I mean, he was a very smart guy.

00:15:08.280 And John Le Carre, who was obsessed by him, who also kindly offered a quote for the book because Le Carre read the manuscripts before he died.

00:15:17.040 Le Carre says, look, if you're a double agent, you want to make a very good impression on your own service so that, you know, you get promoted, you get good jobs.

00:15:25.100 Nobody gives you a hard time.

00:15:27.540 So Blake worked very well in a way for Britain.

00:15:30.380 And he was good kind of spying material because he wasn't easily blackmailable. 0.82

00:15:34.780 He didn't drink.

00:15:35.600 He didn't have affairs.

00:15:36.540 he had a very kind of dull family life he wasn't gay either that was another one 1.00

00:15:41.020 he wasn't gay although you know the british upper class was was more flexible on that of course 0.53

00:15:46.580 than later generations say so every burges continued burges and blunt continued to be gay 0.70

00:15:53.460 into adulthood because the the system in the british upper class was you sort of more or less

00:15:58.500 had to be gay until you finished university and then you were supposed to marry and go straight 0.97

00:16:04.060 and that was considered entirely non-blackmailable.

00:16:09.040 I mean, he didn't really say,

00:16:10.140 oh, this chap had homosexual affairs at Cambridge 0.91

00:16:12.520 because, of course. 0.95

00:16:14.240 That was a requirement.

00:16:16.080 It was a requirement for entry into the establishment. 0.72

00:16:18.860 And Burgess and Blunt continued to be gay after university,

00:16:22.640 which was seen as eccentric,

00:16:24.380 but not as particularly reprehensible, I think.

00:16:26.820 Oh, God, I miss the good old days.

00:16:29.340 He went to boarding school.

00:16:30.740 I did.

00:16:31.860 But Simon, so he's not easily blackmailable.

00:16:34.780 He's the model employee.

00:16:36.980 And just, I mean, we're talking about it very jovially, of course,

00:16:40.280 but I think we should also do justice to what you might describe,

00:16:45.120 I think, quite accurately as this man's terrible crimes.

00:16:48.600 Can you sum up for us the scale of the damage he did

00:16:52.000 to British and Western efforts to defeat the Soviet Union

00:16:57.980 And also, you know, the lives of the many agents that were taken as a result of his betrayal.

00:17:27.980 The Princess of Wells Theatre. Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:17:34.120 Well, let's start with the agents. I mean, when the Brits finally unmasked him in 1961,

00:17:41.380 they do this survey of their foreign spying stations, mostly in Eastern Europe. And they

00:17:49.480 reckon that Blake, by his own admission, gave away hundreds of British agents. So if you were,

00:17:55.480 let's say a telephone operator in moscow passing information on to britain blake given the soviet

00:18:05.200 your name or in east berlin if you were a businessman um from let's say britain who often

00:18:14.380 visited the eastern europe then blake had given them your name so he betrayed probably 500 plus

00:18:22.100 of these people to the eastern powers now he says the kgb assured me these people wouldn't be killed

00:18:28.480 i think the kgb did promise him that because of course they didn't care what they told him

00:18:37.600 and so sis reckons about 40 of these people were killed i mean luckily he did this after

00:18:46.880 Stalin's death and as you know the USSR and the eastern countries generally were much less

00:18:52.900 bloodthirsty after 53 yeah and so most of these people were given long jail sentences etc but

00:18:58.760 about 40 of them are reckoned to have been killed but look let's put the counterpoint to this this

00:19:05.420 is a time of war effectively now if that had been a British person being a double agent against the

00:19:13.360 soviets we'd all lured him to the skies as a hero isn't george blake a hero to the soviets

00:19:19.540 he is he was a hero to the soviets yeah he got the order of lenin from putin and

00:19:23.700 blake's very job some of the time was trying to turn russians and east germans to get them to spy

00:19:28.940 for britain so his job was to create double agents so so is creating double agents there

00:19:35.140 rice and being a double agent here wrong i mean clearly communism was a an evil creed

00:19:41.440 i i do condemn blake i i'm not trying to defend him i mean he was in a very low business of spying

00:19:49.420 and as le carrie says you know horrible things were done on both sides but that doesn't

00:19:54.480 that doesn't negate the horrible things that blake did and the the many lives that he destroyed

00:19:59.460 did you ever challenge him on that simon it sounds like you did talk about it did you ever

00:20:03.600 put it to him that the dozens of people at least have died and hundreds of people's lives or maybe

00:20:08.900 even thousands if you include their family members would have been ruined by his actions did he did

00:20:14.100 you talk to him about that and did he have any uh thoughts on that well i raised it obliquely i mean

00:20:19.400 we were sitting on the sofa together we were getting on well and it was a difficult i i i'm

00:20:24.120 not a kind of very big hard hitter on the spot so i didn't really want to say well look mr blake

00:20:28.860 you killed about 40 people what do you reckon so i did say you know you betrayed a lot of agents

00:20:34.340 do you regret anything and then he talked about regrets he had vis-a-vis breaking up his family

00:20:41.360 you know he was arrested when his two his three sons were tiny and left his wife behind he talked

00:20:48.660 about regrets of having betrayed the SIS the British spying services to which he felt still

00:20:53.400 loyal he didn't talk about regrets about agents and when he's been asked about that when he was

00:20:58.660 asked about that at other times he always said none of these people were killed and this is the

00:21:03.600 way spine works you know uh you were supposed to catch each other's agents and if the man who

00:21:09.580 betrayed me to the british were to walk into this room now i'd give him a cup of tea he's his line

00:21:14.400 was this is just the game and anyway none of these guys were killed so i think he genuinely came to

00:21:18.640 believe that he lived in denial because he was actually quite a peaceful bloke he didn't like

00:21:22.420 violence didn't like killing people he thought all that was ugly and so he coped with what he

00:21:26.400 done by denying it even to himself. Have you ever been abroad and felt out of place because you

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00:22:46.000 Because in many ways, he was a picture of the perfect English gentleman, wasn't he?

00:22:50.480 the way he conducted himself, the way he was. Also, he was very, very moral. So it's quite

00:22:58.420 incongruous the fact that the way he presents himself and that's at the same time being

00:23:02.540 incredibly duplicitous. I would say he was the perfect gentleman, but not the perfect English 1.00

00:23:08.600 gentleman. And at SIS, they always thought he's not really one of us. I mean, he wasn't posh.

00:23:13.600 He was a foreigner. He was half Jewish. He hadn't been to boarding school. And so he was definitely

00:23:20.020 kind of looked down on and sneered at in that way. I think that if you think about perfect

00:23:26.940 English gentleman, you're thinking more of people like Philby and Burgess, also complete with their

00:23:30.840 eccentricities, whereas Blake was a much more straight guy in the way he presented himself.

00:23:38.060 And so not being a perfect British gentleman was one of the issues at work in the workplace.

00:23:44.140 And do you think that contributed in any way to what then happened, or was it purely an

00:23:48.800 ideological thing with him. He just thought that communism and Marxism and Leninism were the way

00:23:53.820 to go. He just believed in communism. I mean, a lot of people, especially in Britain, have written,

00:23:59.000 well, he hated Britain. He was excluded by the establishment and therefore he hated Britain.

00:24:03.940 Now, he was excluded by the establishment, but he didn't hate Britain at all. He quite liked Britain.

00:24:08.400 He just never really had much to do with Britain because he only spent, I mean, the longest stretch

00:24:12.780 of his life he spent in Britain was the five years he spent in jail before he legged it.

00:24:16.240 so he didn't really spend much of his life there he admired Britain he was very attached to Britain's

00:24:22.420 wartime record he um he loved British uh literature British films so he and he thought

00:24:30.860 Britain was a very upstanding place and actually the people who mentored him in his move to communism

00:24:35.380 unintentionally were all conservative members of the British establishment Elizabeth Hill who taught

00:24:40.680 him in Cambridge gave him this love of Russia Carew Hunt who wrote this theory of practice of

00:24:45.040 communism book later his best friend in Moscow was Donald McLean another British tough Vivian

00:24:51.260 Holt the consul in Korea who told him that communism was the future so he was very influenced

00:24:57.680 by conservative Brits from the establishment and he was rescued from jail we might come to that by

00:25:02.800 other Brits so I mean he told me at one point look he said so much of my life has been given

00:25:07.580 to me by kind British people he he didn't hate Britain at all so let's move it forward he's

00:25:14.380 doing very, very well in the service. He's doing very, very well with the KGB. Everything's going

00:25:19.440 swimmingly for him. Where did it begin to go wrong? Well, the problem is always other defectors. So

00:25:26.020 a couple of people from the East, two Poles leading Polish intelligence officers defected,

00:25:33.180 and this double agent in East Germany, a kind of lowly guy called Horst Eitner.

00:25:38.580 both uh they all point the finger of suspicion to blake this guy called golonievsky who's um

00:25:45.480 who's been giving the western powers information he defects in 1961 and later he starts to say he's

00:25:54.340 the grand duke alexei the son of um char nicholas ii so he goes a bit bonkers but before that

00:25:59.780 happens golonievsky gives them all the information that they need to see that the mole that they knew

00:26:04.940 they had in the service is in fact Blake and so Blake at this point has been because he's already

00:26:11.000 on the suspicion they didn't want to tell him this is 1961 he's been sent to Lebanon to learn

00:26:15.580 Arabic in this kind of British-run school in Lebanon called Mikas and so at one point Nicholas

00:26:22.640 Elliott who's the MI6 station officer that's there says to Blake oh Blake you're wanted back in

00:26:27.980 London I think they want to give you a promotion and so Blake you know suspects something but he

00:26:33.660 thinks what can I do you know I don't want to blow up my family by escaping to the Soviet Union now

00:26:38.920 maybe it's nothing so he flies back to London he walks into the office at St James's and I said

00:26:46.680 what did you feel when you walked in he said I felt and he says this in English the game is up

00:26:51.080 because his colleague Shergold I think Harry Shergold says hello Blake some things to talk

00:26:59.460 about. And let's walk across the park to our other office. And Blake realizes they're going

00:27:06.120 to the other office so that they can record an interrogation. And they interrogate him for a

00:27:11.100 couple of days, but they know he's a spy, but they don't have any evidence that can stand up in court

00:27:15.600 because it's all secret evidence. They don't want to go to court anyway, be embarrassing.

00:27:20.580 And so Blake's just denying everything. I didn't do it. I didn't do it.

00:27:23.600 And Simon, just to jump in there very briefly, when you say interrogate,

00:27:26.960 they're just asking him questions or are they applying a bit of the old Russian method to him?

00:27:32.680 Not Russian at all. It's very gentlemanly, very collegiate. He's interrogated by three

00:27:37.880 colleagues who he knows well, one of whom is a good friend. And they're all sitting around and

00:27:43.300 it's a nice chat. And in the evenings, he's allowed to go home to his mother's house in

00:27:48.660 Radlet in Hertfordshire. So they did take the precaution of tailing him just in case.

00:27:52.760 but every evening he leaves the interrogation he takes the train to Radler where he's not allowed

00:27:57.620 to tell his mother who's his closest friend in the world that he's being interrogated

00:28:00.560 and so on the third day Shergold says to him well Blake you know of course you spied for them

00:28:05.860 but you couldn't really help it could you the Koreans tortured you they made you do it 0.89

00:28:10.220 you didn't have a choice and Blake said bursts out and suddenly he says no nobody tortured me

00:28:15.960 nobody forced me I spied for the KGB of my own accord I did it out of belief because he desperately

00:28:22.220 wants people to see him as an idealist which he is and they can't believe it he's given this kind

00:28:27.880 of unforced confession given another half hour they'd have said to him okay you know george get

00:28:32.380 on a plane to moscow we never want to see you again go um but they they suddenly have this

00:28:38.200 this confession and then he just confesses the whole thing and he even stupidly confesses to

00:28:42.660 the police not realizing that the confession he'd given to his sis colleagues wouldn't stand up in 0.55

00:28:47.540 court. He then confesses to the police. And there's that great scene in the book where

00:28:52.240 he's going to, I think, going to make a phone call, isn't he, in the park? And then there's

00:28:57.420 the moment of hesitation. Could you expand upon that a little bit? What happened there?

00:29:01.820 Yeah, it seems that he waits outside the telephone booth. Of course, they tail him on his lunch

00:29:06.120 breaks. So on his lunch break, he goes to the telephone booth and he walks in and then he walks

00:29:10.080 out again, doesn't make the call. And then he goes back in and then he walks out, doesn't make the

00:29:14.480 call and the suspicion is that he wanted to call his KGB handler and say look they got me what

00:29:19.680 should I do because the KGB had never given him advice on what to do if caught the line was well

00:29:25.840 you won't be caught anyway but and the thing I loved about the book is that you took the personal

00:29:32.060 which is a story of Blake but you also expanded it into the international like the Americans

00:29:36.740 actually they came across really well they were very understanding so in spring 61 the Brits

00:29:44.380 call the Americans and say oh something rather embarrassing has happened and it's that Blake you

00:29:49.780 know not only um we had various spying scandals we just had the Portland spy ring blown Burgess

00:29:57.160 McLean but now this bloke Blake essentially he's given up every western agent to the eastern block

00:30:02.700 for eight years now and the Americans of course not happy about this at all however luckily for

00:30:10.120 the Brits. The Bay of Pigs has just happened. The stir-crazy, completely failed American attempt 0.64

00:30:17.360 to invade Castro's Cuba using a ragtag bag of Cuban exiles, looking a lot like the storming 0.99

00:30:23.620 of the capital, but in Cuba. A bunch of crazy right-wing nuts trying to subverse a government. 0.99

00:30:30.580 Where have we seen that before? So the Bay of Pigs has gone completely wrong. It's a massive 0.97

00:30:34.360 intelligence disaster. So the Americans are not really in a great position to lecture the Brits.

00:30:39.600 The Americans do go back and say to each other, never give these idiot Brits any more information again. 0.99

00:30:46.820 But they can't afford to really go in hard on the Brits at that particular moment. 0.99

00:30:51.240 Macmillan, the prime minister, is hugely embarrassed.

00:30:53.960 Macmillan refers to the so-called secret services. 1.00

00:30:58.220 He thinks his spies are a bunch of idiots and are just there more or less to embarrass him, which is not wrong. 1.00

00:31:04.820 That's interesting. 1.00

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00:32:24.060 so simon he gets caught he confesses even to the police not realizing that he didn't actually need

00:32:31.600 to uh and then he gets sentenced to is it 44 years 42 years so uh it seems that the judge had quite

00:32:40.160 against all rules had called mcmillan the prime minister before sentencing and had asked mcmillan

00:32:47.160 you know this chap blake has he done much damage how much damage has he done wow and you are really

00:32:53.380 not as a judge in England supposed to discuss cases in your court with anyone else, and certainly

00:33:01.240 not with the Prime Minister. But it appears that this is what Justice Parker did. And so he then

00:33:07.040 gives Blake 42 years, which even Macmillan calls a savage sentence, longest jail sentence in modern

00:33:13.740 British history, meaning that Blake, if he served it, would be in jail till 2003. Wow. Wow. And I

00:33:21.400 I mean, that caused a stir primarily as well

00:33:23.680 because he was working for MI6 and MI6,

00:33:26.280 no one even knew that it existed.

00:33:28.540 He weren't allowed to publicise, talk about it.

00:33:30.760 The wider population didn't know.

00:33:33.620 Wasn't there, I loved the bit where Macmillan

00:33:36.040 was almost trying, considering whether just to hush it up

00:33:39.600 because it was more embarrassment than it was worth.

00:33:42.800 Yeah, Macmillan's analogy, he says,

00:33:44.120 when my gamekeeper catches a fox,

00:33:46.060 he doesn't string it up in the front room.

00:33:48.380 it's a great line and so yeah Macmillan thought all this should be secret we should not be having

00:33:56.640 these trials which are in public inevitably and Dick White who was head of SIS said no

00:34:02.360 um you know Blake has done these terrible things we're going to make an example of him

00:34:06.820 now of course they didn't make an example of uh the posh spies so Philby was under suspicion at

00:34:12.440 this point but he had been allowed to go to Beirut to work as a newspaper correspondent

00:34:16.000 And Anthony Blunt actually became Keeper of the Queen's Pictures. And John Cairncross, who would later make two confessions of being a KGB spy, was allowed to return to Britain in old age and die happily in a village in Wiltshire. So they only made an example of Blake. They didn't make an example of the Toffs. 0.98

00:34:38.360 I know it's a very Russian question for me to ask, but do you think there was ever any consideration of just him, you know, you know, I don't know if they had the same technology that we do now, but, you know, having a cup of tea or going for a walk and, you know, having a little heart attack or anything like that?

00:34:52.940 there was discussion i mean they had this uh weekend after blake's confession the interrogators

00:34:59.300 say okay shergold says let's all go to my cottage in surrey i think and we'll have a weekend then

00:35:07.220 we'll talk about this together so blake is there and shergold's mother and blake make pancakes in

00:35:11.960 the kitchen for everyone and it's all quite jolly but meanwhile the mi6 people are having this 1.00

00:35:16.880 conversation of can we bump him off it would save us a lot of embarrassment in the end it is decided

00:35:22.280 that this is not appropriate. And do you know why? Was that just not the done thing at the time? Or

00:35:28.760 did they have some particular reason to think that way? I think MI6 probably didn't want to start

00:35:35.240 bumping off British citizens in Britain. There might have been pesky questions from the opposition

00:35:41.380 benches, etc. I'm guessing that that would have been a consideration. And Britain, you know,

00:35:47.560 So for all its faults, Britain is a democracy and there is scrutiny of this kind of stuff.

00:35:53.140 So although one would like to draw the analogy with the USSR, as you do, there are important differences.

00:35:58.840 Yeah, well, this is why, just to finish this point, this is why I'm curious whether how seriously you take Blake's denial of the agents that he betrayed being killed.

00:36:08.780 Because if in his mind, well, look what I've done and no one did anything to me, why would the KGB be killing off these telephone operators or whatever?

00:36:17.560 Do you think he just, you know, that's why he didn't believe that the spies he betrayed had

00:36:21.960 been killed? I mean, Blake had seen a lot of violence in his life. You know, he had been in

00:36:28.040 the resistance. He had been in post-war occupied Germany where he had to deal with a lot of former

00:36:34.320 Nazis in the German Navy. He had been in Korea where he'd seen American airplanes destroying

00:36:40.180 Korean villages where the half the prisoners he was with died on a death march. I mean, he knew 0.97

00:36:46.000 that terrible things were done in the world.

00:36:48.120 He was not a blue-eyed boy by that point.

00:36:51.400 And the judge sentenced him.

00:36:53.900 There were three years,

00:36:55.040 three concurrent sentences, weren't there,

00:36:57.820 each of 14 years, if memory serves correctly.

00:37:00.800 He then gets sent to Wormwood Scrubs,

00:37:03.640 where he's a bit of a model prisoner, isn't he?

00:37:06.880 You like this guy, don't you?

00:37:07.940 I kind of did.

00:37:08.840 Francis is a big fan.

00:37:11.560 He is a model prisoner.

00:37:12.600 I mean, in Wormwood Scrubs,

00:37:13.760 finally he doesn't have to live a secret life.

00:37:16.000 because everyone knows he's a spy and a communist so for the first time in his adult life he can just

00:37:19.780 be himself he's not living underground and he he becomes an incredibly likable guy and of course

00:37:26.700 he's one of the few educated people in the prison so he has classes where he teaches these cockney 0.99

00:37:31.800 prisoners german and arabic and french he reads the quran on a you know a book stand made for him

00:37:38.220 by a grateful fellow prisoner he writes letters to the authorities on behalf of his fellow prisoners

00:37:43.200 who can't write he's just a great guy everyone in the prison loves him the screws the wardens love

00:37:47.940 him too you know he's he's just a good bloke and he doesn't complain about being there for 42 years

00:37:52.620 and um so yeah he becomes the kind of most popular man in the prison but meanwhile all the while he's

00:37:59.180 plotting his escape which isn't very difficult escaping from a british prison in the 1960s

00:38:03.840 seems to have been a you know bit of a cinch and how does that happen he identifies this irishman

00:38:10.380 who's about to be released, Sean Burke.

00:38:12.220 So Burke's going to be on the outside.

00:38:13.640 Burke is quite clever.

00:38:15.300 And Burke, he's Britain.

00:38:17.100 So Burke agrees to help him escape.

00:38:19.920 They get money from former peace activists

00:38:21.800 who've also been in jail with them.

00:38:23.940 And it's really quite amateurish.

00:38:26.380 A burglar breaks a window

00:38:27.560 so that Blake can make it to the outside wall of the scrubs.

00:38:31.480 Burke throws a rope ladder up on top of the wall,

00:38:35.680 forgets to tie it.

00:38:36.920 There's nothing to tie it with.

00:38:38.080 So then Blake has to jump off the wall

00:38:39.720 it's about a four meter five meter jump off the wall of rum one would scrub so he's quite badly

00:38:43.980 hurt breaks his wrist but anyway burt shoves him in a car and a few minutes later they're hiding

00:38:50.400 in a bedsit a couple of hundred meters away on high lever road in shepherd's bush and it really

00:38:55.960 really was that simple wasn't it i mean you would have thought that a prisoner like blake you know

00:39:01.540 somebody who is a traitor possibly one of britain's most how can heinous traitors wouldn't why didn't

00:39:09.380 they put him under armed guard all the rest of it? I think partly because he'd put them off

00:39:14.480 guard by being such a nice bloke and partly because I mean British prisoners escaped that's

00:39:21.480 what they did the great train robbers two of them escaped I mean remember Ronnie Biggs ending up in

00:39:25.420 Brazil also at about that time at one point about just after Blake escaped 10 prisoners escaped from

00:39:31.940 Wyrmwood Scrubs in a month including this bloke known as Frankie the Mad Axeman who began writing

00:39:37.500 letters to the newspapers so frankie the mad axe man mate if you're gonna go into crime you need a

00:39:46.380 nickname you need a good name you need a name it's all about the good name isn't it yeah i mean there

00:39:50.300 was also mad frankie fraser i mean there's lots of mad frankies so anyway he escaped how did he

00:39:56.060 actually get to the ussr considering he's got the police and mi6 on his tail now well and burke who

00:40:02.820 he's hiding with. Burke is actually a writer, an artist. He's also a small-time crook. But Burke

00:40:08.920 thinks, right, this escape of George Blake, I'm going to write the book of my life about it,

00:40:12.800 which he does, The Springing of George Blake. It's a great book. And so Burke needs it to be

00:40:17.500 known by the police that he did it. So Burke starts writing letters to the police, starts

00:40:23.220 calling the police, tells them where they can find the getaway car. So it's becoming a real

00:40:26.200 problem. Meanwhile, Burke and Blake are hiding in a Hampstead flat with Pat Pottle, who is a

00:40:32.000 peace activist, an anti-bomb activist who'd been jailed for trespassing on an American airbase.

00:40:38.140 And so he was helping Blake. And so he's hiding in Hampstead. How are we going to get him out?

00:40:43.960 So they build a camper van. In a camper van, they build a secret compartment.

00:40:48.560 And a peace activist named Michael Randall takes his wife and two young sons on holiday to Germany

00:40:54.220 at Christmas 1966. And Blake is hidden in the secret compartments at the bottom of the camper

00:41:00.520 van they leave britain they go from dover to cali nobody checks them it's plane sailing

00:41:05.580 and blake is in west berlin he walks to an east berlin border post and demands to speak to

00:41:11.800 somebody from the soviet command it's easy so the soviets weren't actually the ones that broke him

00:41:19.340 out they didn't help him get to berlin it was just through connections and friends etc and and

00:41:24.840 How was he treated when he gets to that checkpoint?

00:41:29.620 The German guard is not very forthcoming,

00:41:33.160 but eventually Blake is given a bed while phone calls are made.

00:41:37.000 And luckily, Blake's former KGB handler, Sergei Kondrashev, is in Berlin.

00:41:42.620 And they find Kondrashev and they say, there's this bloke here.

00:41:45.680 He might be Blake.

00:41:47.680 Kondrashev rushes to the border post and he and Blake embrace

00:41:50.360 and become firm friends for the next 40 years of their lives in Moscow.

00:41:53.980 where Blake is swiftly taken to and Blake attends Kondrachev's funeral.

00:42:00.480 And so, yeah, he gets lucky.

00:42:04.000 So he gets to this place, he gets to the USSR, 0.68

00:42:07.080 which is in many ways the embodiment of his dream.

00:42:10.300 You know, he's a firm and avowed communist.

00:42:12.900 Does it live up to his expectations?

00:42:15.660 Within a week, he knew that communism had failed.

00:42:20.640 It doesn't take long, does it?

00:42:23.980 can you imagine being that guy you spent your life you betrayed hundreds of people 1.00

00:42:29.300 for this ideal and you get there and it's fucking shit 1.00

00:42:32.620 they all have that experience guy burgess said that um the soviet union was like glasgow on a 0.99

00:42:40.700 saturday night in the 19th century which i think is the best description i've read yeah and um

00:42:47.960 yeah so it's very ramshackle it's run down blake has given a nice flat because you know he's kgb 0.68

00:42:53.500 but he has his plan he wants to drive through the soviet union and admire its different regions

00:42:59.220 and then he discovers the state of soviet roads etc etc so he's very downcast and of course the

00:43:05.280 soviets think that he's a triple agent that he's already been turned by the british so they're not

00:43:10.760 going to give him any responsible work and so yeah it's very miserable but then thankfully the best

00:43:15.260 thing happens to him his mother his dutch mother comes to live with him in moscow and that cheers 1.00

00:43:19.380 him up immensely. Then he meets a Russian woman, Ida, who he marries. So the thing about Blake,

00:43:24.720 the difference between him and Philby is Philby was a Brit. Philby in Moscow, you know, yearned

00:43:29.400 for Britain. He'd read the Times, do the Times crossword, he'd listen to the cricket. He has

00:43:33.580 this great description of listening to Arsenal win the FA Cup final in 1971. He lived emotionally

00:43:38.320 in Britain. But Blake was a cosmopolitan who spoke very good Russian and his view was, I'm just going

00:43:43.660 to make this work. And he did. He integrated, he becomes Russian, which McLean does as well, really.

00:43:49.380 And do you think he ever regretted it in terms of once he got there,

00:43:56.220 he realised that communism wasn't going to work?

00:43:59.540 He realised he was fighting on the wrong side?

00:44:02.080 Or did he believe in what he did?

00:44:04.060 He didn't believe in what he did anymore.

00:44:05.920 I mean, he believed that communism was a beautiful ideal.

00:44:09.000 And for him, that mattered.

00:44:10.560 So he could see that the reality was awful.

00:44:13.040 But he thought, well, it's a great ideal.

00:44:15.100 So, you know, it's not such a bad thing that I've given my life to it.

00:44:18.560 but also because he was a determinist because he thought everything was predetermined there is some

00:44:23.520 kind of force maybe not god but some force that makes us do what we do there's no point he thought

00:44:30.200 having regrets or thinking things might have been different they couldn't have been different

00:44:34.620 so he just copes with life as it's thrown at him and you know he'd been everywhere and he'd always

00:44:41.500 coped he'd been in Cairo he'd been in a Korean prison he'd been in post-war Germany he'd always

00:44:48.360 managed to find his feet and in that way that that's very admirable absolutely and then of course

00:44:54.240 the fall of communism what was blake's opinions of that it sounds as if he thought it was an

00:44:59.140 inevitability yeah he did i mean he thought you know given that communism delivered a terrible

00:45:05.200 life to people it was not going to survive and yeah it was quite traumatic because he you know

00:45:10.200 he'd seen the british empire collapse and then the soviet empire and he'd left his his homeland

00:45:14.560 in the Netherlands. So he'd lost kind of three homelands, as it were. But he, you know, he

00:45:20.640 believed in communism with a human face, that kind of fantasy that from Dubček into the 80s.

00:45:26.620 And he thought Gorbachev was that. And he was quite excited about Gorbachev and Yeltsin initially.

00:45:32.300 But yeah, when the Soviet Union collapses, I mean, he copes. He's coped with everything. By this

00:45:38.740 point he's he's what he's over 70 and he he just plugs on that's really interesting and Simon

00:45:45.380 uh we wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the sort of lessons and implications but

00:45:49.820 the first thing I wanted to ask you is he was obviously and not an ordinary person just by

00:45:56.100 virtue of his life and biography was there anything in particular that struck you about

00:46:00.820 him when you met him when you talked to him what struck me he could listen it's a very rare

00:46:08.640 gift I mean as a I know I'm banging on now but it's something you learn as a journalist you learn

00:46:13.420 to listen to people because often the thing that you want to hear is not the thing that they're

00:46:17.980 trying to tell you they're trying to tell you something more interesting journalists can listen

00:46:22.080 diplomats psychologists and spies and he writes about this somewhere that if you just listen the

00:46:29.280 other person will happily tell you everything and so that made him very likable and I also

00:46:35.600 recognized in him the cosmopolitanism that I have and so when people call Blake a traitor which I do

00:46:42.340 as well in the title of my book I mean he was a traitor to Britain but he didn't feel like a

00:46:46.820 traitor because he felt like he was a man of the world not a man of Britain and it didn't mean he

00:46:51.360 hated Britain it's just that he he felt himself to be largely above nation so and that kind of

00:46:57.940 adaptability which I think we cosmopolitans have I mean you probably recognize it yourself as well

00:47:03.200 Constantine that when you come into a new environment you're trying to sniff out the codes

00:47:08.120 the rules so you know I live in Paris and you learn that in Paris when you greet people you

00:47:13.220 don't smile whereas in the US when you greet people you do smile so these little things so

00:47:18.180 I recognized a lot of the kinds of cosmopolitan tics that he had and yeah in a sense a lot of

00:47:25.460 the spy literature in Britain is about British gentlemen you know from James Bond to Philby

00:47:29.360 and this is a book about a cosmopolitan spy and the the thing that i found very very interesting

00:47:36.940 is because how everybody seems to keep falling in love with the myth of communism and it's only

00:47:45.360 when they're confronted by the realities of it does it seem to be this moment where they realize

00:47:49.860 it doesn't work why is it we keep falling for the myth i think in the case of blake it's because he

00:47:57.520 had grown up with the religious idea of paradise it was very important to him that there should be

00:48:01.660 a paradise and clearly one's own society is never paradise so paradise must be somewhere else

00:48:07.580 and then communism gives a very convincing picture in a way of paradise you know communist literature

00:48:16.140 Marx and so he needed paradise which I don't feel the need of I mean I always think as a liberal

00:48:23.840 i think what we should strive for is the least bad society but in these kind of um i think probably

00:48:31.320 in most religions suddenly in islam and christianity less so in judaism judaism is not 0.98

00:48:37.120 big on paradise but islam and christianity are very big on them that is this central idea that

00:48:42.420 life on earth is horrible and you know these books are written at times when people die young

00:48:48.140 and everyone around you dies and it's dreadful, but there is paradise.

00:48:53.200 And so I think communism, the need for communism is the need for paradise.

00:48:57.520 That's a really interesting point.

00:48:58.740 Do you think that is part of the distinction there?

00:49:02.800 Because you talk about the least bad society, which is a vision I share as well,

00:49:09.860 accepting the reality that a perfect society is not going to be possible.

00:49:14.000 It's not very inspiring, though, is it?

00:49:15.380 It doesn't sell, right?

00:49:17.320 It doesn't sell very well, whereas the idea, as you say, of paradise or utopia,

00:49:21.380 whatever word you want to use to describe it, that sells very well.

00:49:26.000 That's exciting. That's invigorating. It's convincing. It's persuasive.

00:49:30.600 It's something that you want to sign up to.

00:49:33.320 You saw that now that we're talking about modernity in the Brexit referendum,

00:49:37.900 where the Brexiteers are promising a kind of paradise,

00:49:41.240 a return to the best of Britain, the golden age.

00:49:44.120 and Remainers are offering the least bad option you know nobody would pretend that life in Britain

00:49:50.280 in 2016 was paradise but Remainers say you know this is about as good as we can make it and you're

00:49:56.100 right it's not a very it's not a great sell I mean it is to me and I think it is to me partly because

00:50:00.480 you know my family's from South Africa so I've seen a society that is totally dysfunctional that

00:50:05.960 is just awful and I would go from the Netherlands as a child in the 70s and 80s to visit South

00:50:12.920 africa and come back to the netherlands and think you know netherlands is not paradise but it's

00:50:19.140 pretty damn good um this is about and it was it was about and it still is today it's about the

00:50:23.960 least bad society on earth so i've seen a society that's really not bad and i've seen a terrible

00:50:30.800 dysfunctional evil society so i know which one i would choose and we've just we've seen a resurgence

00:50:37.400 in, especially the young people, very much advocating communism, believing in communism,

00:50:43.860 saying, you know, the classic thing, communism has never been tried.

00:50:48.380 Why is it that this is so popular amongst that generation?

00:50:53.400 I don't know. I don't hear that. I see that young Americans are talking about socialism,

00:50:58.520 but I think that by that they mean Denmark. They mean universal healthcare and free college.

00:51:07.360 I don't think they mean nationalization of all production

00:51:10.000 and rule by a politburo and gulags.

00:51:12.080 I mean, Francis, I'd forgotten, of course,

00:51:13.900 that you also have an international background from Venezuela.

00:51:16.660 I don't sound it, I know.

00:51:19.620 You sound like you're very much against any sort of diversity, really.

00:51:23.940 And I think that one of the difficult,

00:51:26.820 I mean, the difficulty with the word socialism

00:51:28.220 is it conflates, let's say, Denmark with Venezuela.

00:51:31.340 And so it's used by the American right.

00:51:32.980 Well, if you want socialism, you want Venezuela.

00:51:34.820 them. I don't, I don't see among, and also don't see politically movements succeeding that are

00:51:42.280 saying, let's, let's have communism, let's have the USSR. No, no, there aren't. Although there 0.56

00:51:48.720 certainly are people who are advocating for communism. I agree with you, they're probably

00:51:53.860 a fringe. I mean, the counter argument to that might be that, you know, when Soviet Union was

00:51:59.260 created, nobody was saying anything about the purges and the gulags and the Politburo or

00:52:04.600 anything like that either. It was all about fairness, equality, justice for workers and

00:52:09.860 peasants at the time. But I guess a more interesting question might be, rather than

00:52:16.740 getting into the nuances of politics, the sort of what happens when people pursue very idealistic

00:52:24.360 visions of the world as opposed to dealing with reality. I wonder whether your conversations with

00:52:30.560 George Blake and research for the book gave you an insight into the sort of maybe preconditions

00:52:35.880 that encourage people to think in those ways? I mean, Blake himself said there is no idealism

00:52:42.320 anymore. You know, he complains about that at one point. He says, well, you know, in my day,

00:52:46.300 people spied out of idealism, but now people only spy out of base motives. You have to pay them

00:52:50.200 money and i mean for not for 70 years but for several decades there was this political paradise

00:53:00.920 on offer this rhetorical paradise from before the russian revolution but let's say until the 60s

00:53:09.700 70s there are quite a lot of people who are falling for it by the time i was a teenager in

00:53:14.500 the 80s i don't really think anyone was anymore so it had it had run its course and i sometimes

00:53:20.500 wonder if i had been a teenager in the 30s you know as my grandmother did would i have become

00:53:25.820 a communist she she did she said she stopped with the nazi soviet pact i don't know but um

00:53:31.260 maybe i mean it was a paradise on offer in the 30s at a time when the capitalist powers were

00:53:39.540 refusing to do anything about fascism so that might be a moment and blake became a communist

00:53:44.240 in 1950, by which time we really did know about Stalin's purges, if you care to pay attention.

00:53:49.900 So that by then, by 1950, communism is going out of fashion. But at the same time,

00:53:55.420 communism is conquering. It's conquered Eastern Europe, it's conquering China.

00:53:58.720 So it's kind of winning having already gone out of fashion. So I think me and you guys are younger,

00:54:04.940 we've grown up in a time when there hasn't really been a paradise on offer. And in a sense,

00:54:10.060 I think that's been lucky for us because it's saved us from diving into millenarian movements.

00:54:15.740 I mean, Trump is offering a version of that, Brexit, but those seem to appeal mostly to old people.

00:54:22.180 That's really interesting.

00:54:23.860 And Simon, what lessons do you think can be learned from the life of George Blake?

00:54:28.500 Don't be an idealist.

00:54:30.880 Don't fall for some dream of some country that you don't know about

00:54:35.140 and some system that has never been successfully done.

00:54:38.640 just go with what works uh don't i mean my favorite election slogan was um konrad adenauer

00:54:47.380 the german chancellor in the 50s at one point campaigns under the slogan kind of experimenter

00:54:53.580 no experiments which i i have to say i um as an anti-idealist i share yeah oh it's interesting

00:55:02.440 i i feel like you're very much in your place but in terms of being in paris and not smiling when

00:55:07.380 you greet people you have that sort of very reserved demeanor but uh listen simon it's been

00:55:13.260 great chatting to you the book not only is a very interesting story but it's incredibly well written

00:55:17.640 uh and you know your experience and your writing skills really shine through so uh it's out on the

00:55:23.400 4th of february is that fourth yeah yeah for february happy traitor happy traitor and we really

00:55:28.900 recommend everybody reads it uh but before uh we let you go we've got one final question for you

00:55:34.260 Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about,

00:55:36.940 but we really should be?

00:55:39.960 Modern spying, hacking.

00:55:42.720 I mean, in Blake's day, it was very hard to get any information

00:55:46.860 on what the other side was doing.

00:55:49.180 And now, I mean, the Russians probably know more about the US government

00:55:52.660 than most people in the Trump cabinet.

00:55:56.540 Simon, thank you so much.

00:55:58.940 If people want to find you online, where's the best way to do that?

00:56:02.480 uh look for me on twitter it's cooper simon is my twitter handle and i'll be tweeting about the

00:56:08.160 happy traitor obsessively promoting this book um to death it's worth promoting but hopefully not

00:56:13.500 to your own death at least uh but simon thanks so much for coming on the show we really appreciate

00:56:17.640 your time we recommend everybody gets the happy traitor and we will of course see you very soon

00:56:22.580 with another brilliant interview like this one or a live stream all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time

00:56:27.680 take care and see you soon guys

00:56:32.480 We'll see you next time.

TRIGGERnometry - February 03, 2021

Hero or Traitor： The Story of George Blake with Simon Kuper

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