Hero or Traitor： The Story of George Blake with Simon Kuper
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Summary
Our brilliant guest today is a journalist for the Financial Times, and now the author of The Happy Traitor, Simon Cooper, about the life of George Blake, the former KGB spy turned journalist and author, and how he became a writer.
Transcript
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hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show
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for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today
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is a journalist for the financial times and now the author of the happy traitor simon cooper
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welcome to trigonometry it's an honor to be here this is the very first interview i've done in
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english about this book and i did not know that you two existed apart from kilkenomics the festival
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where i always meet you so it's great to see that you are real people thank you very much
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there are a lot of people who think we're controlled opposition and avatars created
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by the government so yes we do exist jewish shills and there's all sorts of other options
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whatever you decide of the political spectrum you hate us from uh but enough about us i mean
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you've written a brilliant book i've always enjoyed your your commentary anyway uh you've
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written about football quite a lot and about many other subjects. But The Happy Traitor is a
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biography of George Blake, the double agent. Before we get into that, tell everybody a little
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bit about who you are, how are you, where you are, what was your interest in writing this book,
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and so on. Well, I spent most of my life writing for the Financial Times. I used to write sports
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stuff, and now I write political and cultural stuff about how the world is coming to an end,
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as we all know. And I am quite an international person like you, Constantine, and I grew up
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mostly in the Netherlands. By chance, my dad had a job there. And so about 20 years ago,
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I read an article in Holland about this KGB agent who was British Dutch in origin. He'd grown up in
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Holland uh British Egyptian Jewish father and he had ended up George Blake a KGB agent jailed in
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Brissa and escaped to Moscow and I thought what an amazing story that was the first I heard I must
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interview this guy one day because I grew up about 20 miles away from him in the Netherlands uh also
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Jewish also British also speaking Dutch as he did so egoistically I saw a lot of similarities
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between me and Blake and then in 2012 I was going to speak at a conference in Moscow and I have a
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Dutch friend in Moscow who knows Blake who knew Blake and I said would you set me up with Blake
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and you know the story goes on I could bang on about that but in the end I'm sitting in Blake's
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dacha listening to this story I mean I was the deal was it was complicated to arrange it with
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Blake as you can imagine KGB double agents are not always keen to go on the record etc
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so Blake actually phoned me to interview me first and I was in this Moscow cemetery I was looking at
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the graves of Chekhov and Khrushchev I can't remember the name of the cemetery it's a well
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known one in Moscow and Blake calls me and he speaks in this very old-fashioned sort of pre-war
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Dutch accent we have a nice chat and his issue which he doesn't dare express is he doesn't want
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me to ask him about Putin, because he's very afraid of Putin. He hates Putin. He thinks Putin
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is anti-democratic, etc. But he relies for Putin on his pension and his dacha. And so I say, look,
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you know, Mr. Blake, I'm not going to, I won't ask you about Putin. I won't ask you about your
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life, etc. So he says, come on over. And we had a lovely time together. Actually, I have to admit,
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I really liked the guy, which is something I had to wean myself off in the later writing.
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and I walked out of his dacha after four hours thinking I was only going to write an interview
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for a Dutch newspaper he only wanted me to write about it in Dutch and I walked out thinking that
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was the most interesting interview I've ever done in my journalistic career wow but my kids were
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quite small at the time so I never had a free moment to myself so only a couple of years later
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did I think actually you know I'm no longer in the playground every hour of the weekend I could
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about turning this interview into a book. So then I began to research his life.
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And the book is A Happy Traitor with Beau Fred. It is absolutely brilliant. He did lead a
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fascinating life. Why do you think it was that for someone who was actually a very, very mild
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mannered man, he then went and had this career where he became a double agent, risking his life
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and also ending many others? I mean, he says himself that to be a spy, you have to kind of
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like the game, the secrecy, the adventure. And, you know, he was always into kind of dressing up
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and acting. I mean, even as a child with his sisters, he'd act the pastor. His ambition was
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to be a Calvinist pastor. He would act Hitler, who was, of course, a big figure on the world stage in
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his childhood. And he liked the thrill. So when he's 17, 18, World War II breaks out and he's in
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the Netherlands having spent a few years with family in Cairo and he joins the Dutch resistance
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as a teenage courier and he has very exciting times but he thinks I want the big stage and
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also I want to join my mummy in England she'd fled to England when the war broke out he was very much
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a mummy's boy and so he escapes through Belgium and France and Franco Spain amazing journey in
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1942-43 underground through occupied Europe to Britain where he does indeed join the British
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Secret Services. So he'd always had this kind of yen for adventure for the double life behind this
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mild-mannered facade. But he was also an idealist. I mean, he starts off with this very pious
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Calvinist, and he then becomes a very pious communist. Well, actually, this was what I was
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going to ask you about, because my impression, and correct me if I'm wrong from the book, is that
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by the time he joins the British Secret Service, he's already a committed communist. Is that correct?
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that's not what i believe some people have suggested that i don't think so i think
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in his youth into his 20s he's a colvinist in the war he still thinks well after the war i'm going
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to become a pastor and he's very anti-nazi anti-hitler he's a half-jewish britain living
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in the occupied netherlands so he he very courageously takes the side of the resistance
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which very few dutch people did and he gets to london and his focus is on winning the war he's
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not really a british patriot never pretended to be but he you know he's part of the dutch effort to
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win the war and it's only later when the when mi6 sis as it then was the secret intelligence
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service send him to south korea as a spy the korean war breaks out in 1950 he is held captive
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by the north koreans for two years with other british and french prisoners and in that time
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almost the only reading matter they are sent is Marx and Lenin in Russian.
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So you got the good shit in the original language?
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Well, he could have read Marx in German as well.
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but he'd learned Russian in a year in Cambridge.
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he was there in 1947-48 but he goes to Cambridge he learns Russian he loves the language within
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months he can read Anna Karenina in the original and so when he's in captivity I mean they had
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nothing to do for two years a group of highly intelligent men and at one point the Soviet
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embassy sent them this package of books they're very excited but there's only one book in English
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Treasure Island by Stevenson so they think okay well who gets to read Treasure Island first this
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is going to be the biggest thrill of our lives here. So they draw lots. And so they read Stevenson
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in turn, and they just keep rereading it. And in the end, the copy is destroyed. And there are two
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books in Russian, Marx and Lenin. And so Blake and the former British consul in Korea, who's an old
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British conservative, read Marx in Russian, discuss it. And the consul says to Blake, you know,
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I'm an anti-communist, but I believe that Marx is correct, that communism is the future,
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it will replace the british empire and um i i'm sorry to say that i think communism is going to
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win and blake was very persuaded by this but we talk about so i mean his ideological indoctrination
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you might say at this particular point but the seeds of his belief in communism were sowed much
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earlier in his time in egypt with the disparity between rich and poor that he observed there were
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many forces pushing him i mean when his father dies they get a letter from the father's sister
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in cairo and she says well um my brother you probably didn't know it he was jewish that was
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a huge shock to blake's family never knew father was jewish anyway uh you must be quite poor now
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that your husband has died she writes to blake's mother so come and live in our mansion in cairo
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and i've seen pictures it's an amazing mansion it's now the algerian embassy so blake lives in
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this fantastic opulence in cairo which was then a kind of european run city and he lives with this
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jewish family they speak french and they are the richest people in the world and around them the
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average age of death for egyptians is about 30 i mean it's the circumstances are terrible the family
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has a kind of textile uh mill on the nile where the workers children are treated terribly and so
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that I think was definitely something that worked on Blake that he thought well you know
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the world is unjust but he had grown up believing that communism was the enemy of God
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and so these influences work on him a bit the British Secret Service
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facially give him this book which they've written a guy called Carew Hunt had written a book for the
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British Spy Service called Theory and Practice of Communism the idea being you know communism is the
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new enemy post-war, so we have to understand communism, what it is. And so Carew Hunt very
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kind of honestly and fairly tries to describe communism, meaning, you know, this is what we're
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up against, chaps. But Blake reads his book and thinks, wow, that's very convincing. Communism
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sounds just the thing. And so all these influences work on him. He falls in love with Russia and with
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Russian, again, taught by a very anti-communist Russian-British exile at Cambridge. And so when
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he starts to read Marx in 1950, all these influences have come together. He's lost his
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faith in God. He also believes very strongly in determinism. Everything we do in life is determined.
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God shapes all our actions. And the communists, of course, have a version of that, which is history
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is determined. There's nothing really the individual can do about it. So he's very much
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kind of equipped for communism when he meets it head on in Korea. And once then that happens,
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and he goes back to the UK, where was the moment where he actually started to defect
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and start to work for the KGB and the Soviets? That happens in North Korea. I mean, it's not
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quite clear exactly who chats up who. He says at one point he slips a note to the North Korean
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camp commander who the prisoners called Fatso. So he gives this note to Fatso in Russian.
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I think the prisoners were quite thin at that point.
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but not at a very privileged moment of their lives.
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and laenka uh interrogates all the prisoners and he and blake kind of recognize kindred spirits in
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each other and so laenka says to blake you know you could be a kgb spy and so in 1953 stalin dies
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immediately there's a big thaw and the prisoners are happily released they go straight to china
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where they all have a big bath together and they sing nursery rhymes they're related they're given
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new suits. And in spring 1953, Blake arrives back in Britain. He and the other British prisoners
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are given a hero's welcome at RAF Abingdon Airport. And he goes back to the SIS and says,
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hi guys, here I am. And they say, wow, you're the hero of North Korea. You survived communist
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captivity. And weirdly, I mean, just two years before, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean had defected
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to moscow so and kim philby was under suspicion so mi6 knew you know there are some some bad eggs
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around here and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to check out blake to see
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whether he might have been turned in north korean captivity they just say welcome back george you
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know come straight in that's really interesting isn't it simon because as you'll know you know
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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.
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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.
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But that didn't happen. And by this point, he's already been turned.
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So he goes back into MI6 and at this point he starts being a double agent. Is that right?
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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.
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and he um photographs all the documents and then he meets his kgb handlers on you know the top
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flights of buses in the london fog on corners in belsize park deserted surrey railway stations and
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he hands them all these documents and they really like it and he tells them that the uh the ally
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the western allies us uk have built a spy tunnel under berlin to listen to soviet telephone calls
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So he blows the Berlin's bite on even before it goes into operation,
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which is the kind of main Western listening device of the 50s.
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And so, yeah, he's giving the Soviets amazing stuff and he is never suspected.
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Because in many ways, he was actually, I mean, take aside the fact that, you know,
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he sent hundreds of people probably to their deaths.
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In many ways, he was a perfect employee, wasn't he?
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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.
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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.
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So Blake worked very well in a way for Britain.
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And he was good kind of spying material because he wasn't easily blackmailable.
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he had a very kind of dull family life he wasn't gay either that was another one
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he wasn't gay although you know the british upper class was was more flexible on that of course
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than later generations say so every burges continued burges and blunt continued to be gay
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into adulthood because the the system in the british upper class was you sort of more or less
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had to be gay until you finished university and then you were supposed to marry and go straight
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and that was considered entirely non-blackmailable.
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oh, this chap had homosexual affairs at Cambridge
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It was a requirement for entry into the establishment.
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And Burgess and Blunt continued to be gay after university,
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but not as particularly reprehensible, I think.
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And just, I mean, we're talking about it very jovially, of course,
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but I think we should also do justice to what you might describe,
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I think, quite accurately as this man's terrible crimes.
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Can you sum up for us the scale of the damage he did
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to British and Western efforts to defeat the Soviet Union
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And also, you know, the lives of the many agents that were taken as a result of his betrayal.
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Well, let's start with the agents. I mean, when the Brits finally unmasked him in 1961,
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they do this survey of their foreign spying stations, mostly in Eastern Europe. And they
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reckon that Blake, by his own admission, gave away hundreds of British agents. So if you were,
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let's say a telephone operator in moscow passing information on to britain blake given the soviet
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your name or in east berlin if you were a businessman um from let's say britain who often
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visited the eastern europe then blake had given them your name so he betrayed probably 500 plus
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of these people to the eastern powers now he says the kgb assured me these people wouldn't be killed
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i think the kgb did promise him that because of course they didn't care what they told him
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and so sis reckons about 40 of these people were killed i mean luckily he did this after
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Stalin's death and as you know the USSR and the eastern countries generally were much less
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bloodthirsty after 53 yeah and so most of these people were given long jail sentences etc but
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about 40 of them are reckoned to have been killed but look let's put the counterpoint to this this
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is a time of war effectively now if that had been a British person being a double agent against the
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soviets we'd all lured him to the skies as a hero isn't george blake a hero to the soviets
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he is he was a hero to the soviets yeah he got the order of lenin from putin and
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blake's very job some of the time was trying to turn russians and east germans to get them to spy
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for britain so his job was to create double agents so so is creating double agents there
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rice and being a double agent here wrong i mean clearly communism was a an evil creed
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i i do condemn blake i i'm not trying to defend him i mean he was in a very low business of spying
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and as le carrie says you know horrible things were done on both sides but that doesn't
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that doesn't negate the horrible things that blake did and the the many lives that he destroyed
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did you ever challenge him on that simon it sounds like you did talk about it did you ever
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put it to him that the dozens of people at least have died and hundreds of people's lives or maybe
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even thousands if you include their family members would have been ruined by his actions did he did
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you talk to him about that and did he have any uh thoughts on that well i raised it obliquely i mean
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we were sitting on the sofa together we were getting on well and it was a difficult i i i'm
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not a kind of very big hard hitter on the spot so i didn't really want to say well look mr blake
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you killed about 40 people what do you reckon so i did say you know you betrayed a lot of agents
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do you regret anything and then he talked about regrets he had vis-a-vis breaking up his family
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you know he was arrested when his two his three sons were tiny and left his wife behind he talked
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about regrets of having betrayed the SIS the British spying services to which he felt still
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loyal he didn't talk about regrets about agents and when he's been asked about that when he was
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asked about that at other times he always said none of these people were killed and this is the
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way spine works you know uh you were supposed to catch each other's agents and if the man who
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betrayed me to the british were to walk into this room now i'd give him a cup of tea he's his line
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was this is just the game and anyway none of these guys were killed so i think he genuinely came to
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believe that he lived in denial because he was actually quite a peaceful bloke he didn't like
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violence didn't like killing people he thought all that was ugly and so he coped with what he
00:21:26.400
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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
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
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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
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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
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wartime record he um he loved British uh literature British films so he and he thought
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Britain was a very upstanding place and actually the people who mentored him in his move to communism
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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
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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
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
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
00:30:17.360
to invade Castro's Cuba using a ragtag bag of Cuban exiles, looking a lot like the storming
00:30:23.620
of the capital, but in Cuba. A bunch of crazy right-wing nuts trying to subverse a government.
00:30:30.580
Where have we seen that before? So the Bay of Pigs has gone completely wrong. It's a massive
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.
00:30:46.820
But they can't afford to really go in hard on the Brits at that particular moment.
00:30:51.240
Macmillan, the prime minister, is hugely embarrassed.
00:30:53.960
Macmillan refers to the so-called secret services.
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.
00:31:05.660
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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
00:33:28.540
He weren't allowed to publicise, talk about it.
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.
00:33:48.380
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.
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
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
00:37:03.640
where he's a bit of a model prisoner, isn't he?
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
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
00:38:27.560
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,
00:38:39.720
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?
00:41:33.160
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.
00:41:47.680
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.
00:42:07.080
which is in many ways the embodiment of his dream.
00:42:15.660
Within a week, he knew that communism had failed.
00:42:23.980
can you imagine being that guy you spent your life you betrayed hundreds of people
00:42:29.300
for this ideal and you get there and it's fucking shit
00:42:32.620
they all have that experience guy burgess said that um the soviet union was like glasgow on a
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
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
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?
00:44:05.920
I mean, he believed that communism was a beautiful 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
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.
00:48:58.740
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.
00:49:17.320
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.
00:49:33.320
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
00:51:13.900
that you also have an international background from Venezuela.
00:51:19.620
You sound like you're very much against any sort of diversity, really.
00:51:28.220
is it conflates, let's say, Denmark with Venezuela.
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
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.
00:54:23.860
And Simon, what lessons do you think can be learned from the life of George Blake?
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,
00:55:42.720
I mean, in Blake's day, it was very hard to get any information
00:55:49.180
And now, I mean, the Russians probably know more about the US government
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