Simon Kuper - The Happy Traitor

THE
HAPPY TRAITOR

ALSO BY SIMON KUPER

Ajax, the Dutch, The War: The Strange Tale of Soccer during Europes Darkest Hour

Football Against the Enemy

Soccernomics

The Football Men

SPIES, LIES AND EXILE IN RUSSIA: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF GEORGE BLAKE

SIMON KUPER

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

29 Cloth Fair

London EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Simon Kuper, 2021

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset in Sabon by MacGuru Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78125 937 5

eISBN 978 1 78283 398 7

For Pamela, Leila, Leo and Joey

George Blake had spent the last forty minutes hiding in a passageway just inside the wall of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, waiting to escape. Sean Bourke, his accomplice on the outside, was supposed to throw a rope-ladder over the wall. But Bourke had gone quiet. Blake, soaked by the torrential rain, was getting desperate.

As the clock ticked to 6.50 p.m. on 22 October 1966, Blake began to suspect he wouldnt hear from the Irishman again. He grew so despondent that he almost switched off his walkie-talkie. He heard the bell calling the prisoners back to their cells. When they were counted at 7 p.m., his absence would be discovered. Police around the country would be alerted. In 1961 the Briton of Dutch origin had been unmasked as a KGB spy and had become the first officer in the UKs Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, known today as MI6) ever to be convicted as a traitor. His forty-two-year jail sentence was the longest in British history. If he were caught trying to escape from the Scrubs, he could expect to be moved to a maximum-security jail, far from his wife and sons, and one day, decades later, to die there.

At about five minutes to seven Blake made his last bid for freedom. Using the agreed code names, he called Bourke on the walkie-talkie: Fox Michael! You MUST throw the ladder now, you simply must. There is no more time! Throw it now, Fox Michael! Are you still there? Come in, please. Bourke on the outside wasnt sure the coast was clear, but chucked the ladder over the wall regardless.

Within about forty-five minutes prison officers had found the rope-ladder and, lying against the prisons outside wall, like a clue out of Agatha Christie, a pot of pink chrysanthemums.

When Blakes fellow prisoners heard of his escape, they celebrated. Zeno, a war hero who was in the Scrubs for murdering his ex-girlfriends lover, wrote:

There must have been nearer a hundred than fifty escapes in the years I have spent here, but I have never known a reaction like this. By concentrating, I can distinguish words and snatches of conversation.

Hes fucked em And then, far away and faintly from the south end of the prison, singing, For hes a jolly good fellow I have always known of his popularity, but until now had never appreciated the extent of it.

Blake the Spy Escapes from Scrubs Cell: Iron Bars Sawn Away, screamed the Observers front-page headline the next morning. The newspaper reminded readers that at his trial in 1961 Blake had admitted that every single official document of any importance to which he had access as an intelligence officer was passed to his Russian contact.

Some quotes from a safe-robber recently released from the Scrubs added personal detail on the double agent: He was very pro-British. He was a Communist, but an ideological one He was very popular with the other prisoners I have known men who went to him for Arabic, French and German lessons.

Police were watching airports, south coast ports and Communist embassies in London. But a spokesman at the Soviet embassy told the Observer: We have nothing to say. Why should you think he has come here?

* * *

I first became curious about Blake in 1999, when I came across an interview that he had given to a Dutch magazine from his exile in Moscow. I was immediately, selfishly, struck by how similar our backgrounds were. We were both mixes of British, Jewish and cosmopolitan, raised in the Netherlands.

His life story was remarkable, yet I had barely heard of him before. He had been front-page world news when he was jailed in 1961, and again when he escaped. But soon after his disappearance from the Scrubs he was practically forgotten, the sort of figure from a bygone age who is assumed to have died decades ago. I began to read about his life, and discovered a delicious cast of supporting characters that ran from Alfred Hitchcock to Vladimir Putin.

Then, in 2005, I met Derk Sauer, a Dutchman who had moved to Russia in 1989 and become a Moscow media mogul. (As well as founding the Moscow Times newspaper, he had the brilliant idea of starting Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy.) Sauer, a Maoist himself in his youth, had become friendly with his fellow Dutch Muscovite. Some years their families got together to celebrate Sinterklaas, the Dutch St Nicholass Day. Before I flew to Moscow in May 2012, to speak at a conference, I asked Sauer if Blake might be willing to give me an interview.

This wasnt the sort of thing Blake did much. Being a spy, he was by nature secretive.

By the time I was trying to find him, Blake had acquired a new reason for avoiding journalists: he didnt want to be asked about Putin. Though Blake retained some of his old Communist dreams, he had become a peace-loving democrat at heart, and he disliked his fellow KGB alumnus. However, Putin had the power to deprive Blake and his wife of their dacha and pensions, so Blake didnt want to offend him.

Before Blake agreed to let me interview him, he insisted on interviewing me. I rang him at the agreed time, from a friends Russian mobile phone. I was standing in Moscows Novodevichy cemetery, where I had been looking for the graves of Chekhov and Nikita Khrushchev. On the phone Blake and I spoke Dutch. His accent was pre-war chic, mixed with the hard tones of his native Rotterdam. He was chatty and quick to laugh. He skirted around the topic of Putin, so in the end I raised it: I promised not to ask him about contemporary Russian politics.

The other obstacle to an interview, he told me apologetically, was his family. He said his three British sons (establishment types) didnt like it when newspapers ran articles about their dad the Soviet spy. (In fact, I later learned that it was probably their mother, Gillian, Blakes ex-wife, who preferred to keep the whole story quiet.)

I agreed to publish the interview only in Dutch. That was good enough for Blake, and he invited me to his house. I think he did it because he trusted Sauer, because he welcomed having someone to speak Dutch with and because he liked the idea of being able to reach readers in his home country after seventy years of separation.