Great Britain: A Question of Identity

A cold, grey rain pelted the turrets of Wormwood Scrubs as the 320 prisoners of D block began their nightly “free-association period.” Inmates gathered in the block’s communal hall to watch the telly or drifted into one another’s open cells for an hour and a half of convivial chatter before lights-out. Favorite gathering place for D block’s intellectuals was a cozy yellow-and-primrose-painted cell with a 100-book library, a Bokhara rug and a medieval print of St. Paul. There, over coffee and aphorisms, Convicted Spy George Blake conducted his soirées, teaching a bit of Russian or Arabic to his fellow inmates, discussing world affairs, or philosophizing on the art of espionage. On that rainy night, the soirée was canceled: sawed bars and a nylon ladder attested to the fact that Blake was associating more freely outside the walls of Wormwood Scrubs.

Last week all of Britain wondered where Blake was: Scotland Yard staked out the abandoned R.A.F. airstrips around London, put a watch on the docks, kept a discreet eye on the Russian and East European embassies. Seven other spies were transferred to less porous prisons, and the Home Office appointed Lord Mountbatten to investigate the scandalous state of security in British jails, which have been losing inmates at the rate of ten a week. A more fascinating question concerned neither Blake’s whereabouts nor his means of escape. Rather, it was a question of identity: Who and what was George Blake?

Conversion? On the face of it, swarthy, Dutch-born George Behar Blake, 44, was a British MI-6 (military intelligence) agent who had sold out to the Russians, and for nine years—from Berlin, London and Beirut—fed Moscow everything that came his way. At his hush-hush trial in 1961, Blake admitted to passing “every document” he saw to the Russians, thus blowing the covers of British agents in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It took the court only 69 minutes to award Blake the longest sentence for espionage in recent British history: 42 years.* The trial raised as many questions as it answered.

Blake’s conversion to Communism ostensibly occurred while he was a prisoner in North Korea from 1950 to 1953. As British vice consul in Seoul, he rated harsh treatment from his Communist captors, as well as a few sporadic attempts at brainwashing. A fellow prisoner, British Journalist Philip Deane, finds the conversion theory “ludicrous.” Says he: “Blake was never kept away from his fellow prisoners for more than a few hours”—too short a time for effective brainwashing. As to a philosophical decision by Blake that Communism was morally superior, Deane observes: “All we knew at the hands of the Koreans was unspeakable brutality. Fellow prisoners were dying like flies around us.” Blake and Deane converted their Korean interrogator to democracy: he later defected to the West.

Implausible? Deane theorizes that Blake was actually a triple agent. After the Korean experience, he surmises, British intelligence asked Blake to “sell out” to the Russians, then plant false information (leavened with bits of sound but less valuable data) in hopes of misleading Moscow or gaining enemy information himself. According to Deane, Blake might well have consented to the 1961 trial to maintain the illusion that British authorities thought he was working for the Kremlin, when in fact he remained a loyal British public servant all the while. Thus Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs could have been engineered by British intelligence.

Western intelligence sources last week dismissed the Deane theory as “naive” and insisted that Blake’s escape from Wormwood Scrubs was a Soviet-planned breakout, abetted perhaps by London “scarperers” (specialists in prison escapes). Blake, they guessed, was already en route to Moscow—perhaps in a Russian trawler. Even Author John le Carré, whose own character Alec Leamas would have ultimately been more cynical, found the triple-agent theory “romantic nonsense.”

* Compared with 25 years for Russian Agent Gordon Lonsdale, only 14 for Atom Spy Klaus Fuchs.