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

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest to date is a journalist for the Financial Times and now the author of The Happy Traitor. Simon Cooper, welcome to Trigonometry. It's an honour to be here. This is the very first interview I've done in English about this book. And I did not know that you two existed apart from Kilkenomics, the festival where I always meet you. so it's great to see that you are real people. Thank you very much.

There are a lot of people who think we're controlled opposition and avatars created by the government, so we do exist. Jewish shills, and there's all sorts of other options, whatever you decide of the political spectrum you hate us from. But enough about us, Simon, you've written a brilliant book. I've always enjoyed your commentary anyway. You've written about football quite a lot and about many other subjects. But the Happy Traitor is a biography of George Blake, the double agent.

Before we get into that, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are, what was your interest in writing this book and so on? Well, I spent most of my life writing for the Financial Times. I used to write sports stuff and I write political and cultural stuff about how the world is coming to an end, as we all know. And I am quite an international person like you, Constantine, and I grew up mostly in the Netherlands by chance my dad had a job there. And so about 20 years ago, I read an article in Holland about this KGB agent who was British Dutch in origin. He'd grown up in Holland, British, Egyptian jurist father, and he had ended up, George Blake, a KGB agent, jailed in Britain, escaped to Moscow. And I thought, what an amazing story. That was the first I heard.

I must interview this guy one day because I grew up about 20 miles away from him. in the Netherlands, also Jewish, also British, also speaking Dutch as he did. So egoistically, I saw a lot of similarities between me and Blake. And then in 2012, I was going to speak at a conference in Moscow. And I have a Dutch friend in Moscow who knows Blake, who knew Blake. And I said, would you set me up with Blake? And, you know, the story goes on. I could bang on about that. But in the end, I'm sitting in Blake's dachshare listening to this story. I mean, the deal was, it was complicated to arrange it with Blake. As you can imagine, KGB double agents are not always keen to go on the record, etc. So Blake actually phoned me

to interview me first. And I was in this Moscow cemetery. I was looking at the graves of Chekhov and Krzschev. I can't remember the name of the cemetery. It's well-known one in Moscow. and Blake calls me and he speaks in this very old-fashioned sort of pre-war Dutch accent. We have a nice chat. And his issue which he doesn't dare express is he doesn't want me to ask him about Putin because he's very afraid of Putin. He hates Putin. He thinks Putin is anti-democratic, et cetera, but he relies for Putin on his pension and his

dachar. And so I say, look, you know, Mr. Blake, I'm not going to, I won't ask you about Putin. I won't ask you about your life, etc. So he says, come on over. And we had a lovely time together. actually, I have to admit, I really liked the guy, which is something I had to wean myself off in the later writing. And I walked out of his dacha after four hours thinking,

I was only going to write an interview for a Dutch newspaper. He only wanted me to write about it in Dutch. And I walked out thinking that was the most interesting interview I've ever done in my journalistic career. Wow. But my kids were quite small at the time, so I never had a free moment to myself. So only a couple of years later did I think, actually, you know,

I'm no longer in the playground. every hour of the weekend. I could think about turning this interview into a book. So then I began to research his life. And the book is a happy traitor with both read it. It is absolutely brilliant. He did lead a fascinating life. Why do you think it was that for someone who was actually a very, very mild-mannered man, he then went and had this career where he became a double agent, risking his life and also ending many others? I mean, he says himself that to, be a spy, you have to kind of like the game, the secrecy, the adventure. And, you know, he was always into kind of dressing up and acting. I mean, even as a child with his sisters, he'd act

the pastor, his ambition was to be a covenous pastor. He would act Hitler, who was, of course, big figure on the world stage in his childhood. And he liked the thrill. So when he's 17, 18, World War II breaks out. And he's in the Netherlands, having spent a few years with family in Cairo. and he joins the Dutch resistance as a teenage courier. And he has very exciting times, but he thinks, I want the big stage. And also I want to join my mummy in England. She'd fled to England when the war broke out. He was very much a mummy's boy.

And so he escapes through Belgium and France and Franco, Spain. Amazing journey in 1942, 43, underground through occupied Europe, to Britain, where he does indeed join the British Secret Services. So he'd always had this kind of yen for adventure for the double life behind this mild-mannered façade. But he was also an idealist. I mean, he starts off with this very pious Calvinist, and he then becomes a very pious communist. Well, actually, this was what I was going to ask you about, because my impression, and correct me if I'm wrong from the book, is that by the time he joins the British Secret Service,

he's already a committed communist. Is that correct? that's not what I believe. Some people have suggested that. I don't think so. I think in his youth, into his 20s, he's a Colvinist. In the war, he still thinks, well, after the war, I'm going to become a pastor. And he's very anti-Nazi, anti-Hitler. He's a half-Jewish Britain living in the occupied Netherlands. So he very courageously takes the side of the resistance, which very few Dutch people did. And he gets to London, and his focus is on winning the war. He's not really a British. patriot, never pretended to be, but he, you know, he's part of the Dutch effort to win the wall.

And it's only later when the, when MI6, SIS as it then was, the secret intelligence service, send him to South Korea as a spy. The Korean war breaks out in 1950. He is held captive by the North Koreans for two years with other British and French prisoners. And in that time, the almost the only reading matter they are sent is Marx and and Lenin in Russian. So Marx and Russian translation. Sounds like a modern university campus, Simon. It is like distance learning, it's true.

Yeah. So you got the good shit in the original language. Yeah. Well, he could have read Marx and German as well. Blake was very much a language as man, but he'd learned Russian in a year in Cambridge. He wasn't there with Ken Filby at all. He was there in 1947, 48.

But he goes to Cambridge. He learns Russian. He loves a language. within months he can read Anna Korenina and the original. And so when he's in captivity, I mean, they had nothing to do for two years, a group of highly intelligent men. And at one point, the Soviet embassy sent them this package of books.

They're very excited, but there's only one book in English, Treasure Island by Stevenson. So they think, okay, well, who gets to read Treasure Island first? This is going to be the biggest thrill of our lives here. So they draw lots. And so they read Stevenson in turn, and they just keep rereading it. and in the end the copy is destroyed.

And there are two books in Russian, Marx and Lenin. And so Blake and the former British consuling career, who's an old British conservative, read Marx in Russian, discuss it. And the consul says to Blake, you know, I'm an anti-communist. But I believe that Marx is correct, that communism is the future.

It will replace the British Empire. And I'm sorry to say that I think communism's going to win. And Blake was very persuaded by this. But we talk about, so, I mean, his ideological indoctrination, you might say at this particular point, but the seeds of his belief in communism was sold much earlier in his time in Egypt with the disparity between rich and poor that he observed. There were many forces pushing him. I mean, when his father dies, they get a letter from the father's sister in Cairo. And she says, well, my brother, you probably didn't know it, he was Jewish.

That was a huge shock to Blake's family. Never knew his father was Jewish. Anyway, you must be quite poor now that your husband has died. She writes to Blake's mother. So come and live in our mansion in Cairo. And I've seen pictures. It's an amazing mansion. It's now the Algerian embassy.

Sir Blake lives in this fantastic opulence in Cairo, which was then a kind of European-run city. And he lives with this Jewish family. They speak French. And they are the richest people in the world. And around them, the average age of, death for Egyptians is about 30. I mean, the circumstances are terrible.

The family has a kind of textile mill on the Nile, where the workers' children are treated terribly. And so that I think was definitely something that worked on Blake that he thought, well, you know, the world is unjust. But he had grown up believing that communism was the enemy of God. And so these influences work on him a bit. The British Secret Service facially give him this. book which they've written, a guy called Carew Hunt had written a book for the British spy

service called Theory and Practice of Communism. The idea being, you know, communism is the new enemy post-war, so we have to understand communism what it is. And so Carrou Hunt very kind of honestly and fairly tries to describe communism, meaning, you know, this is what we're up against, chaps. But Blake reads his book and thinks, wow, that's very convincing. Communism sounds just the thing. And so all these influences work on him. He falls in love with Russia, with Russian, again taught by very anti-communist Russian-British exile at Cambridge. And so when he starts to read Marx in 1950, all these influences have come together. He's lost his faith in God. He also believes very strongly in determinism.

Everything we do in life is determined. God shapes all our actions. And the communists, of course, have a version of that, which his history is determined. There's nothing really the individual can do about it. So he's very much kind of equipped for communism when he meets it head on in Korea. And once then that happens and he goes back to the UK. Where was the moment where he actually started to defect and start to work for the KGB and the Soviets? That happens in North Korea.

I mean, it's not quite clear exactly who chats up, who. He says at one point he slipped a note to the North Korean camp commander who the prisoners called Fatso. So he gives this note to Fatso in Rw. Russian. Disgusting bigotry and fad shaming. I can't believe in 1950. They didn't, oh, unbelievable. Anyway, sorry, Simon. Carry on. I think the prisoners were quite thin at that point. Very privileged. They were privileged member, not at a very privileged moments of their lives. And so at that point, a KGB agent from Vladivostok shows up, a guy called

Nikolai No, Laenko. and Lanca interrogates all the prisoners and he and Blake kind of recognized kindred spirits in each other and so Lanker says to Blake you know you could be a KGB spy and so in 1953 Stalin dies immediately there's a big thaw and the prisoners are happily released they go straight to China where they all have a big bath together and they sing nursery rhymes they're later they're given new suits

and in spring 1953, Blake arrives back in Britain. He and the other British prisoners have given a heroes welcome at R.F. Abingdon Airport. And he goes back to the SIS and says, hi guys, here I am. And they say, wow, you're the hero of North Korea. You survive communist captivity. And weirdly, I mean, just two years before, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean had defected to Moscow. So, and Kim Filby was under suspicion. So MI6 knew, you know, there are some bad eggs around here.

And yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to check out Blake to see whether he might have been turned in North Korean captivity. They just say, welcome back, George, you know, come straight in. That's really interesting, isn't it, Simon, because as you'll know, 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. 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. But that didn't happen. And by this point, he's already been turned. So he goes back into MI6 and at this point he starts being a double agent. Is that right? He starts being a double agent. So he walks around with this camera struck 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. And he photographs all the documents. And then he meets his KGB handlers on, you know, the top flight of buses in the London fog, on corners in Belsize Park, deserted Surrey railway stations.

And he hands them all these documents. And they really like it. And he tells them that the Western Allies, US, UK, have built a spy tunnel under Berlin to listen to Soviet telephone calls. So he blows the Berlin Spytunnel even before he goes into operation, which is the kind of main Western listening device of the 50s.

And so, yeah, he's giving the Soviets amazing stuff, and he is never suspected. Because in many ways, he was actually... I mean, take aside the fact that, you know, he sent hundreds of people probably to their deaths. In many ways, he was a perfect employee, wasn't he? Yeah, I mean, he was very smart guy. And John LaCarray, he was obsessed,

by him, who also kindly offered a quote for the book, because LeCarray read the manuscripts before he died. Lecari 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, nobody gives you a hard time. So Blake worked very well in a way for Britain, and he was good kind of spying material because he wasn't easily blackmailable. He didn't drink. He didn't have affairs. He had a very kind adult family life. He wasn't gay either. That was another one. He wasn't gay, although, you know, the British upper class was more flexible on that, of course, than later generations, say. So Burgess continued, Burgess and Blunt continued to be gay into adulthood. Because the system

in the British upper class was, you sort of more or less had to be gay until you finished university. And then you were supposed to marry and go straight. And that was considered entirely non-blackmailable. I mean, he didn't really say, oh, this chap had homosexual affairs at Cambridge, because, of course. That was a requirement. It was a requirement for entry into the establishment. And Burgess and Blunt continued to be gay

after university, which was seen as eccentric, but not as particularly reprehensible, I think. Oh, God, I missed a good old day. He went to boarding school. I did. But Simon, so he's not easily blackmailable. He's the model employee. And just, I mean, we're talking about it very jovily, of course,

but I think we should also do justice to what you might describe, I think, quite accurately, as this man's terrible crimes. Can you sum up for us the scale of the damage he did to British and Western efforts to defeat the Soviet Union and also, you know, the lives of the many agents that were taken as a result of his betrayal? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. Let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality,

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mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Well, let's start with the agents. I mean, when the Brits finally unmassed him in 1961. They do this survey of their foreign spying stations, mostly in Eastern Europe. And they reckon that Blake, by his own admission, gave away hundreds of British agents. So if you were, let's say, a telephone operator in Moscow passing information onto Britain, Blake had given the Soviet to your name, or in East Berlin. If you were a businessman, from, let's say, Brisson, who often visited Eastern Europe, then Blake had given them your name.

So he betrayed probably 500 plus of these people to the Eastern Powers. Now, he says the KGB assured me these people wouldn't be killed, which... Come on, man. I think the KGB did promise him that, because, of course, they didn't care what they told him. And so SIS reckons about 40 of these people were killed. I mean, luckily he did this after Stalin's death.

And as you know, the USSR and the eastern countries generally were much less bloodthirsty after 53. And so most of these people were given long jail sentences, etc. But about 40 of them are reckoned to have been killed. But look, let's put the counterpoint to this. This is a time of war, effectively. Now, if that had been a British person being a double agents against the Soviets, we'd all lord him to the skies as a hero. Isn't George Blake a hero to the Soviets? He was a hero to the Soviets, yeah, he got the Order of Lenin from Putin.

And Blake's very job, some of the time, was trying to turn Russians and East Germans to get them to spy for Britain. So his job was to create double agents. So he's creating double agents there, Rice and being a double agent here wrong. I mean, clearly communism was an evil creed. I do condemn Blake. I'm not trying to defend him. I mean, he was in a very low business of spying. And as La Cary says, you know, horrible things were done on both sides.

But that doesn't negate the horrible things that Blake did and the many lives that he destroyed. Did you ever challenge him on that time? And it sounds like you did talk about it. Did you ever put it to him that dozens of people at least have died and hundreds of of people's lives, or maybe even thousands, if you include their family members, would have been ruined by his actions. Did he, did you talk to him about that? And did he have any thoughts on that? Well, I raised it obliquely. I mean, we were sitting on the sofa together. We were getting on well. And it was a difficult, I'm not a kind of very big, hard hitter on the spot. So I didn't really

want to say, well, look, Mr. Blake, you killed about 40 people, what do you reckon? So I did say, you know, you betrayed a lot of agents. Do you regret anything? And then he talked about regrets he had vis-a-vis breaking up his family. You know, he was arrested when his three sons were tiny and left his wife behind. He talked about regrets of having betrayed the SIS, the British spying services to which he felt still loyal. He didn't talk about regrets about agents. And when he's been asked about that, when he was asked about that at other times, he always said none of these people were killed. And this is the way spying works.

You know, you were supposed to catch each other's agent. and if the man who betrayed me to the British would to walk into this room now, I'd give him a cup of tea. His line was, this is just the game, and anyway, none of these guys were killed. So I think he genuinely came to believe that. He lived in denial because he was actually quite a peaceful bloke. He didn't like violence, didn't like killing people.

He thought all that was ugly. And so he'd cope with what he had done by denying it even to himself. Have you ever been abroad and felt out of place because you didn't speak the language? No, because I voted Brexit. Brexit means Brexit. I know that sometimes you're abroad, you don't speak the local language, it's very awkward like

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I did. But seriously, go to babble.com.uk.org, forward slash play, use our code trigger, and enjoy Babel. Because in many ways, he was a picture of the perfect English gentleman, wasn't he? The way he conducted himself, the way he was, the way he was very, very moral. So it's quite incongruous the fact that the way he presents himself, and at the same time, being incredibly duplicitous. I wouldn't say he was the perfect gentleman, but not the perfect gentleman. English gentleman. And at SIS, they always thought he's not really one of us. I mean, he wasn't posh. He was a foreigner. He was half Jewish. He hadn't been to boarding school. And so he was definitely kind of loked down on and sneered at in that way. I think that if you think about perfect English gentleman, you're thinking more of people like Philby and Burgess, also complete

with their eccentricities, whereas Blake was a much more straight guy in the way he presented himself. And and not being a perfect British gentleman was one of the issues at work in the workplace. And do you think that contributed in any way to what then happened, or was it purely an ideological thing with him? He just thought that communism and Marxism and Leninism were the way to go. He just believed in communism. I mean, a lot of people, especially in Britain, have risen. Well, he hated Britain.

He was excluded by the establishment, and therefore he hated Britain. Now, he was excluded by the establishment, but he didn't hate Britain at all. He quite like Britain. He just never really had much to do with Britain because he only spent, I mean, the longest stretch of his life he spent in Britain was the five years he spent in jail before he legged it. So he didn't really spend much of his life there. He admired Britain. He was very attached to Britain's wartime record. He loved British literature, British films. So he, and he thought Britain was a very upstanding place. And actually, the people who mentored him in his move to communism,

unintentionally were all conservative members of the British establishment. Elizabeth Hill, who taught him in Cambridge, gave him this love of Russia, Carew Hunt, who wrote this theory of practice of communism book. Later, his best friend in Moscow was Donald McLean, another British Toff, Vivian Holt, the consuling career, who told him that communism was the future. So he was very influenced by conservative Brits from the establishment, and he was rescued from jail. We might come to that by other Brits. So, I mean, he told me at one point, look, he said,

so much of my life has been given to me by kind British people. He didn't hate Britain at all. So let's move it forward. He's doing very, very well in the service. He's doing very, very well with the KGB. Everything's going swimmingly for him. Where did it begin to go wrong? Well, the problem is always other defectors. So a couple of people from the East, two Poles leading Polish intelligence officer defected, and this double agents in East Germany, a kind of lowly guy called Horace Eidner, both, they all point the finger of suspicion to Blake. This guy called Golanievsky, who's been giving the Western Powers information. He defects in 1961, and later he starts to say he's the Grand Duke Alexei, the son of Charles I, so he goes a bit bonkers. But before that

happens, Golanievsky gives them all the information that they need to see that the mole that they knew they had in the service is in fact Blake. And so Blake at this point has been, because he's already on the suspicion, they didn't want to tell him, this is 1961. He's been sent to Lebanon to learn Arabic in this kind of British run school in Lebanon called MECAS. And so at one point, Nicholas Elliott, who's the MI6 station officer that's there says to Blake, oh, Blake, you're wanted back in London, I think they want to give you a promotion.

And so Blake, you know, suspect something, but he thinks what can I do? You know, I don't want to blow up my family by escaping to the Soviet Union now. Maybe it's nothing. So he flies back to London. He walks into the officers at St. James's. And I said, what did you feel when you walked in? He said, I felt, and he says this in English, the game is up. Because his colleague Shergold, I think Harry Shergold says,

Hello, Blake. Some things to talk about. And let's walk across the park to our other office. And Blake realizes they're going to the other office so that they can record an interrogation. And they interrogates him for a couple of days, but they know he's a spy. But they don't have any evidence that can stand up in court because it's all secret evidence. They don't want to go to court anyway. It'd be embarrassing. And so Blake's just denying everything. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. And Simon, just to jump in there very briefly, when you say, They're just asking him questions or are they applying a bit of the old Russian method to him? Not Russian at all. It's very gentlemanly, very collegiate. He's interrogated by three colleagues who he knows well, one of whom is a good friend. And they're all sitting around and it's a

nice chat. And in the evenings he's allowed to go home to his mother's house in Radlitt in Hertfordshire. So they do take the precaution of tailing him just in case. But every evening he leaves the interrogation, and he takes the train to Radlet, where he's not allowed to tell his mother, who's his closest friend in the world, that he's being interrogated. And so on the third day, Shergold says, well, Blake, you know, of course you spied for them,

but you couldn't really help it, could you? The Koreans tortured you, they made you do it. You didn't have a choice. And Blake said, burst out, and suddenly he says, no, nobody tortured me. Nobody forced me. I spied for the KGB of my own accord. I did it out of belief,

because he desperately wants people to see him as an idealist, which he is. and they can't believe it. He's given this kind of unforced confession. Given another half hour, they said to him, okay, George, get on a plane to Moscow. We never want to see you again. Go. But they suddenly have this confession,

and then he just confesses the whole thing, and he even stupidly confesses to the police, not realizing that the confession he'd given to his SIS colleagues wouldn't stand up in court. He then confesses to the police. And there's that great scene in the book where he's going to, I think going to make a phone, phone call, isn't he in the park? And then there's the moment of hesitation. Could you expand

upon that a little bit? What happened there? Yeah, it seems that he waits outside the telephone booth. Of course, they tail him on his lunch breaks. So on his lunch break, he goes to the telephone booth and he walks in and then he walks out again, doesn't make the call. And then he goes back in and then he walks out, doesn't make the call. And the suspicion is that he wanted to call his KGB handler and say, look, they got me, what should I do? Because the KGB had never given him advice on what to do if caught, the line was, well, you won't be caught anyway. But the thing that I loved about the book is that you took the personal, which is the story of Blake, but you also expanded it into the international. Like the Americans, actually,

they came across really well. They were very understanding. So in spring 61, the Brits called the Americans and say, oh, something rather embarrassing has happened. And it's that Blake, you know, not only we had various spying scandals, we just had the Portland spy ring blown, Burgess McLean, but now this bloke essentially has given up every Western agent to the Eastern Bloc for eight years now. And the Americans, of course, not happy about this at all. However, luckily for the Brits, the Bay of Pigs has just happened. The Stur-crazy completely failed American attempt to invade Castro's Cuba using a rag-tag bag of Cuban exiles looking a lot like the storming of the capital, but in Cuba.

A bunch of crazy right-wing nuts trying to subverse a government. Where have we seen that before? So the Bay of Pigs has gone completely wrong. It's a massive intelligence disaster. So the Americans are not really in a great position to lecture the Brits. The Americans do go back and say to each other, never give these idiot, Brits, any more information again. But they can't afford to really go in hard on the Brits at that.

that particular moment. Macmillan, the Prime Minister, is hugely embarrassed. McMillan refers to the so-called secret services. He thinks his spies are a bunch of idiots and are just them or less to embarrass him, which is not wrong. That's interesting. Do you watch problematic content online? Of course they do. They watch trigonometry. Many ISPs log your internet activity and sell that data on to other big tech companies or other advertising companies. I know. That's That is why I use ExpressVPN to hide my browsing activities. I bet you did. ExpressVPN is a simple app which you can have on both your computer and your smartphone,

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That's EXPR-E-S-V-P-N. Dot com slash trigger. I love it with you spell things out. But it gets even better than that. ExpressVPN are offering Trigonometry fans three extra months free. Go to Express. VPN.com slash trigger to learn more. So, Simon, he gets caught.

He confesses even to the police not realizing that he didn't actually need to. And then he gets sentenced to, is it 44 years? 42 years. 42. It seems that the judge had quite, against all rules, had called McMillan, the prime minister before sentencing. And it asked McMillan, you know, this chap, Blake, has he done much damage? How much damage is he done?

Wow. And you are really not as a judge in England supposed to discuss cases under in your court with anyone else and certainly not with the Prime Minister. But it appears that this is what Justice Parker did. And so he then gives Blake 42 years, which even Macmillan calls a savage sentence. The longest jail sentence in modern British history, meaning that Blake, if he served it, would be in jail till 2003. Wow. Wow. And I mean, that causes stir primarily as well because he was working for MI6 and MI6. No one even knew that it existed. He weren't allowed to publicise, talk about it. The wider population didn't know. Wasn't the, I loved the bit where McMillan was almost trying, considering whether just to hush it up, because it was more embarrassment than it was worth. Yeah, McMillan's analogy, he says, when my gamekeeper catches a fox, he doesn't string it up in the front room. It's a great line. And so, yeah, McMillan thought all this should be secret.

We should not be having these trials, which are in public, inevitably. And Dick White, who was head of SIS, said, no, you know, Blake has done these terrible things. We're going to make an example of him. Now, of course, they didn't make an example of the posh spies. So Philby was under suspicion at this point, but he had been allowed to go to Beirut to work as a newspaper correspondent. and Anthony Blunt was actually became keeper of the Queen's pictures. And John Cancross, 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. I know it's a very Russian question of me to ask, but do you think there was ever any consideration of just him, you know, I don't know if they had the same technology that we do now, but having a cup of tea or going for a walk and having a little heart attack or anything like that. There was discussion. I mean, they had this weekend after Blake's confession.

The interrogator say, okay, Shergult says, let's all go to my cottage in Surrey, I think. And we'll have a weekend then. We'll talk about this together. So Blake is there, and Shergold's mother and Blake make pancakes in the kitchen for everyone. and it's all quite jolly. But meanwhile, the MI6 people are having this conversation of, can we bump him off? It would save us a lot of embarrassment. In the end, it is decided that this is not appropriate. And do you know why? Was that just not the done thing at the time? Or did they have some particular reason to think that way? I think MI6 probably didn't want to start bumping off

British citizens in Britain. There might have been pesky questions from the opposition benches, etc. I'm guessing that that would have been a consideration. And Britain, you know, for all its faults, Britain is a democracy and there is scrutiny of this kind of stuff. So although one would like to draw the analogy with the USSR, as you do, there are important differences. 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. Because if in his mind, well, look, look what? I've done and no one did anything to me, why would the KGB be killing off these telephone operators

or whatever? Do you think he just, you know, that's why he didn't believe that the spies he betrayed had been killed? I mean, Blake had seen a lot of violence in his life. You know, he had been in the resistance. He had been in post-war, occupied Germany, where he had to deal with a lot of former Nazis in the German Navy. He had been in Korea where he'd seen American airplanes destroying Korean villagers where half the prisoners he was with died on a death march. I mean, he knew that terrible things were done in the world. He was not a blue-eyed boy by that point. And the judge sentenced him.

There were three years, three concurrent sentences, weren't there, each of 14 years, if memory serves correctly. He then gets sent to Wormwood Scrubs, where he's a bit of a model prisoner, isn't he? You like this guy, don't you? I kind of did. Francis is a big fan. he is a model prisoner.

I mean, In Wemwood Trust, finally he doesn't have to live a secret life because everyone knows he's a spy and a communist. So for the first time in his adult life, he can just be himself. He's not living underground. And he becomes an incredibly likable guy. And of course, he's one of the few educated people in the prison. So he has classes where he teaches these Cockney prisoners, German and Arabic and French.

He reads the Quran on a, you know, a bookstand made for him by a grateful fellow prisoner. He writes letters to the authorities on behalf of his fellow prisoners who can't write. He's just a great guy. Everyone in the prison loves him. The screws, the wardens love him too. You know, he's just a good bloke, and he doesn't complain about being there for 42 years. And so, yeah, he becomes the kind of most popular man in the prison. But meanwhile, all the while, he's plotting his escape, which isn't very difficult.

Escaping from a British prison in the 1960s seems to have been a bit of a cinch. And how does that happen? He identifies this Irishman who's about to be released, Sean Burke. So Burke's going to be on the outside. Burke is quite clever. And Burke, he's Britain. So Burke agrees to help him escape. They get money from former peace activists who've also been in jail with them.

And it's really quite amateurish. A burglar breaks a window so that Blake can make it to the outside wall of the scrubs. Burke throws a rope ladder up on top of the wall, forgets to tie it. There's nothing to tie it with. So then Blake has to jump off the wall. It's about a four metre, five metre jump off the wall of rum one with scrub. So he's quite badly hurt, breaks his wrist.

But anyway, Bert shoves him in a car. And a few minutes later, they're hiding in a bed sit a couple of hundred metres away on high lever road in Shepherd's Bush. And it really, really was that simple, wasn't it? I mean, you would have thought that a prisoner like Blake, you know, somebody who is a traitor, possibly one of Britain's most, how can't, heinous traitors? Why didn't they put him under armed guard or the rest of it?

I think partly because he'd put them off Gulfguard by being such a nice bloke. And partly because, I mean, British prisoners escaped. That's what they did. The great train robbers, two of them escaped. I mean, remember Ronnie Biggs ending up in Brazil. Also at about that time. At one point, about just after Blake escaped, 10 prisoners escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in a month.

including this bloke known as Frankie the Mad Axeman, who began writing letters to the newspapers. So... Frankie the Mad Axeman. Mate, if you're going to go into crime, you need a nickname. You need a good name. You need a name. It's all about the good name, isn't it? Yeah.

I mean, there was also mad Frankie Fraser. I mean, there's lots of mad Frankies. So anyway, he escaped. How did he actually get to the USSR, considering he's got the police and MI6 on his tail now? Well, and Burke, who he's hiding with, Burke is actually a writer, an artist. He's also a, you know, a small-time crook. But Burke thinks, right, this escape of George Blake, I'm going to write the book of my life about it, which he does, the springing of George Blake, it's a great book.

And so Burke needs it to be known by the police that he did it. So Burke starts writing letters to the police, starts calling the police, tells them where they can find the getaway car, so it's becoming a real problem. Meanwhile, Burke and Blake are hiding in a Hampstead flat with parents. at Pottle, who was a peace activist and anti-bom activists who'd been jailed for trespassing on an American airbase. And so he was helping Blake. And so he's hiding in Hampstead.

How are we going to get him out? So they build a camper van. In a camper van, they build a secret compartment. And a peace activist named Michael Randall takes his wife and two young sons on holiday to Germany at Christmas, 1966. And Blake is hidden in the secret compartments at the bottom of the camper van. they leave Britain, they go from Dover to Calais, nobody checks them, it's plain sailing, and Blake is in West Berlin, he walks to an East Berlin border post,

and demands to speak to somebody from the Soviet command. It's easy. So the Soviets weren't actually the ones that broke him out, they didn't help him get to Berlin. It was just through connections and friends, etc. And how was he treated when he gets to that checkpoint? The German guard is not very forthcoming, but eventually Blake is given a bed while phone calls are made. And luckily Blake's former KGB handler, Sergei Kondrachev, is in Berlin. And they find Kondrachev and they say there's this bloke here. He might be Blake.

Condrasev rushes to the border post and he and Blake embrace and become firm friends for the next 40 years of their lives in Moscow, where Blake is swiftly taken to. and Blake attends Condoricev's funeral. And so, yeah, he gets lucky. So he gets to this place. He gets to the USSR, which is, in many ways, the embodiment of his dream. You know, he's a firm and avowed communist. Does it live up to his expectations? Within a week, he knew that communism had failed.

It doesn't take love, does it? Can you imagine being that? guy, you spent your life, you betrayed hundreds of people for this ideal and you get there and it's fucking shit. They all have that experience. Guy Burgess said that the Soviet Union was like Glasgow on a Saturday night in the 19th century, which I think is the best description I've read. Yeah. And yeah, so it's very ramshuckle, it's run down. Blake has given a nice flat because, you know, he's KGB. But he has his plan. He wants to be. He wants to be. He has his plan. He to drive through the Soviet Union and admire its different regions,

and then he discovers the state of Soviet roads, et cetera, et cetera. So he's very downcast. And, of course, the Soviets think that he's a triple agent, that he's already been turned by the British. So they're not going to give him any responsible work. And so, yeah, it's very miserable. But then thankfully, the best thing happens to him, his Dutch mother, comes to live with him in Moscow,

and that cheers him up immensely. Then he meets a Russian woman, Ida, who he marries. So the thing about Blake, the difference between him and Philby, is Philby was a Brit. Philby in Moscow, you know, yearn for Britain. He'd read the Times. You'd do the Times crossword. He'd listen to the cricket. He has this great description of listening to Arsenal win the FAA Cup final in 1971. He lived emotionally in Britain. But Blake was Gossopoulson, who spoke very good Russian, and his view was, I'm just going to make this work. And he did. He integrates it. He becomes Russian, which McLean does as well, really.

And do you think he ever regretted it in terms of once he got there. He realized that communism wasn't going to work. He realized he was fighting on the wrong side, or did he believe in what he did? He didn't believe in what he did anymore. I mean, he believed that communism was a beautiful ideal, and for him that mattered. So he could see that the reality was awful. But he thought, well, it's a great ideal, so, you know, it's not such a bad thing that I've given my life to it. But also, because he was a determinist, because he thought everything was predetermined, there is some kind of force, maybe not God, but, but, you know, he's not God, but some force that makes us do what we do,

there's no point he thought having regrets or thinking things might have been different. They couldn't have been different. So he just copes with life as it's thrown at him. And, you know, he'd been everywhere, and he'd always coped. He'd been in Cairo. He'd been in a Korean prison. He'd been in post-war Germany.

He'd always managed to find his feet. And in that way, that's very admirable. Absolutely. And then, of course, the fall of communism, What was Blake's opinions of that? It sounds as if he thought it was inevitable. Yeah, he did. I mean, he thought, you know, given that communism delivered a terrible life to people, it was not going to survive. And yeah, it was quite traumatic because he'd, you know, he'd seen the British Empire collapse

and then the Soviet Empire, and he'd left his homeland, the Netherlands. So he'd lost kind of three homelands, as it were. But he, you know, he believed in communism with a human face, that kind of fantasy that from Dubechek into the 80s. and he thought Gorbachev was that. And he was quite excited about Gorbachev and Yeltsin initially. But, yeah, when the Soviet Union collapses, I mean, he copes. He's coped with everything.

By this point, he's what? He's over 70. And he just plugs on. That's really interesting. And Simon, we wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the sort of lessons and implications. But the first thing I wanted to ask is he was obviously and not an ordinary person, just by virtue of his life and biography.

Was there anything in particular that struck you about him when you met him, when you talked to him? What struck me, he could listen. It's a very rare gift. I mean, I know I'm banging on now, but it's something you learn as a journalist. You learn to listen to people. Because often the thing that you want to hear is not the thing that they're trying to tell you.

They're trying to tell you something more interesting. Journalists can listen, diplomats, psychologists and spies. and he writes about this somewhere that if you just listen, the other person will happily tell you everything. And so that made him very likable. I also recognized in him the cosmopolitism that I have. And so when people call Blake a traitor, which I do as well in the title of my book, I mean, he was a traitor to Britain, but he didn't feel like a traitor because he felt like he was a man of the world, not a man of Britain. And it didn't mean he hated Britain. It's just that he felt himself to be largely above nation.

And that kind of adaptability, which I think we cosmopolitans have. I mean, you probably recognize it yourself as well, Constantine, that when you come into a new environment, you're trying to sniff out the codes, the rules. So, you know, I live in Paris, and you learn that in Paris, when you greet people, you don't smile, whereas in the US,

when you greet people, you do smile. So these little things. So I recognize a lot of the kinds of cosmopolitan ticks that he had. And, yeah, in a sense, A lot of the spy literature in Britain is about British gentlemen, you know, from James Bond to Philby. And this is a book about a cosmopolitan spy. And the thing that I found very, very interesting is because how everybody seems to keep falling in love with the myth of communism.

And it's only when they're confronted by the realities of it, does it seem to be this moment where they realize it doesn't work? Why is it we keep falling for the myth? I think in the case of Blake, it's because he had grown up with the religious idea of paradise, it was very important to him that there should be a paradise. And clearly one's own society is never paradise. So paradise must be somewhere else. And then communism gives a very convincing picture in a way of paradise. You know, communist literature marks.

And so he needed paradise, which I don't feel the need of. I mean, I always think as a liberal, I think what we should strive for is the least bad society. But in these kind of, I think probably in most religions, suddenly in Islam and Christianity, less so in Judaism. Judaism is not big on paradise, but Islam and Christianity are very big on them. That is this central idea that life on earth is horrible,

and these books are written at times when people die young and everyone around you dies and it's dreadful, but there is paradise. And so I think communism, the need for communism is the need for paradise. That's really interesting point. And do you think that is part of the distinction there? Because you talk about the least bad society, which is a vision I share as well, accepting the reality that a perfect society is not going to be possible. It's not very inspiring, though, is it?

It doesn't sell, right? It doesn't sell very well. Where's the idea, as you say, of paradise or utopia or whatever word you want to. used to describe it, that sells very well. That's exciting, that's invigorating, it's convincing, it's persuasive, it's something that you want to sign up to. You saw that now that we're talking about modernity in the Brexit referendum, where the Brexiteers are promising a kind of paradise, a return to the best of Britain, the Golden Age, and Remainers are offering the least bad option. you know, nobody would pretend that life in Britain in 2016 was paradise,

but remain and say, you know, this is about as good as we can make it. And you're 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, you know, my family's from South Africa. So I've seen a society that is totally dysfunctional, that is just awful. And I would go from the Netherlands as a child in the 70s and 80s to visit South Africa and come back to the Netherlands and think, you know, Netherlands is not paradise, but it's pretty damn good.

This is about the, and it was, and it still is today, it's about the least bad society on earth. So I've seen a society that's really not bad, and I've seen a terrible dysfunctional, evil society, so I know which one I would choose. And we've just, we've seen a resurgence in, especially the young people, very much advocating communism, believing in communism,

saying, you know, the classic thing communism has never been tried. Why is it that this is so popular amongst that generation? I don't know. I don't hear that. I see that young Americans are talking about socialism, but I think that by that they mean Denmark. They mean universal healthcare and free college. I don't think they mean nationalization of all production and rule by a Politburo and goulogs.

I mean, Francis, I'd forgotten, of course, that you also have an international background from Venezuela. I don't sound it, I know. You sound like you're very much against any sort of diversity, really. And I think that one of the difficult, I mean, the difficulty with the word socialism is it conflates, let's say, Denmark with Venezuela. And so it's used by the American right. Well, if you want socialism, you want Venezuela. I don't see among, and also don't see politically movements succeeding that are saying, let's have communism, let's have the USSR.

No, no, there aren't, although there certainly are people who are advocating for communism. I agree with you that are probably a fringe. I mean, the counter argument to that might be that, you know, when Soviet Union was created, nobody was saying anything about the purges and the gulags and the Politburo or anything like that either. It was all about fairness, equality, justice for workers and peasants at the time. But I guess a more interesting question might be. rather than getting into the nuances of politics, the sort of what happens when people pursue very idealistic visions of the world

as opposed to dealing with reality. I wonder whether, you know, your conversations with George Blake and research for the book gave you an insight into the sort of maybe preconditions that encourage people to think in those ways. I mean, Blake himself said there is no idealism anymore. You know, he complains about that at one point. He says, well, in my day, people spied out of idealism, but now people only spy out of base motives. You have to pay them money.

And, I mean, not for 70 years, but for several decades, there was this political paradise on offer, this rhetorical paradise. From before the Russian Revolution, but let's say until the 60s, 70s, there are quite a lot of people who are falling for it. By the time I was a teenager in the 80s, I don't really think anyone was anymore. So it had run its course. And I sometimes wondered if I had been a teenager in the Thetys, you know, as my grandmother did, would I have become a communist? She did. She said she stopped with the Nazi Soviet pact, I don't know.

But maybe. I mean, it was a paradise on offer in the Thetys at a time when the capitalist powers were refusing to do anything about fascism. So that might be a moment. Blake became a communist in 1950, by which time we really did know about Stalin's purges, if you can, to pay attention. So that by then, by 1950, communism is going out of fashion, but at the same time, communism is conquering. It's conquered Eastern Europe. It's conquering China.

So it's kind of winning, having already gone out of fashion. So I think me and you guys are younger, we've grown up in a time when there hasn't really been a paradise on offer. And in a sense, I think that's been lucky for us, because. it saved us from diving into millinarian movements. I mean, Trump is offering a version of that Brexit, but those seem to appeal mostly to old people. That's really interesting. And Simon, what lessons you think can be learned

from the life of George Blake? Don't be an idealist. Don't fall for some dream of some country that you don't know about and some system that has never been successfully done. Just go with what works. I mean, my favorite election slogan was Conrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor in the 50s, at one point campaigns under the slogan, Kainer Experimenta, No Experiments, which I have to say, as an anti-idealist I share.

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like you're very much in your place in terms of being in Paris and not smiling when you greet people. You have that sort of very reserved. But listen, Simon, it's been great chatting to you. The book, not only is a very interesting story, but it's incredibly well written. And, you know, your experience and your writing skills really shine through. So it's out on the 4th of February. Is that 4th? Yeah, for February, happy traitor. Happy traitor. And we really recommend everybody reads it. But before we let you go, we've got one final question for you. Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? modern spying, hacking.

I mean, in Blake's day, it was very hard to get any information on what the other side was doing. And now, I mean, the Russians probably know more about the US government than most people in the Trump cabinet. Simon, thank you so much. If people want to find you online, where's the best way to be to do that? Look for me on Twitter. It's Cooper Simon is my Twitter handle, and I'll be tweeting about The Happy Traitor Obsessor promoting this book to death. It's worth promoting, but hopefully not to your own death at least.

But Simon, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate your time. We recommend everybody gets the happy traitor. And we will, of course, see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a live stream. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.