by Ted Allbeury
“Do you mean that you never said or hinted to Silvester that you wanted to go back?’
Petrov shrugged. “Of course I say that. Two, three times maybe.’
“But you don’t want to go back?’
‘Is not possible for me to go back.’
‘So why did you suggest it?’
“To test him. To see how he react.’
‘And how did he react?’
“He fix these games with you.’
‘Why do you think he did that?’
‘So I go on talking, and when he has all he wants then . . . pouff! They fix me. You do, or they do.’
‘Who’s they?’
Petrov just stared back at him and the hand on his knee was trembling. He stood up slowly, staggering slightly as he bent to put his glass on the table. His eyes were half-closed. At the door of his bedroom he turned and looked back at Lawler.
‘I think maybe they make fool of you, Jimmy. They don’t tell you.’ He smiled. A shrewd, knowing smile. ‘Maybe you better find out about Blake or they end up to kill you as well as me.’
‘Goodnight, Tolya. Try and sleep.’
Petrov closed the door behind him without replying.
7
HAMBURG 1945
He booked the German into the jail and put the things he had collected into a large buff envelope. Everything except the keys to the flat. He wanted to search the flat thoroughly, but on his own with the German that hadn’t been possible. The German was a big strong man despite his one arm. And an Obersturmbannführer der SS was a good haul for one night.
Outside the jail he sat in the open jeep. It was a warm night with a bright moon that emphasized the heaps of rubble and the skeleton shapes of what remained of the buildings of Hamburg. It was August 1945 and Sub-Lieutenant Blake took his duties as an intelligence officer seriously. There were many of his colleagues who thought, and sometimes even said, that he took his duties far too seriously. He ignored their slipshod attitudes. He knew what had to be done. He knew what the war had been about, and they didn’t. They saw their time in occupied Germany as a time for self-indulgence and making money on the black market.
He looked at his watch. It was just past eleven and he decided to go back and search the flat while it was fresh in his mind. The tip-off had come from the SS mans wife and he had almost decided to ignore it. But duty is duty, and if information came in it should be used, whatever the source and whatever the motive. He started the engine and headed back to the house by the Grossmarkthalle.
It was one of the few remaining old houses that were still standing. The windows had all been blown out and were boarded up, and there were tarpaulins fastened across half the gaping roof. It was well after curfew, and there was silence everywhere, except where a broken pipe dripped water, and rats scuttled stealthily in the rubble. There was still the smell of rotting corpses in the air.
He took his torch and the paraffin lamp from the back seat of the jeep and crossed the road to the house.
The electricity would have been switched off at eleven in all buildings except those occupied by troops and Military Government, and he played his torch over the door until he found the lock. As he opened the door he saw a door close to the far end of the corridor. He went slowly up the stairs to the second floor, and to his surprise there was a faint bar of light at the bottom of the door. He took the pistol from its holster and held it in his left hand as he slid the key into the door lock and turned it slowly. He threw the door open. The pale light came from a British army paraffin lamp on the table, and a girl was standing naked with a glass of beer in her hand. A sergeant with RAOC flashes was sitting in a wicker armchair. For a moment all three of them were silent and then Blake recovered from his surprise and walked over to the sergeant.
‘Where’s your AB64 part 2, Sergeant?’
The sergeant put down his empty glass, fished in his battle dress pocket and pulled out the brown book. Blake turned over the pages and read them carefully before handing the book back.
‘You know it’s an offence to fraternize with Germans, Sergeant.’
‘It was just a drink, sir.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About twenty minutes.’
‘You’d better get back to your unit and thank your lucky stars I’m Royal Navy not Military Police.’
The sergeant stood up, put on his forage cap and left.
Blake turned to look at the girl. She was very young and very pretty, long-legged and big-breasted and obviously unconcerned at her nudity. But her half-smile turned to surprise and fear when he spoke in German.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Heidi.’ And she smiled back at him, nervously.
‘Heidi what?’
‘Heidi Voss.’
‘Where did you get the beer and the lamp?’
‘They were given to me.’
‘By whom?’
‘The sergeant gave me the beer and a captain gave me the lamp.’
‘What was the captain s name?’
She shrugged. I’ve no idea.’
‘Where did you meet him ? ’
‘At the officers’ club. I’m a waitress there.’
‘You live with the SS officer?’
‘No. I don ’t know any SS officer.’
‘Klaus Horstmann.’
The surprise was genuine. ‘I didn’t know he was a soldier.’
‘You’d better get dressed.’
She looked surprised. ‘You can do what you want for cigarettes.’
‘Is that what you do at the officers’ club?’
‘They come back here with me.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘And how long have you been sleeping with men for money?’
‘Since May. Since the occupation.’
‘Why don’t you get a job?’
She shrugged. ‘There are no jobs. I can’t do anything except this.’
‘How much do they pay you?’
‘A packet of cigarettes. Twenty cigarettes.’
‘And you let them have sex with you for that?’
‘Yes.’
He stood looking at her and she mistook his look for lust and smiled back at him. ‘You can have me all night if you want.’
He shook his head slowly, and said quietly, ‘I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed at what they do. It’s terrible. Unforgivable.’
‘They need a woman, it’s nothing more. They’re just men.’
‘Men don’t treat women like that. They’re scum. ’
‘Don’t you sleep with girls?’
‘No.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘How is it you speak such good German?’
And even that minor probing of his intelligence background brought him back to earth.
‘The SS man is under arrest. He won’t be back.’
She nodded and he abandoned his intended search. As he stood at the door he said, ‘Will you be here tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes. Until eleven. Then l go to the club to serve lunch.’
‘If I have time I’ll bring you a carton of cigarettes. Two hundred. Not for sex.’
‘For what?’
‘To make up for the others.’
And he closed the door securely as he left and went back to his quarters.
Despite being heartily disliked by his Royal Navy colleagues Lieutenant-Commander Blake had been noticed by officers of MI6, and while his colleagues were only counting the days to their demobilization, George Blake was recruited to help, in a minor role, the counter-intelligence operations against the Russians in the British Zone. He worked hard and zealously and, although his colleagues found his intensity and single-mindedness an embarrassment, he was recommended for a home posting to take a Russian Language course at Downing College, Cambridge. As always, he did outstandingly well.
His P’ file assessment noted that he lacked personality and had
more the air and appearance of a junior clerk. A nonentity rather than an intelligence officer. But a section field operations officer had scrawled in red ink — ‘So what? This is exactly what we want.’
The Foreign Office was more used to finding a home for mild eccentrics than the Royal Navy, and when he came down from Cambridge in 1948 George Blake was posted as His Britannic Majesty’s Vice Consul to the Legation in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea.
8
KOREA 1950
The film was the English original with sub-titles. It was Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and the audience was silent and rapt. The camera closed in on the hands on the zither, and then the sound track groaned, and the image on the screen flickered and finally faded. There was a murmuring from the audience and a few people made for the aisle, to be suddenly illumined by the bright white light on the screen. The loud-speakers crackled, and then a tense voice, breathless and high-pitched, spoke in Korean. All soldiers were to report immediately to their barracks. The message was repeated three times and then the house lights went up. There was no panic but there was pushing around the doors, and frightened faces. It was Sunday, 25 June 1950 and the North Koreans had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. The Korean War had started.
George Blake waited until the cinema was almost empty and then walked back to the Legation. There were crowds in the streets and already there was the sound of distant gunfire, and as he passed the Toksu Palace he saw soldiers formed up at the side of the road being harangued by an officer.
Captain Holt, the British Minister, was already burning secret papers and the two of them stayed up all that night preparing for the worst.
Four days later Seoul was occupied by the North Koreans, and despite the looting and destruction, time was found to attack the British Legation. Men wearing the red arm-bands of the People s Militia and carrying automatic pistols surrounded the compound. On that first day they only looted the building and took away the Legation cars. Captain Holt, Consul Owen and Vice-Consul Blake spent the next two days in the stripped Legation wondering what their fate would be. Holt rehearsed his piece about international law and territorial rights without much hope of being heeded. There was no electricity and therefore no communication with the world outside. And no news of what was happening outside. The battery-driven radio could only pick up Korean stations and none of the three men could speak Korean.
It was early in the morning two days later when the police vans drove into the compound and an hour later amidst shouting and confusion all the Legation staff were bundled into the vans, under arrest. They were driven to the large house on the outskirts of Seoul that had been taken over by the North Korean Security Police. Outside they could hear bursts of machine-gun fire and the crack of exploding grenades. Commissioner Lord of the Salvation Army and a Roman Catholic priest, Father Hunt, were brought in a few minutes later.
Captain Holt asserted the Legation staffs diplomatic status in vain, and a rough and ready interrogation by their captors began. It was interrupted by the small-arms fire around the house, and eventually the questioning stopped when several South Korean police officers were brought in. They had been viciously beaten up, their legs broken, and blood was pouring from their ears and mouths. They gave no signs of fear or pain as they were violently interrogated, and half an hour later they were taken out and shot.
The North Koreans seemed to have lost interest in the diplomats but a few days later they were pushed into a truck and taken to Pyongyang, the Communist capital. In the camp at Pyongyang they were joined by other European civilians. By then the Americans were pushing back the North Korean army and the treatment of the civilians in the camp became harsher. They were moved on to the town of Man-po on the River Yalu on the Manchurian border.
On 20 October American forces captured Pyongyang. Then the Chinese army came into the war, and the civilian prisoners were moved from one town to another, and the mood of the guards became ugly. At the end of October the internees started on a forced march. They were warned before they set off that those who collapsed would be shot, and that their corpses would have to be carried by the survivors, and the nightmare journey started. Disease, wounds, exhaustion, starvation and cold took their toll, and the victims were dealt with mercilessly. Across mountain passes in blizzards men stumbled exhausted as they carried corpses on their backs, and the only gesture of mercy from the Communists was that they sometimes shot those who fell exhausted at the side of the road. About a hundred people had died or been shot by the time they arrived at their destination, the village of Chung-Kang-Djin. The morning after their arrival the guard commander ordered physical exercises as a punishment for bad behaviour on the march, and another dozen deaths were added to the toll.
A few days later they were moved to a larger camp at a nearby village, Hadjang. It already housed a variety of civilians and American and United Nations’ prisoners of war.
The camp commandant at Hadjang was known as ‘The Tiger’. Ruthless and energetic, he turned the camp into a camp for the dying. With temperatures sometimes falling to seventy degrees below freezing the cold itself would have been enough, but when dysentery, meningitis and gangrene were added, then death was a commonplace. Out of seven hundred and eighty American PoWs, four hundred and sixty died in Hadjang, and the proportion among the civilians was roughly the same.
When prisoners were seriously ill ‘The Tiger’ had them moved to a line of wooden huts where they were left alone to die. Vice-Consul Blake had his share of dysentery and frostbite, but Holt and Consul Owen were seriously ill. Blake nursed them both, and argued and pleaded that they should not be removed to the death-huts. The two diplomats were so near the point of death that they had no knowledge of what was happening. George Blake survived, day by day, and despite his weakness he struggled to help the helpless and protect the dying from the guards. His haggard, white face was given a touch of defiance by his faintly jaunty beard. His attitude to his captors was a strange mixture of aggression and politeness.
In this camp without hope, food, medical care or mercy, the Communists mounted their first attempts at indoctrination of their prisoners. The lectures by the barely literate and simple-minded North Korean political officers were almost a welcome relief to the sick, half-starved prisoners whose minds were still alert. The indoctrinators were no match for the tactics of their victims, who argued skilfully with far more knowledge of Marx and Lenin than their captors. Some hackneyed quotation of Marx or Lenin that was used to make a point was often thrown back in their faces with a counter-quotation that exposed their real ignorance of Marxism and the revolution. But all this amateur indoctrination programme ended in the autumn of 1951. The diplomats and certain other key prisoners were removed to a farmhouse at Moo-Yong-Nee where indoctrination was to begin in earnest.
The leader of the indoctrination team was a Russian whom the prisoners christened ‘Blondie’. He was obviously well-educated and spoke fluent English, and one by one he interviewed them alone as the start of his task of persuading them that the Communist system was a superior way of life. Convincing a group of intelligent Europeans who were experiencing first-hand the effects of Communism made his task hopeless from the start. The prisoners welcomed the interludes of conversation but were scornful of the attempts to persuade them towards the Communist line.
The Russian, Gregori Kuzmich, had served on the staff of the Soviet ambassador to Canada and later at the embassies in London and Washington. His knowledge of the Western way of life was first-hand and extensive, and his English was faultless.
Because George Blake spoke Russian he seemed an obvious target for Kuzmich’s arguments and he listened, as he had to, to the iteration of the massacre of the Red Indians by the settlers, Dickens quoted as an authority on living conditions in Britain, and the general discrimination against Negroes and coloured people. But it took more than Oliver Twist to convert intelligent Europeans to Communism.
On 20 March 1953, without an
y explanation, the three British diplomats were taken to Pyongyang. The journey took nearly two days by car, and en route they were able to see the destruction wrought by the war. From Pyongyang they were taken to Antung, Peking, Moscow, and finally they were handed over to the British authorities in West Berlin. After a couple of days’ rest they were flown to the RAF airfield at Abingdon, Berkshire where they were given a hero’s welcome. But it was 21 April 1953, and the public were rather more interested in the gruesome details being revealed in Bow Street Magistrates’ Court about John Reginald Christie and how he had murdered his wife and several other women in the house at 10, Rillington Place.
Captain Holt was knighted, but his captivity had broken his health. He retired in 1956 and died four years later. He told many people in those last years that he owed his life to the loyalty and nursing of George Blake.
9
They had stopped for a meal at Hindhead and it was just past three o’clock when they turned off the Portsmouth road at Petersfield. Buriton is a small, quiet village in the shadow of the Downs that leads nowhere and links no roads. Its Norman church and the manor house are its only landmarks.
The Lawler cottage was the only building in the lane near the edge of the village. It was long and narrow, its small wooden windows in typical Sussex style set in the thick stone walls that had once housed the village inn. Set on the Hampshire/Sussex borders, its thatched roof and general neatness declared its Sussex influences. It sat at the edge of the village green, below Butser Hill and the forest, and there were blackberries in the hedge and golden samphire between the stones.
Edward Lawler was sitting in the old-fashioned garden at a round white table and he stood up smiling as he saw his son and his two companions. As his son made the introductions they could hear the piano inside the cottage, and ‘Moon River’ merged into a Schubert song that spoke of evening stars.
Chatting, the four of them went into the cool of the cottage, through the quarry-tiled kitchen to a large room with an oak strip floor. The Blüthner boudoir grand was in the far corner and flowers were everywhere. In vases and pewter pots they frothed their colour around the room. Old-fashioned flowers. Campanulas, lupins, wallflowers, sweet-peas and phlox, not artfully arranged, but overflowing from their containers in every direction. The blackhaired woman who was walking from behind the piano held her arms out to her son and kissed him on the mouth. Then she turned to be introduced, smiling at Petrov and impulsively kissing the girl.
