ROGER HERMISTON
Aurum, 2013, 362 pages, $39.99 (hb)
George Blake was smart, resourceful and committed. A teenage courier with the Dutch anti-Nazi
Resistance during the war and a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6)
spy after it, Blake then picked, says Roger Hermiston in The Greatest
Traitor, the wrong cause, converting to Marxism and becoming a Soviet mole
in the SIS.
The British Establishment’s vengeance would be severe - a 42
year prison term - only for the ever-ingenious Blake to escape over the walls
of Wormwood Scrubs via a rope-ladder made from knitting needles, finding refuge
in Moscow where, on an intelligence service pension, he still resides,
unrepentant.
Blake first turned leftwards when he headed the SIS station
in post-war South Korea, mingling with distasteful Korean businessmen lining
their pockets from US aid whilst the rest of the population festered in
poverty, ruled over by a corrupt regime which was to survive thanks only to
brutal US military tactics in the Korean War.
Communism, Blake decided, compared more than favourably with
the capitalist class system, despite his three-year privations as a prisoner of
North Korean and Chinese troops during the peninsular war. In 1951, the ideologically-converted Blake
began passing on copies of secret SIS documents to the KGB.
After nine years of dead-letter drops and clandestine
meetings with his KGB ‘handlers’, Blake fell under suspicion but he only
confessed after being goaded by his SIS interrogators’ suggestion that he had
spied for financial gain or under duress of torture in North Korea. On the contrary, an indignant Blake
maintained, he had acted from political conviction.
Conviction was not lacking, however, by the British
political and judicial Establishment which sought to make an example of Blake
with an unprecedented sentence. Blake’s
response was to become an escapee, in 1966, aided by willing helpers, including
two peace campaigners who had done time with Blake for non-violent civil
disobedience and who assisted Blake from humanitarian affront at his virtual
life term rather than from any sympathies for Stalinist dictatorships.
Like most who took up spying for Moscow, Blake did so from
high-minded socialist idealism, equating this with protecting the Soviet Union
from Western imperialism, a not unworthy aim given that imperialist threats
against the Stalinist state were the Cold War ideological and military umbrella
sheltering, under the guise of ‘fighting Communism’, the real Western agenda to
seize eastern European and post-colonial societies for Western capital.
Alas, Hermiston has a different take on Blake, to whom the
words ‘traitor’ and ‘treachery’ are freely applied at all opportunities. Hermiston can not conceive of anyone who
believes they ‘have no country’, as both Blake and Marx averred, and who act
out of internationalism, however much hindsight may now show this to have been
distorted by Stalinist travesties of socialism for some members of a past
generation of Marxists. In Blake versus
capitalist Establishment, the red mole still comes out on top.
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