THE GREATEST TRAITOR: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake by ROGER HERMISTON

THE GREATEST TRAITOR: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake
ROGER HERMISTON
Aurum, 2013, 362 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

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.

PETE SEEGER, 1919-2014

PETE SEEGER, 1919-2014

By Phil Shannon

Pete Seeger, who passed away in January this year, discovered both socialism and banjo in the 1930s.  The result, for folk music and politics, was highly beneficial.  Not everyone welcomed the development, however.  Harvard’s most famous dropout would become the most-picketed, blacklisted music entertainer in American history as Seeger united in virulent enmity the militarists, anti-communists, racists and union-busters of the American right.

War veterans, the Ku Klux Klan, local police, amateur Red-hunters and the professional anti-communists of Hoover’s FBI and Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee variously rained stones at Seeger’s head, cancelled his bookings and kept him off TV and radio.  Denigrated as “Moscow’s trained canary”, Seeger fell back on grass-roots touring, singing at small venues where a beleagered American left nurtured renewal during the Cold War.

Always distrustful of commercial success, however, Seeger revelled in this environment as a performer with an extraordinary ability, through simple tunes, clear diction and magical banjo, to work a crowd through song, laughter and feeling.  He served lovely appetisers through traditional folk songs (Froggie Went a Courtin’), invigorated labour ballads and ditties (Which Side Are You On; Little Boxes), recast the Civil War Union song (Redwing) into a feminist class war union song (Union Maid), made the exotic African freedom song (Wimoweh) into a domestic standard, and took black spirituals like We Shall Overcome to goosebump-worthy heights at mass singings. 

Seeger’s original compositions also found a subversive measure of popular success.  Where Have All The Flowers Gone was inspired by a novel by Soviet author, Mikhail Sholokov.  If I Had A Hammer, which now serves as an all-purpose song for freedom and justice, was first written for eleven US Communist Party leaders facing jail under anti-communist legislation.  Waist Deep In The Big Muddy undermined the Vietnam War consensus by a man who found it impossible to hate (except in extremis, for which the war certainly qualified, doubly so because of Seeger’s Asian-American family).

Seeger’s life on the left also had its own internal challenges.  Rapid repertoire obsolescence afflicted Private Seeger’s first group (the Almanacs, with Woody Guthrie) as they juggled anti-war with anti-Nazi feelings and traded Talkin’ Union for wartime class unity).  Seeger’s sense of humour, and artistic independence, also kept at bay the cultural correct-liners in the US Communist Party who wanted to tamper with Seeger’s lyrics (Seeger was an arms-length member from 1941 to 1950), whilst Seeger also had to fend off some doctrinaire Marxist criticism of the emergent environmental movement.

Seeger’s major musical crisis (his distress at his protégé, Bob Dylan, going electric with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival) also resolved itself courtesy of Seeger’s 1980s tours with Arlo Guthrie’s amplified band.

It took arthritis, not rightwing reactionaries, to still Seeger’s banjo towards the end but whilst the left may have lost its share of political battles, it has wound up with the best songs because, as was inscribed on Pete Seeger’s banjo, ‘This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender’.