Table Of Content5.625 × 8.75 SPINE: 0.9375 FLAPS: 3.5
“The most comprehensive and insightful biography to date.”
Biography $27.99 U.S.
—BEN MACINTYRE, THE TIMES
“Different and valuable. . . . Humane and informative.”
S
,
S P I E S
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
P
Few Cold War capers approach the
I
sheer daring and treachery of the
“Truly enthralling, gets under the skin, gives us a E
spy George Blake’s.
S
more nuanced sense of who Mr. Blake—or is it Comrade
S , After fighting in the Dutch resistance dur-
, L I E S
Blake?—really was and what, if anything, actually
I ing World War Two, Blake joined the British
motivated him. It’s a deeply human read, wonderfully M L spy agency MI6, and was stationed in Seoul.
SIMON KUPER is a British author
written, on the foibles of a fascinating, flawed, O I Taken prisoner after the North Korean army
and journalist for the Financial Times. Kuper E
overran his post in 1950, Blake later returned to
treacherous and sort of likeable character.”
was born in Uganda of South African parents N S A N D England to a hero’s welcome, carrying a dark
—PHILIPPE SANDS, author of The Ratline and East West Street
in 1969, and moved to the Netherlands as , secret: while in a communist prison camp,
K
a child. He studied history and German at he had secretly switched sides to the KGB.
A
Oxford University, and attended Harvard “A good account of a good story . . . a sceptical wit in U As a Soviet double agent, Blake betrayed
N E X I L E
University as a Kennedy Scholar. He has writ- judging his man and the secret world he inhabited.” P uncounted western spying operations—
ten for The Observer, The Times, and The —MAX HASTINGS, Sunday Times E D including the storied Berlin Tunnel, the most
Guardian, and also writes regularly for Dutch R expensive covert project ever undertaken by
newspapers. He lives in Paris with his family. E the CIA and MI6. Blake exposed hundreds of
“Fascinating material, including lectures Blake gave to
X western agents, forty of whom were likely
the Stasi in East Berlin in the 1980s. Some of Kuper’s questions
executed. After his unmasking and arrest, he
I
T h e E x t r a o r d i n a r y S t o r y o f
to Blake are properly direct. . . . And, above all, Kuper does L received, for that time, the longest sentence
not fail to remind us of the agents—more than forty of them— E in modern British history.
R u s s i a n D o u b l e Ag e n t
Much of Blake’s career existed inside the
who are thought to have lost their lives because
hall of mirrors that was the Cold War, espe-
of Blake’s self-gratifying treachery.” G E O R G E B L A KE
cially following his sensational escape from
—NOEL MALCOLM, Daily Telegraph
Wormwood Scrubs prison. Veteran journalist
Simon Kuper tracked Blake to his dacha out-
side Moscow, where the aging spy agreed
to be interviewed for this unprecedented
www.thenewpress.com
account of Cold War espionage. Now that
the master spy has died, Kuper finally sets
S I M O N K U P E R
Author photograph by Leila Kuper
the record straight.
Jacket photograph by Keystone/Getty Images
Jacket design by Emily Mahon co-author of Soccernomics
SSppiieess LLiieess EExxiillee__jjaacckkeett__RREEVV..iinndddd 11 33//44//2211 11::3399 PPMM
SPIES, LIES, AND EXILE
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also by simon kuper
Ajax, the Dutch, The War: The Strange Tale
of Soccer during Europe’s Darkest Hour
Football Against the Enemy
Soccernomics
The Football Men
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SPIES, LIES,
AND EXILE
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY
OF RUSSIAN DOUBLE AGENT
GEORGE BLAKE
S I M O N K U PE R
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Contents
Preface to the US Edition vii
1. Finding Blake 1
2. An Ordinary Dutch Boy 12
3. A Jewish Mansion in an Arab City 17
4. Deception Becomes Daily Habit 22
5. A Legendary Centre of Hidden Power 32
6. The Prisoner Converts 42
7. Lunchtime Spy 56
8. A Mole in Berlin 67
9. The Game Is Up 80
10. The Human Cost 100
11. Espionage, Balls and Rackets 114
12. Foreign Traitor 122
13. Headstands in Jail 130
14. Straight Out of Hitchcock 140
15. Someone Who Adjusts Easily 158
16. Henri Curiel, A Parallel Life 185
17. Cynicism and Christmas Pudding 196
18. ‘Tragic I Am Not’ 210
Afterword 219
Acknowledgements 221
Notes 222
Select Bibliography 260
Books and Articles 262
List of Illustrations 267
Index 269
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Preface to the US Edition
When I went to see George Blake in his dacha outside Moscow
in May 2012, I was expecting just to write a newspaper article.
I left several hours later thinking, ‘That was the most interest-
ing interview I have ever done’.
Blake was a one-man Netflix series, whose life played out
amid the dramas of the Second World War and the Cold War.
He was a teenaged courier for the Dutch resistance under the
Nazi occupation, then an agent for the British secret services,
a captive in North Korea, and finally a double agent spying for
the KGB. He was given the longest prison sentence in modern
British history, before making a jailbreak so spectacular that
Hitchcock spent his last decade trying to make a film about it.
Blake fled to Moscow, where he experienced at first hand the
reality of Communism and its messy collapse. He died there
in December 2020, aged ninety-eight, as a silent dissident in
Putin’s Russia. No wonder Blake fascinated John le Carré. He
both charmed and revolted me – an ambivalence I have wres-
tled with in this book.
Blake risked his life for his cause in an era, the 1950s, when
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viii SPIES, LIES, AND EXILE
spying was almost the only way for both the East and the
West to discover each other’s intentions. The Cold War was
being fought in a fog. The great fear, in both the US and the
USSR, was of a sudden attack: another Pearl Harbor or Hiro-
shima, only this time with hydrogen bombs. Having advance
warning of even a few hours could prevent the destruction of
one’s way of life. That’s why Blake’s betrayal of the British-
American Berlin spy tunnel – the West’s best window onto
Soviet activity – was so momentous, and its consequences so
unexpected. He also betrayed several hundred agents of the
British secret services to the KGB. About forty of these people
are thought to have been executed.
There is a vast and very British literature about the country’s
double agents – above all about Blake’s Moscow companions,
Kim Philby and Donald Maclean – but Blake doesn’t quite fit
the tradition of gentleman traitors. The son of a Dutch mother
and Egyptian-Jewish father, at home everywhere, he really was
an international man of mystery. He spent only a decade or so
of his life in Britain, nearly half of it behind bars. During his
years as a double agent, the British spying services were almost
an adjunct of the US’s, so he double-crossed the West rather
than simply Britain.
Blake does belong in the century-old tradition of Russian
spying on the West, a tradition that is still going strong. I wrote
this book during the Trump era. I’d spend hours living men-
tally in the 1950s, but when I resurfaced and checked the latest
news about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elec-
tions, it often felt as if I were reading the sequel. Then, a couple
of weeks before Blake’s death, the US admitted that a Russian
intelligence agency had hacked into multiple government
agencies, including the Treasury and Commerce departments,
where it had free access to emails.
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PREFACE TO THE US EDITION ix
Indeed, the main thing that has changed in espionage since
Blake’s day is the method. Nowadays, most spying is elec-
tronic. Human spying (and presumably there were waiters at
Mar-a-Lago doing the job in the Trump years) is just gravy.
But in the era described in this book, spying was a messy
human business. It relied on stealing and photographing secret
documents, and turning people into traitors. Blake’s story is
gripping enough on its own terms, but it’s also a window onto
a period of history that isn’t yet entirely history.
When I decided I wanted to write this book, I consulted
Derk Sauer, a Dutch media magnate in Moscow, the mutual
friend who had originally put me in touch with Blake. Sauer
gave his blessing to the book, on condition that I published it
only after Blake’s death. He told Blake I was writing it. Blake
doesn’t seem to have minded much either way. He had come to
see everything that happened as predestined, perhaps by God.
That absolved him from thinking about his sequence of human
choices with their devastating human consequences.
—Simon Kuper, Paris, January 2021
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