Attain The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives Of Agent George Blake Illustrated By Roger Hermiston Conveyed As Booklet

every turn the gripping writing reminds you of a world of spies and betrayal that was so much a part of life in post war Europe.
. . Superb from start to finish, ' JEREMY VINE OnMay, after a trial conducted largely in secret, a man named George Blake was sentenced to an unprecedented forty two years in jail.
At the time few details of, . . This is the best biography of George Blake I have read, Roger Hermiston gives the impression of having set out to tell the story of one of the great Soviet intelligence agents without trying to wield any particular political axe.
The book takes us from Blakes early years growing up in pre war Netherlands, his role in the antiNazi resistence, recruitment into the British intelligence services, and the war in Korea.
His thought processes are considered based on both Blakes own words and that of friends and colleagues, While his working life as a hidden agent was relatively short it was highly productive, Perhaps due to his more proletarian up bringing he did not suffer the same self destructiveness which marked some of the Cambridge ring, The latter part of the book details well for the first time George Blakes imprisonment and trial and his spectacular escape following the draconian sentence imposed on him by the British establishment.
It would be interesting to have a clearer idea of the thoughts of SIS concerning the prosecution of Blake especially in the wake of the lack of urgency shown in throwing the book at Philby.
Together with Blakes autobiography "No Other Choice" and Randal and Pottles "The Blake Escape" these are essential for anyone with an interest in the subject.
Born George Behar in Rotterdam onNovember, George Blake had a peripatetic childhood and had already had a chequered career around the world before he fully became a double agent in the autumn of.


Already having spent time with relatives in Cairo, as ayearold he was whisked away from his family in the Netherlands and incarcerated in a detention centre by the dreaded Waffen SS.
When he was released he was feted on his release and return home for everyone wanted to hear about his experiences, He definitely had a taste for adventure so it was perhaps no surprise when he asked about joining a Dutch resistance group, He was readily accepted and his undercover work began,

With his family having moved to England he continued his resistance work but he eventually decided that he wanted to make his way to join his family.
This involved a dangerous,mile journey across Europe and he had a number of hairraising escapes while seeking sanctuary along the way, He later commented, 'Scared You had the pressure of the Germans all around you, but I'd been used to that for more than two years.
You get used to being scared and you stop thinking about it, And when you're young you are far less scared than you are later in your life, '

When he reached England he attended Cambridge as did many of the spies of the day and then
doors opened for him and he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in order to qualify as an officer.
But later, when questioned by a Naval officer, his background, his resistance work and his escape from Holland led to an appointment in the Secret Intelligence Service.
Thus his career in intelligence work had begun atBroadway, St James's, in a building where my late wife was later to have an office.


That was when his secret service career began in earnest and after some time in the local office he was posted to Seoul in South Korea to open a new outpost there it was quite an achievement at ageto be chosen to head up a new secret service station.
His time in Seoul was very eventful and ended up with him being a captive in Korea under most awful circumstances, Some of the atrocities he describes rival those carried out by the Germans during World War II, He even took part in what was called the 'Death March',

He was eventually freed and returned to England where his participation in various SIS and CIA meetings allowed him to keep his masters in the Kremlin informed about progress on various secret and top secret activities his spying activities then became second nature as he continued to pass information across to the Russians on a regular basis.


He had plenty of agents who he worked with and he tells stories of how they arranged meetings so as to avoid detection but after a posting in Berlin, from where he passed on all the secret information about the Berlin listening tunnel, there were leaks about spies in the establishment.
The unmasking process of George Blake had begun, After much interrogation when initially he argued against all the allegations that were being made, he eventually confessed after his interrogators had suggested that they understood perhaps why he had passed secrets across after the way he had been treated in Seoul.


This suggestion annoyed him so much that, in what he calls 'an upsurge of indignation', he put the interrogators right and informed them that he had acted purely out of conviction, out of a belief in Communism and not under duress or for any financial gain.
He was immediately arrested and a lengthy trial followed,

The maximum penalty for treason wasyears so he was resigned to being found guilty and sentenced thus, But he did not account for a judge who bent the rules somewhat and imposed three consecutive sentences ofyears, making a massiveyears in total.
He was mortified and he immediately made up his mind to start making escape plans so as not to complete such an inhumane sentence.


And with the help of fellow prisoners and sympathisers he engineered a daring escape from Wormwood Scrubs, which is fully described in great detail, and set off on a high risk trip to get to the Soviet Union.
After many hardships en route he duly did so and was set up in Moscow as a celebrity, He met with other former exiled spies, most notably Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, and lived a comfortable life, and presumably, coming up to histh birthday, still does to this day.


He was married twice his first wife eventually divorced him and he married again in Russia and there is plenty of pathos in the story of those marriages even when one considers that Blake was a spy.
And Roger Hermiston tells the whole story with plenty of feeling that helps to make this book one of the most readable on the subject of spying.


Finally, Blake himself takes some comfort in the words from the Bible, In Romans for instance there is, 'Nay but, O Man, who art thou that repliest against God Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one lump to honour, and another unto dishonour' And having read that, he maintains that he has been formed in the way he is whether by God, or

someone or something else and it is not for him to question why.
He does concede, however, 'I would say that I have been an unusual vessel, in that I have been fashioned both to shame and to honour.
' An interesting philosophy indeed One of the blurbs when you open the book says that Hermiston ", . . writes in a way so objective and unslanted that the reader is challenged to decide what to make of his subject, " I didn't find it so, I found Hermiston to be subjective and thereby slanted, I don't use Kindle, but I challenge anyone who does to put in the words treacherous and treachery and see how many times they appear in the text.
In the parts where he talks about Blake's work with SIS, the British Secret Service, they appear at least once per page, and there are a couple hundred pages of that.


But he does lay out all the facts I hope and those facts, in spite of Hermiston's favored treachery, leave a reader with that challenge to decide what to make of Blake.
I'm all for those who helped him escape, His trial was a sham and he was given an unjustly heavy sentence because he was "Not one of us, " Excellent book, to the highest standards of British non fiction authorship, the writer himself has no presence and allows the story to tell itself and what a story, superb.


unlike american authors who often seem to write books with one mind on a film script and the riches that follow, This is a really good read, Roger Hermiston has written this biography with flair that makes one forget that it's a true story and not fiction, Blakes life would have been fascinating enough even if he had never become a Russian spy, Theres his early cosmopolitan upbringing and education in numerous countries and his complex family history, Theres his struggle to survive and escape the Nazis in war torn Europe, His subsequent work for British intelligence and then his two years of imprisonment in Korea during the war there, In fact, the details of his spying activities in thes are the least interesting part of this book, The story picks up at the end with the detailed description of Blakes daring escape from Wormwood Scrubs and his subsequent flight to Russia.
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