Continuing the Blake Saga: Insight and Missed Opportunities

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 From his recruitment in 1944, until his arrest on espionage charges in January 1961.

2 Leslie Frewin, Shadow of a Spy (London: E.H. Cookridge, 1967).

3 H. Montgomery Hyde, George Blake: Super Spy (London: Futura, 1987).

4 George Blake, No Other Choice (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990); Kevin O’Connor, Blake, Bourke and the End of Empires (Dublin: Prendeville, 2003); Roger Hermiston, The Greatest Traitor (London: Aurum, 2014).

5 Steve Vogel, Betrayal in Berlin (London: John Murray, 2019).

6 Sean Bourke, The Springing of George Blake (London: Cassell, 1970); Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, The Blake Escape (London: Harrap, 1989).

7 Philip Deane, Prisoner in Korea (New York: Norton, 1953). He and Blake had been fellow prisoners in Korea and his account of their Soviet interrogators would unintentionally create the myth that a KGB officer named Kuzma Kuzmich had cultivated Blake, a process that led to his ideological conversion and its appalling consequences. Actually, “Kuzmich” was a nickname invented by Deane, but in Cookridge’s version of Blake’s recruitment the author claimed that although he “had been unable to find out his real name … he was known as ‘Gregory Kuzmitch’ or ‘Kuzma.’” Bizarrely, Cookridge even alleged that later “Kuzmitch defected to the Americans,” having served under diplomatic cover at the Soviet embassies in Ottawa and London. This invention would be authenticated in 1987 by Hyde who averred that Blake’s recruiter was “Gregory Kuzmitch,” and again two years later by James Rusbrdger in his treatment of Blake in The Intelligence Game (London: Bodley Head, 1989). Incredibly, the increasingly strange story of Blake’s recruitment by the KGB in Korea would be embellished further in 1990 by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky in their KGB: The Inside Story (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), in which they insisted that “Grigori Kuzmich” had been the true name of “the first MGB officer to interrogate Blake,” and that he had later defected.

8 Some accounts identify Blake’s KGB handler in East Berlin as Sergei Kondrashev.

9 Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 207. Kuper says Maclean was posted to Washington in 1945, but the correct date is April 1944.

10 In fact, Penkovsky was arrested the very day President Kennedy made his television address announcing a blockade, and by then Penkovsky had been out of touch with his handlers since 6 September, the day after a U-2 overflight had confirmed the existence of a Soviet antiaircraft missile site in west Cuba. Penkovsky’s last delivery to his contact in Moscow was in August 1962.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nigel West

Nigel West, one of the world’s most prolific commentators on intelligence matters, has authored and edited more than three dozen books and written four novels. In 2003, he received the Lifetime Literature Achievement Award from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Under his given name, Rupert Allason, Mr. West was an elected member of the British House of Commons in London for a decade. The author can be contacted through the website at www.nigelwest.com.