Case Closed

Never in anyone's memory had such strict security measures been clapped on a criminal trial at the Old Bailey in peacetime. Hordes of police cordoned off the sidewalk outside, allowed no one near the courtroom. When the trial began, Lord Chief Justice Lord Parker ordered the doors locked, the windows shuttered. In the dock was George Blake, 38, a British Foreign Service official, who had confessed that for 9 1/2 years he had fed Moscow a steady flow of Britain's closest secrets.

"I must admit freely," Blake stated in his confession, "that there was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact." Though Blake did not deal with atomic or scientific matters, explained Attorney General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, "he had access to information of the very greatest importance." Fact was, Blake was in a position to betray British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. Lord Parker took only 53 minutes to reach his decision. Blake's disloyalty, he commented, "rendered much of this country's efforts completely useless." He then sentenced him to 42 years in prison, the heaviest term handed out by any British court for espionage during peacetime in this century.*

Ordeal in Camp. Blake's origin was murky enough for any spy. Born in Holland, his father was Egyptian, his mother Dutch. Later she divorced, married an Englishman named Blake, which provided the young son with the proper credentials when he was busy fighting the Nazis as a member of the wartime underground. It was then that he was first recruited by British Intelligence to serve as an agent, later escaping to England.

At war's end, he served briefly in Hamburg, then was sent to Cambridge University to study Russian. When the Korean war came along, Blake was a British vice-consul in Seoul. Fellow diplomats remember him as convivial, gay, and with a delight in mimicry and dressing up in fancy clothes at costume parties. Blake was grabbed with the other foreigners when the Communists moved in. The North Koreans shipped him off to a detention camp for three years. There, according to Blake's signed statement, he decided that Communism was the better system and deserved to triumph.

Said the Attorney General: "What he did was to approach the Russians and volunteer to work for them." In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan cut off questions by offering to take the leader of the Opposition into his confidence on the nature and extent of Blake's crime, but publicly would only say: "His action was not the result of brainwashing. He received no money for his services."

Spy Among Spies. Released from Korean captivity in 1953, Blake returned to Britain as something of a hero. He married the daughter of a respected Foreign Office official, fathered two children, was assigned to the British mission in West Berlin. There he lived a spy in a city of spies, until 1959, when he returned to London. Then he was posted to the Foreign Office's Middle East Centre for Arab Studies near Beirut. Last month he was recalled to London and arrested.

To Blake's old pals who shared his Korean camp ordeal, the confession was incredible, for Blake's courageous defiance of his Korean captors had earned the admiration of them all. He tried to escape on two occasions, treated his guards with scornful contempt. One fellow inmate, British Journalist Philip Deane, in his book described a beating he and Blake received: "George Blake, who got the worst of this ordeal, smiled throughout, his eyebrows cocked ironically at his guard, his beard aggressively thrust forward." "I find it almost impossible to believe that George Blake could have turned into a traitor," said another fellow inmate.

The super secrecy clamped on the case brought loud demands for a full investigation. Roared the Daily Mirror: "How was it possible for a man in a key British position to be a top Soviet spy for 9 1/2 years without being discovered?"

To all its critics, the government replied with the traditional blank stare accorded all inquiries on such delicate matters as espionage. The case of George Blake was closed.

*In contrast, Gordon Lonsdale was sentenced to 25 years in last month's naval secrets case. Atom Spy Klaus Fuchs got only 14 years.

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