On Monday 16 March, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of Masterspy of Moscow – George Blake, directed by George Carey. The film, which will be broadcast on Monday 23 March by BBC 4 Storyville, traces the life story of the legendary George Blake, a British diplomat who became a longterm double agent for the Soviet Union. Masterspy of Moscow clarifies the many myths surrounding Blake that persist, and culminates with an interview with the protagonist himself, from his cabin in the woods outside of Moscow.

Director George Carey

Following the screening, Carey began the discussion by highlighting that agents such as Blake often face serious identity crises.

“You’ve got these two lives, which you’ve got to keep separate. And you haven’t  just got to keep it separate in the sense that you don’t tell your boss what you’re doing. But you have to keep it separate from your wife, your children, and in the end from one side of your head. And it’s such a strain,” he said.

In Blake’s case, this was reinforced by his complicated, and at times unstable, background. He was raised in the Netherlands by his Calvinist mother and Jewish father with roots in both Cairo and Istanbul. After the occupation of his home country, young Blake fled to London with his mother in 1943.

The documentary narrates how the now 92-year-old former spy offered himself as a double agent to the KGB during his imprisonment in North Korea, and how he was later imprisoned for acts of treason. Blake escaped prison five year later, in 1966, and fled to Moscow where he remains to this day.

Carey explained to the audience how he tried to contact Blake’s former wife, who eventually refused to comment. Curiously, one of his sons chose a profession that Blake aspired to when he was young: he is currently a vicar in Surrey.

“But I decided not to include that. I felt the essence of the story was George himself,” Carey said.

He also underlined that aside from religion, Blake had been influenced by a strong moment of transition after the Second World War when anti-colonialist sentiment was sweeping the world.

“Who was whose spy was a very ambiguous business. What you had was the Americans, the British and the Russians, principally, in the early 1950s. All had their own staff agents and they all had their own informers. The trouble was that someone who was one of your informers (…) was probably informing somebody else as well,” Carey said.

He also pointed out that such inner frictions remain key up to the present day. Carey mentioned the recent assassination of Boris Nemtsov as one such example: “It is becoming clearer and clearer that this is because there are factions inside the FSB and the Kremlin.”

Nevertheless, Carey acknowledged that speculation is “almost axiomatic” when making a film about a spy and talking about secret intelligence services.

“You have to understand I’m just a humble old filmmaker. I do my best.” Carey said.

“Good breeding and good manners are no guarantee of loyalty.” On Friday 11 October 2013, the Frontline Club screened Philby – The Spy Who Went Into the Cold. Kim Philby acted as a Soviet double-agent while serving as chief British intelligence officer in the United States, and while heading MI6’s anti-Soviet section. The BBC Storyville preview delved into Kim Philby’s conflicted past.

Moderator Nick Fraser (L) and director George Carey (R) Photo by: George Symonds

Before the lights went down, moderator Nick Fraser introduced director George Carey:

“While I’m a mild connoisseur of, as one might be, the deviant behaviour of the British upper classes, he is a true obsessive [laughter from the audience]. If there were a Mastermind of errors and stupidities committed by the British upper classes, George would score 40 points [more laughter].”

“I’m not sure I would have written that script myself,” Carey was quick to qualify:

“I came to Philby with a slightly more open-minded view [even more laughter]. I hope you all enjoy the film.”

As the lights went up, Fraser engaged the Q&A:

“The very charming but overweight KGB man says he was a romantic who believed in Karl Marx, . . . but when you went to his lair, there was P.G. Woodhouse there, not Karl Marx. What evidence did you ever uncover that he wasn’t just trapped by the decisions in his early life, but actually continued to believe in all the plumbery of Marx and Lenin?”

“I think the two can both be true. He was certainly trapped,” said Carey.

“I think he missed lots of things about England, and I think he felt the Communism that he thought he was fighting for and had done those things for had not really delivered. . . . What puzzled me more than if he’d kept the faith or if it was a burnt out faith, was how on earth he’d got away with it. And it seemed to me he’d got away with it because everyone in that world was like him, like us. They were a gang as it were, and it was too easy.”

Many of the interviewees from the film were present in the audience. “A hopeless cause” was how one attendee described the idea of pursuing the Freedom of Information Act to find out exactly what Philby had done:

“It’s a hopeless cause to the extent that the secret service has never – and will never – disclose documents under any kind of legislation or statute as exists today, because they are in the business of keeping secrets. . . . And they have promised individuals today, yesterday and tomorrow that identities of people who have given information and cooperated will never be disclosed. So quite simply, it’s bad for business to make those kinds of disclosures.”

Fraser put it to Carey:

“You still didn’t quite explain to me in the film, though I love the film deeply, how it was he believed in all this shit for all this time. Because intelligent people like Arthur Koestler or Orwell could have set him right very early on, George.”

“Well,” responded Carey:

“Like many communists themselves, I’m sure he became disillusioned. The point is that was the side you reckoned you belonged to. You’d signed up for it. He’d committed himself to it.”

In reference to a comment on Philby being a product of his time Carey expanded:

“How on earth Philby thought his way through the Soviet–Nazi pact, given that the impetus of his spying was anti-fascist, goodness knows. But the general view amongst KGB I talked to, who kind of went through the same thing themselves was, ‘Oh well, our leader knows best,’ and ‘In the end it’s just expediency,’ ‘In the end it’s the way to defeat themselves,’ but I agree it’s a very difficult question to answer.”

“It was a kind of cast,” opined Fraser, “of upper-middle class intellectuals from places like Winchester, Eton et cetera:”

“Surely now, they would be more likely to be making a ton of money in the City with financial instruments. And the ideologies now – wholly unfashionable.”

In terms of the human cost of espionage, the film was unequivocal:

“Spies may have good causes, but few things they ever do is good.”

Upcoming documentaries on BBC Storyville can be found here.

On a stormy night in January 1963, Kim Philby, a charming Englishman with a tendency to stutter, failed to meet his wife at a dinner party in Beirut and instead defected to the Soviet Union. It was the end of a unique career, which at one time had seen this long term double agent rise to become head of the anti-Soviet section of MI6.

Veteran director George Carey captures the extraordinary story of what happened to Philby, from the moment he first came under suspicion in 1951, to his death in Russia just before the end of communism. Several people who knew him well – in London, Beirut and Moscow – talk frankly about his character, and the weaknesses in the British establishment that made his double life possible.

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 70′
Year: 2013

This screening is in partnership with BBC Storyville, the BBC’s international feature documentary strand.

George Carey brought his Storyville documentary Hitler, Stalin and Mr. Jones to the Frontline Club on Friday night, exploring the life and tragic murder of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935).

Jones grew up in Barry, south Wales, attended Cambridge University on a scholarship, became fluent in Russian and German, and showed a flair for networking into circles of power.

In early 1933, he found himself invited to fly with Hitler and Goebbels across Germany. Carey’s narration:

"Gareth’s diary that day makes for real reading:  ‘The Leader is coming […]  out steps a very ordinary looking man […]  surprised me by his smile: quite intelligent, natural.’"

In mid-air Jones jotted:

"If this aeroplane should crash, the whole history of Germany would change."

But it was Jones’ reporting from the USSR that defined his legacy, and which may have resulted in his death.

Stalin had launched his First Five Year Plan, breaking the back of the Soviet peasantry by enforcing collective farms that required all grain to be given to the State.  Massive famine resulted, but few in the West were aware of such events.

Jones sidestepped Soviet officials, wandering into the Ukrainian countryside himself.  In his diary he noted:  

"Everyone with whom I’ve talked, they all have the same story:  ‘there’s no bread.’"

Upon returning, he issued a press release detailing grisly experiences, of bloated stomachs, lying officials, and death on a scale of millions. His writing fell on deaf ears.  

In the midst of the Great Depression, Communism and Fascism competed with war-weary democracies to provide the most compelling vision of the future.  Many Western intellectuals sided with Communism, and Jones’ report threatened to shatter their dream.

Foreign correspondents at The New York Times and other outlets published denials of Jones’ accounts, thus preserving their ties to Moscow.  The Kremlin banned Jones and wrote scathingly to his major benefactor, former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had launched Jones’ career but then promptly cut ties.

Two years later, Jones was captured and killed by bandits while reporting in Inner Mongolia.  Carey’s film hints that a German double-agent for the Kremlin had befriended and subsequently betrayed Jones.

After Jones’ death, Lloyd George remembered his former protegé:

"I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many.  Nothing escaped his observation […]  he had an almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered."

George’s words haunt in relief against the memory of Jones’ death shared by his niece in the film, and of a letter Jones had written his mother years before.  Jones wrote:

"I should consider myself a flabby little coward if ever I gave up the chance of a good, interesting career, for the mere thought of safety."

Yet his niece remembered the family reacting to the news of Jones’ killing:

"We were all miserable.  It was such a sad thing to have happened.  I don’t suppose that any of us could have expressed how we felt, really and truly.  We were just devastated."