Prisoners Listened To Police Radio

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31208, 4 November 1966, Page 13

Prisoners Listened To Police Radio

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) LONDON, November 3. Prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs gaol monitored police radio calls with short-wave radios a former prisoner said yesterday.

Speaking on the 8.8. C. Home Service radio news, the former prisoner, who was not named, said he had been involved in a plot to free the spy, George Blake, which had

failed. Blake escaped last week. The former prisoner said he had been paid to draw a map of streets round the prison for the earlier escape attempt, but secretly reported it to the prison governor. He said the smuggling of money and letters into Wormwood Scrubs was easy and prisoners were given shortwave radios when they asked for them.

“They could do anything with them. Some prisoners monitored police radio calls,” he said. The earlier escape plan had been to get Blake out of England within two hours. The convict was identified in the radio interview only as “Mr X.” He said that he did not know the plan concerned Blake until another convict was caught attempting to break out the same window from which the spy dropped to the gaol yard. The man told Mr X he had planned to arrange a break for Blake on Christmas night, 1964. Once over the wall the spy would be “out of the country within two hours.”

Mr X said about the escape: “I was not at all surprised. I was expecting it any time.”