Post-war traitor’s Dutch resistance service remembered

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 25

Post-war traitor’s Dutch resistance service remembered

The British spy George Blake’s adoption of communism was completely out of character in the eyes of a Christchurch man, - Lou van Eerten, who knew Blake as a young man in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Blake has just given a long interview in Moscow, in which he says he became a convert to communism by reading Marx, Engels and Lenin while training as a spy for British Intelligence. Mr van Eerton remembers Blake as a youth with obvious close contacts to the British Secret Service. He was deeply religious and hoped to become a minister of religion. At the same time he was daring, flamboyant and a strong supporter of freedom. George Blake, whose name seemed so solidly English as to make his treachery even worse, was really a Dutchman with Spanish-Jewish antecedents. His father, Albert Behar, was born in Cairo, the son of a wealthy Spanish-Jewish banker, when Egypt was a British “protectorate.” Albert Behar served with the British Army in Flanders in World War I and was gassed. In London after the war he met and married his Dutch wife Catherine, and they settled in her home town of Rotterdam. George was born there in 1922. His father retained his British nationality, and when George escaped to Britain during the war he anglicised his name to Blake. As a boy in the Netherlands, George was sent to a select school at The Hague, but after his father’s death he was sent' to Cairo to attend the English School there. He lived with his father’s relatives, and perfected his English, returning to high school in Rotterdam in 1938. Lou van Eerten was 21 when he was conscripted into the Dutch Army, and he saw just five days active service in May, 1940, before the Germans over-ran the country, following their bombardment of Rotterdam. “Very shortly after, we were approached by the Dutch Army Command to establish a resistance movement to work closely

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GARRY ARTHUR

with the Allies,” he says. He recalls that George Behar’s family decided to flee to Britain, but that George chose to stay behind. His mother and two sisters left with the Dutch royal family and the Dutch Government on two British destroyers. Mr van Eerten, who comes from a very old Dutch landowning family, says George Behar’s mother was of the old Dutch gentry, and the two families became acquainted when George developed a romance with Mr van Eerten’s sister, Lous. A neighbour, who was in the Dutch Nazi Party, denounced young George Behar to the Gestapo as a "Britisher,” and he was sent to an internment camp as an. enemy alien. He managed to escape and took refuge with his uncle in Warnsveld. “But the Gestapo were looking for him, so he moved to Hummelow, where he made contact with our resistance movement,” says Mr van Eerten.

In love with younger sister

“My late younger brother Emile was in contact with him, and they were very close friends,” says Mr van Eerten. “They kept very much to themselves in a separate organisation, but we finally joined forces. “George did some sabotage for about a year, cutting telephone wires, slashing tyres on military vehicles — minor things, and not to the liking of the British secret service.”

Lou van Eerten met George Behar through his brother, and was very much taken by him. “He had a very pleasant personality.” he says. “He was obviously seeking friendship with people who were on a similar wave length. People from the older families.

“He fell in love with my younger sister, and he was a real charmer. My mother was very much taken with him.” Things began to go badly wrong in the resistance movement because of German infiltration, and in June, 1942, the British Special Operations Executive (5.0. E. called George Behar to Britain. He managed to escape through the Netherlands, Belgium and France, disguised as a Trappist monk, and eventually took the underground escape route across the Pyrenees to Spain and on to England. “We lost track of him after that,” says Mr van Eerten. “He and my sister were still very much in love, and they managed to make contact in 1945 in London. She was in the W.A.A.F. But they drifted apart.” Mr van Eerten says that it was completely out of character for the George Behar he knew to become a spy and a double agent. “My father never believed it,” he says. “George was an idealist. He didn’t do it for the money, and he didn’t betray the tradition of his family. He was very anti-Nazi, but there was no indication that he was interested

in communism.” The young George Behar had a great sense of melodrama, his resistance friend remembers. “He wanted to become a minister of religion, and had been trained by Pastor Goedhart, whom he met after escaping from the detention camp. He knew the scriptures by heart.” He remembers young George Behar as having a ruthless streak. He was a very daring young man, and kept very cool. Although he was only 18, he was the leader of about two dozen resistance members, some of whom were twice his age. “One day in Rotterdam, he was distributing illegal pamphlets in the main street. He had a packet of pamphlets under his raincoat, and suddenly they were all blown across the street by the wind. There was an S.S. man standing near him, but George did not run away; he just began to pick up the papers, and amazingly the S.S. man helped him, without looking to see what the pamphlets were about. That was George.” When he reached London, Behar became Blake and joined the Royal Navy, but with his fluency in four languages and his resistance experience he quickly moved to Naval Intelligence as an interpreter, and then to the S.O.E.’s Dutch section where he briefed and despatched secret agents to the Netherlands. He was trained himself as a secret agent, and sent to Cambridge University after the war to study Russian. He joined the Foreign Office and was posted to Seoul as vice-consul, and was captured when the North Koreans invaded the south in June, 1950. After his release, three years later, he was attached to M. 1.6, the British secret intelligence service. His posting was to Berlin, where he become a double agent, possibly with the knowledge and connivance of his employers, working for both the British and the Russian secret services. In 1960, because of the confession of another double agent, Blake was recalled from Beirut, where he had been sent to add Arabic to his linguistic reper-

toire, and arrested and charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act. He made a detailed confession and pleaded guilty — but was sentenced to 42 years in jail, the longest sentence ever handed down in a British court. He had confessed that for nine years he had passed on to the Russians every official document of any importance which came into his hands.

In 1966 he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs Prison with the help of an Irishman, Sean Bourke, who had earlier been a fellow inmate. Bourke, who followed Blake to Russia, returned to Ireland and wrote a book about it called “The Springing of George Blake.” Those who knew George Blake as young George Behar were incredulous at the news of his treachery. “We couldn’t believe that he could serve such a regime as the Stalinist Russian regime of that time,” van Eerten says. “Stalin was as bad as Hitler. George was a, great lover of freedom.” He thinks George Blake might

have a schizophrenic personality. “He was a remarkable man, and a very likeable man. He would not have done what he did for financial gain, but from a conviction that the world would serve better under a communist regime than a capitalist regime.” One theory is that George Blake was “brainwashed” by the Communists when he was captured in Korea in 1950 and imprisoned with other diplomats and officials for three years. But Mr van Eerten does not believe that, any more than some of Blake’s fellow prisoners did. “He was too strong a character,” says Mr van Eerten. “He was brought up in the old family tradition, with a sense of destiny — that he had to do something for the world. For him it was communism.” One who claimed to 'know when Blake had his change of heart is his wife, Gillian. She told a British newspaper that “George’s actual conversion ...

came in November, 1951 (in Korea). Like all conversions it was a sudden one ... He had

come to believe that the fundamental aspects of communism were-akin to Christian principles and that communism was the accomplishment of Christ’s ethical teaching ...” She said that from that moment on, “he was utterly dedicated to the new ideal.”

New Zealanders among dead

Lou van Eerten’s father was a doctor, and was imprisoned by the Germans for refusing to sterilise Jews. In fact, the family was harbouring a Jewish man wanted by the Germans. In 1940 during the Battle of Britain, an R.A.F. Whitley aircraft was shot down over Hummelow, and Dr van Eerten was called in by the Germans to write death certificates for the crew, all of whom were killed. Three of them were New Zealanders, and after the war

Mrs van Eerten tried to get in touch with the relatives. Relatives of the dead pilot, Neville Andrew, of Ellesmere, visited the Netherlands and later sponsored Lou van Eerten to emigrate to New Zealand with his wife. He worked with Air New Zealand at Harewood until his retirement in 1982. "George Blake’s mother helped me write an English letter to apply for New Zealand,” he recalls. In 1948 Mr van Eerten’s brother made x contact with George Blake and asked him if he too would like to be sponsored to go to New Zealand or Australia. Blake declined, saying that he found Europe too exciting. Years later, in 1966, when Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, the British Secret Service got in touch with Mr van Eerten’s brother, who was by then a burgomaster in the central Netherlands. He told the British that he had not seen Blake, but that if he did he would arrest him.