The Greatest Traitor by Roger Hermiston Page A

– notwithstanding the role he had performed in the Resistance, and despite all the connections he had made along his escape route – and he was extremely disappointed.
    Onto the scene stepped Commander Douglas William Child, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer and a family friend of the Beharsfrom Holland days. He was to play a vital part in George’s life during the war years and beyond.
    Child was an unlikely recruit to British intelligence, simply because of his humble origins. A fisherman’s son from Deal, in Kent, he left home at fifteen to join the Merchant Navy, eventually winning his master’s certificate in his twenties. In the early 1930s, as the worldwide Depression took hold, he nonetheless managed to make a decent living as the skipper of private yachts, transporting the wealthy owners up and down the Rhine and along the Dutch waterways. In 1936, as the threat of war loomed larger, he decided to join the Royal Navy Volunteer Supplementary Reserve, but his obvious potential as an intelligence officer, together with his experience of Germany and the Low Countries, saw him installed in SIS’s station at The Hague at the beginning of the war. His cover was that of a lieutenant commander in the Naval Attaché’s office.
    When the invasion came Child stayed on, but was captured and badly wounded when German parachutists attacked his car. He had a leg amputated, and after his recovery he was imprisoned along with other British diplomats in a hotel in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany. There, he remained for more than two years before an exchange deal was struck to bring him and his colleagues back to England. Various German diplomats had been stranded in different parts of the British Empire at the start of the war and then interned; they were returned to Berlin, and Child and his colleagues to London.
    When George met up with his old friend in the spring of 1943, Child was back at Broadway working in the P8 (Dutch Section) of SIS. Whatever his experience and his connections, he was not yet able to engineer a Secret Service position for George. Instead, he suggested that he should join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and qualify to be an officer, just as he himself had done seven years earlier. George duly did so, successfully passing written examinations and then impressing in an interview. Not long afterwards he received a letter welcominghim into the Royal Navy, and informing him that in ‘due course’ he would be given instructions on where to report for duty.
    While he waited, through connections his mother had with the Government-in-exile, he found a temporary clerical post at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, based at Arlington House, St James’s. But he didn’t relish the life of a commuting civil servant, and soon realised he was ill-suited to a regular nine-to-five job.
    In the autumn the exiled Behar family decided to change their name by deed poll. ‘It was my mother’s decision – I took no part in the consultations as I was away from home by then,’ George recalled. ‘She lived with an old lady whose name was Drake, and had thoughts of taking that name. But she eventually decided it would be better to take the fresh name, Blake.’
    By then, George had received his navy call-up papers and had reported to HMS Collingwood – not a ship but the Navy’s principal shore-based training centre. For a fit, adaptable man, the ten weeks of mainly physical work were tiring but not over-demanding. From there, it was on to the Firth of Forth in Rosyth, Scotland, for a more gruelling six weeks aboard the cruiser Diomede , the aim being to give the new recruits as realistic an introduction to life at sea as possible.
    Finally, in March, the enlisted men made the fifteen-mile journey to their last training institution, HMS King Alfred in Hove. Named after the ninth-century King of Wessex – considered the ‘father’ of the Royal Navy as the first monarch to use ships in the defence