WHAT’S THE STORY?
MASTER spy George Blake has died at the age of 98 in Moscow.
For nine years during the Cold War he spied for the Soviet Union from inside the British intelligence services. He was caught in 1961 and jailed for 42 years, the longest sentence for a crime other than murder ever handed down in the UK. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 to live out his days in Moscow as a Soviet hero.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described him as an “outstanding professional of special courage and life endurance”.
“Throughout the years of his hard and strenuous efforts he made a truly invaluable contribution to ensuring the strategic parity and the preservation of peace on the planet.
“Our hearts will always cherish the warm memory of this legendary man.”
That his treachery led directly to the death of at least 40 MI6 agents means no-one other than Putin is paying him any tributes. This story is about the extraordinary link between Blake and the Scottish criminal Paddy Meehan.
WHO WAS PADDY MEEHAN?
A CONVICTED bank robber, safe-cracker and career criminal, Patrick Connolly Meehan is best known as the victim of Scotland’s most infamous miscarriage of justice to date.
He was wrongly convicted of the murder of Rachel Ross in Ayr in 1969. Bruce Millan, former Scottish secretary, said in 1974: “The house of Mr. Abraham Ross and his wife was broken into in the early hours of Sunday 6th July 1969. Mr. Ross and his wife were treated roughly by the intruders and tied up. They told the thieves where there was money in the house – a considerable amount of money.
“After the thieves had left, Mr and Mrs Ross were unable to attract the attention of anyone during the whole of Sunday and they were not freed until they were found by the cleaning woman when she arrived at the house on Monday morning. Mrs Ross, who was an elderly lady of 71 years of age, died on Wednesday, July 9, as a result of her experiences.”
Meehan denied the crime from the outset but admitted he had been in Ayr that night. Glasgow hoodlum James Griffiths was an associate of Meehan and he was soon being sought by the police in connection with the robbery and murder. But Griffiths had sworn never to be taken alive. He was killed in a shootout with the police on July 15 after a gun battle in the streets of Glasgow in which a number of people were injured, one of them fatally.
Meehan was convicted of being the other intruder and was jailed for life. A long campaign to prove his innocence ended when lawyer Joe Beltrami was able to publish the confession to the murder which he had obtained from William Tank McGuinness, himself murdered in a gangland war.
Meehan was given a royal pardon and more than £50,000 compensation for the six years he spent in jail. He gave up crime and died of cancer in 1994.
WHO WAS BLAKE?
BORN George Behar in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1922, he attended Downing College, at Cambridge University to study Russian. Serving in the wartime Royal Navy he was recruited by MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and went on to serve in post-war Berlin. He was responsible for recruiting agents for MI6 in eastern Europe but was recruited by the Soviets after converting to communism in 1953 and became their double agent.
He was caught in 1961 when a Polish spy defected to Britain. His 42-year sentence saw him moved to Wormwood Scrubs from where he escaped in October, 1966 with the help of Irish convict Sean Bourke and two anti-nuclear campaigners – Michael Randle and Pat Pottle.
SO WHAT WAS THE MEEHAN CONNECTION?
MEEHAN was always convinced that he had been “fitted up” by the police and intelligence services for the murder of Rachel Ross.
In his memoirs he went public and claimed that he had gone to East Germany where he was put in touch with the KGB by the East German secret service the Stasi.
He gave them detailed information on how they could take advantage of the lack of security in Britain’s Victorian prisons such as Wormwood Scrubs. Meehan knew what he was talking about, he had escaped from Nottingham Prison in 1963 and fled to East Germany where he was the “guest” of the Stasi and KGB until December, 1964.
He returned to the UK and told the security services that Blake would be “sprung” but they dismissed his tale as a fantasy. But it wasn’t, and maybe Meehan paid for his knowledge with his freedom.
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