The Happy Traitor

By: Simon Kuper

Narrated by: Kevin Spink

Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Those people who were betrayed were not innocent people. They were no better nor worse than I am. It's all part of the intelligence world. If the man who turned me in came to my house today, I'd invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea.

George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a senior officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least-known double agents, and remained unrepentant.

In 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court.

On the surface, Blake was a charming, intelligent and engaging man and, most importantly, a seemingly committed patriot. Underneath, a ruthlessly efficient mole and key player in the infamous 'Berlin Tunnel' operation. This illuminating biography tracks Blake from humble beginnings as a teenage courier for the Dutch underground during the Second World War, to the sensational prison-break from Wormwood Scrubs that inspired Hitchcock to write screenplay.

Through a combination of personal interviews, research and unique access to Stasi records, journalist Simon Kuper unravels who Blake truly was, what he was capable of and why he did it.

©2021 Simon Kuper (P)2021 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative." (John Le Carré, author of Agent Running in the Field)

"A deeply human read, wonderfully written, on the foibles of a fascinating, flawed, treacherous and sort of likeable character." (Philippe Sands) 

Almost perfect

I chose this book because i like the author. His books on futbol are great. This is an interesting book about spies and intelligence.

My biggest nitpick has to do with the narrator. I don’t know if it’s his style or perhaps the editing, but at some point, the narrator takes an inordinately long break before completing the sentence. It happens quite a bit and distracts from the story

Beautifully Written - Not Well Narrated

This is one that I would have preferred to read myself. The narrator is both monotonous and dramatically off key with his pronunciation - "barista" for barrister, really?

More importantly, however, this is a sensitive and beautifully written biography.

Great story

Narrator is strange, eventually I got used to his fragmented reading, even thought that perhaps it imitate the style of the spies' coded reports.