Will Trump Take His Treason to His Grave?
Blake - Blunt - Burgess - Mclean - Philby - Cairncross - Trump
Treason is very much a matter of habit. ~ George Smiley in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
George Blake and Other Misfit Traitors
Notorious British double agent George Blake has died at 98. He led a storied and colorful life. Though of roughly the same generation as the Cambridge Five (Burgess, Philby, Blunt, Mclean, Cairncross), he did not share the same establishmentarian social class, but did share the same professed motivation for betraying their country: ideology, a peculiar vulnerability of the British upper class. Americans (notably Ames, Hanssen, Walker, Pollard) mostly do it for cold hard cash. In this category, I include Donald Trump.
Born in Holland of a Dutch mother and a Sephardic Jewish father who became a British citizen, and having spent part of his childhood in Egypt, the multilingual Blake had the right stuff to become a spy. He assisted the Dutch resistance during the German occupation in WWII and escaped to Britain, where, following training for submarine duty, he was inducted into the SIS. After the war, MI6 took Blake on to recruit Soviet agents in Germany. He subsequently served in Lebanon, Austria, Italy and Korea. When Kim Il-sung's forces took Seoul, Blake was interned along with other UK citizens and held for three years. It was during this time that he offered his services to Soviet intelligence.
"It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake," a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, said in 2007. In his nine years as a double agent, Blake revealed countless covert ops as well as over 40 British agents to Moscow, some of whom were executed. "There was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact," Blake confessed at his sequestered trial in 1961 after he had been exposed by a Polish defector. Blake passed more than 4,720 pages of classified documents to the Soviets, according to the CIA.
His derring-do adventures did not end after being sentenced to an unprecedented 42 years imprisonment. He managed to escape after five years and reach Russia, where he lived the quiet life of a KGB retiree, replete with the title "colonel," the Order of Lenin, a pension, apartment and a Volga automobile, socializing frequently with his fellow British turncoats. Vladimir Putin praised him for making "a truly important contribution" for Russia.
Blake attributed his switching sides to American bombing of North Korea and "I felt that it would be better for humanity if the communist system prevailed."
This all strikes me as lame and unconvincing. I can't help but think Blake was either suborned by the Soviets some time in the '40s or he went all Manchurian candidate during his three-year internment by the DPRK. He was neither a starry-eyed, naive intellectual - like the Cambridge Five, nor had he a history of leftist agitation; nor was he out for money. Whatever truly motivated him, Blake took it to his grave - all too late in coming.
Will Trump Take the Secrets of His Treason to His Grave?
Watching Donald Trump's frenzied antics to try to clutch to power is like watching a condemned man frantically doing everything he can to avoid the firing squad at dawn. Yes, he fears Biden's DOJ and New York's latter-day Untouchables team - Manhattan DA Cy Vance and AG Letitia James. And for lots of good reasons. There are those decades of financial shenanigans that are now known to all. And don't forget his sons' pre-presidency revelations:
"In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Don Jr. said in 2008. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
"Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia," Eric told a journalist in 2014.
Reams have been written on the Russia-Trump connection. Read Seth Hettena's Trump/Russia: A Definitive History for some eye-opening revelations. And here is a thorough compilation of the scores of contacts between Trump's associates and Russian officials and oligarchs.
Read also, my previous articles and posts - links below. I've never shared pundits' descriptions of Trump's servility toward Moscow as "puzzling," "odd," "mysterious." On the contrary, I called out Trump for being a Russian intel asset before he entered the White House. And, in contrast to those who charge him with merely being an "unwitting asset" or "useful idiot," I've maintained all along that Trump is witting and purposeful in his fealty to Moscow. His refusal to take action on Russian bounties for dead American soldiers and his silence on Moscow's most recent massive hacking attack are just the latest examples.
I agree with intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, who told MSNBC's Joy Reid, "At some point, he was co-opted by Vladimir Putin. And that means he bought into and embraced the dictatorial ideology that was done by a spymaster of the KGB." Except I believe Trump was suborned by Russian intelligence pre-Putin - likely some time during his many visits to Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s. And forget the salacious stuff that came out in the very flawed "Steele Dossier." As the saying goes, "Follow the money." Russian intel used Russian oligarchs to channel lots of cash, largely via Deutsche Bank, to save Trump's bankrupt ass. And for this, he sold what passes for his soul to Dr. Faustov.
Will it all be revealed once The Beast turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of noon on January 20, 2021? It will take somewhat longer than that, but all will be revealed over the ensuing months and years. This will be hastened should the FBI's classified investigation info on Trump and his campaign's links to Moscow surface publicly.
So, who is the worst kind of traitor? Moneygrubbing mediocrities like Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and other national security officials who lost no sleep pocketing cash, resulting in a bunch of executions? Or the self-deluded ideologues like the Cambridge Five and George Blake who persuaded themselves that communist leaders' genocide, torture and gulags were merely the eggs broken to make a neat omelette?
Donald Trump clearly falls into the former category. A meretricious, low-intellect, no-class schlump who would sell his children for a Trump Tower in Lower Slobovia. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of "a fifth- or sixth-grader." Former White House chief of staff John Kelly called him "an idiot." Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to him "a f------- moron." Former economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump was "dumb as shit," and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster muttered he was a "dope." And the character testimony goes on.
Think what you will of the Cambridge Five and George Blake, they were super-smart and possessed class, a result of their breeding. What enabled them to take to their graves their innermost secrets of what led them to betray their country and any later regrets, was, simply, brains, a commodity Trump has never had. He's too stupid to manage to hide his many crimes unto mortality. And unless he also defects to Russia, enterprising investigative journalists, legal sleuths and congressional inquisitors will reveal all in time and hold him accountable. Call it rendez-vous at dawn.
See also:
A Call on President Trump to Pardon All Traitors, Including Himself
Trump is a Russian Asset & Here's Why
What's Behind the GOP's Disinformation Machine?
The Return of McCarthyism - This time the intelligence community is the target