I come from rather an international, or in other words, a cosmopolitan background. My father was a Spanish Jew who came from the Middle East or the Near East. He fought in the British Army during the First World War and was very seriously wounded.

He received high decorations, the Military Cross and the French. Immediately after the war he was in Holland, where he met my mother. Now my mother came from a Dutch middle-class, Protestant background.

My father had a business in Holland which wasn't very successful, and he died in 1934, when I was twelve, from the results of his wounds during the war, and I got a Dutch Protestant upbringing. Dutch is my native tongue. After the death of my father, my mother was left in rather strange circumstances.

My father had a sister in Cairo, who was a wife of a very rich banker. They said they would take me and look after my education, give me a good education, and that would relieve my mother as I also had two sisters.

At the age of thirteen I went to Cairo, and lived with my uncle and aunt, in a very large house, and there I met my two cousins, who were ten years older than I was. Both of them had very decided left wing views; they didn't want to succeed their father in a banking business.

Especially the younger of my two cousins who had a great influence on me. He was, by that time, a Communist and he talked a lot with me. Of course his views had a great influence on me, but I resisted them, because I was a very religious boy.

It was my intention to become a minister in the Dutch Reform Church, but later on, in life, things changed. Many of his views acted as a time bomb, and the results under the affect of events shaped my further views.

At the end of the third day, Shergold was fretting. There were few questions remaining. 'After another half hour,' Shergold would later say, 'Blake might have been free.' But the pressure of eight years' deceit was weakening his resistance. White had correctly guessed that Blake, an emotional rather than a professional traitor, would not realise that SIS was powerless without a confession.

Shergold's question, just before the session concluded, bore a hint of desperation: 'We know that you were working for the Soviets, but we understand why. While you were their prisoner in Korea, you were tortured and made to confess that you were a British intelligence officer. From then on you were blackmailed and had no choice but to collaborate with them.' Blake was indignant. 'No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me!' he spluttered, losing his self-control. 'I approached the Soviets and offered my services to them of my own accord.' He wanted everyone to know, he recalls, 'that I acted out of conviction, out of a belief in communism, and not under duress or for financial gain.'

Unrestrained, Blake launched into an uninterrupted monologue confessing his treachery. 'They listened to me in amazed silence,' recalled Blake. At one stage, the traitor stopped. 'Am I boring you?'

Much of the effort made by Macmillan and his government to blanket the horrific details of Blake's treachery was to conceal from the British public the inefficiency which had allowed such a spy to operate for so long inside the Secret Service. The main objective, however, was to conceal the facts from the US Congress, after the Fuchs and Maclean cases had already done so much damage to the reputation of Britain as a safe ally with whom to share secrets.

One of the main things which to me was a disappointment was that I believed that a new man was born here (Russia), the Soviet man who was different from other people, who had been fashioned and formed by the communist system, by communist education, who was different, a higher form of humanity. I realised very quickly that this was not so. They were just ordinary people like everyone else and that the same human passions, and greed and ambitions, which governed the lives of most people also governed their lives.

The communist ideal is too high to achieve, just as the Christian ideal is too high for people to achieve, and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end.

I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a communist society where people really were equal.