His main mission, while he waited for the war, was to recruit spies (especially among sailors) in Vladivostok, on the Soviet east coast. The city was only 450 miles north-east of Seoul. The problem was that both the North Korean and Soviet borders were in the way. 'That was a fairly naive idea [of SIS],' Blake complained later. 'They simply had looked at the map and thought, "What's the closest place to Vladivostok where we can open an intelligence agency?"'