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George Blake, who died in Russia on Saturday at the age of 98, was the latest in a line of British spies whose secret work for the Soviet Union humiliated the intelligence establishment when he was discovered at the height of the Cold War.
Britain says it exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, some of whom were executed as a result of their treason.
His case was one of the most notorious of the Cold War, along with that of a separate circle of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five.
Unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison. In a classic swashbuckling tale, he escaped in 1966 with the help of other inmates and two peace activists, and was smuggled out of Britain in a caravan. He passed through Western Europe without being discovered and crossed the Iron Curtain into East Berlin.
He spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union and then in Russia, where he was celebrated as a hero.
Reflecting on his life in an interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake said he had believed that the world was on the eve of communism.
“It was an ideal that, if it could have been achieved, it would have been worth it,” he said.
“I thought it could be, and I did what I could to help him, to build such a society. It hasn’t been possible. But I think it’s a noble idea and I think humanity will return to it.”
BECOME A COMMITTED COMMUNIST
Blake was born in Rotterdam, Holland, on November 11, 1922, to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian Jewish father who was a naturalized British.
He escaped from the Netherlands in WWII after joining the Dutch resistance as a courier and arrived in Britain in January 1943. After joining the British navy, he began working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. , in 1944.
After the war, Blake briefly served in the German city of Hamburg and studied Russian at Cambridge University before being sent to Seoul in 1948, where he gathered intelligence on Communist North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Far East.
He was captured and imprisoned when North Korean troops took Seoul after the Korean War began in 1950. It was during his stay in a North Korean prison that he became a committed communist, reading the works of Karl Marx and feeling outraged by the heavy American bombardment of North Korea.
After his release in 1953, he returned to Britain and in 1955 was sent by MI6 to Berlin, where he collected information on Soviet spies, but also passed secrets to Moscow about British and American operations. “I met with a Soviet comrade about once a month,” he said in a 2012 interview published by the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Blake described how, for these meetings, he had traveled to the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin on a rail link linking different parts of the divided city. Your contact would be waiting for you in a car and they would go to a safe house.
“I delivered movies and we chatted. Sometimes we had a glass of Tsimlyansk champagne (Soviet sparkling wine).”
Blake was eventually exposed by a Polish defector and brought home to Britain, where he was sentenced and imprisoned.
When he escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs, he left behind his wife, Gillian, and three children. After Gillian divorced him, Blake married a Soviet woman, Ida, with whom he had a son, Misha. He worked at a foreign affairs institute before retiring with her to a country house, or country house, on the outskirts of Moscow.
DRINKING MARTINIS WITH PHILBY
Blake, who called himself Georgy Ivanovich in Russian, received a medal from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007 and held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the former KGB security service, from which he received a pension.
“These are the happiest years of my life and the most peaceful,” Blake said in the 2012 interview marking his 90th birthday. By then, he said, his sight was failing and he was “virtually blind.” He did not regret his past.
“Looking back at my life, everything seems logical and natural,” he said, describing himself as happy and lucky.
Although he worked separately from the Cambridge Five, a spy ring of former Cambridge students who relayed information to the Soviet Union, Blake said that during his retirement he met two of them, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.
He recalled drinking martinis, the fictional British spy James Bond’s favorite cocktail, with Philby, but said he was closer in spirit to Maclean.
Maclean died in Russia in 1983 and Philby in 1988. Of the rest of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess died in Russia in 1963 and Anthony Blunt in London in 1983.
John Cairncross, the last to be publicly identified by investigative journalists and former Soviet intelligence officers, died in England in 1995.
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