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British secret service employee George Blake, famous as a double agent in the Cold War, has died. He died at the age of 98, the Russian foreign intelligence service SWR announced to the state agency Tass on Saturday in Moscow.
Blake was born in Rotterdam in 1922 and was active in the resistance in the Netherlands during World War II. After the end of the war, he was drafted into the British secret service and transferred to South Korea as a spy.
After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he was taken prisoner and offered his services to the Soviet Union. He later justified this step with the US bombings against the civilian population. He revealed the identities of hundreds of agents to the Russian secret service KGB. It also revealed the existence of a secret tunnel in Berlin from which the Soviet Union was spied on.
Blake was exposed as a “mole” by a Polish double agent. In 1961, a British court sentenced him to 42 years in prison. Five years later he escaped from jail. He fled to Moscow via Berlin and has lived in Russia ever since. According to the Russian newspaper “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”, Blake recently suffered from hypertension and malaise.
In Moscow, Blake was revered as a hero. The head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, praised Blake as a “brilliant professional with extraordinary character and courage.” With his hard work, he had made an invaluable contribution to “maintaining peace in the world.”
