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George Blake, one of the most famous British double agents of the Cold War era, whose activities completely dismantled the network of British intelligence agents in Eastern Europe, has died.
George Blake died at the age of 98 in Russia. News of his death was announced on Saturday, citing Russian media sources in London.
Blake was born in 1922 as George Behar in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father, Albert Behar, fought in the British Army during World War I and was granted British citizenship after the war.
George Blake to II. he worked for the Dutch resistance during World War II and then fled to London in 1942 on an adventure trip through Belgium, France, Spain and Gibraltar. In Britain, now known as Blake, he joined the British Royal Navy and then, in 1944, became an agent for British External Intelligence, MI6.
In this capacity, he was appointed consul to the British diplomatic mission in Seoul, but his actual task was to gather intelligence on North Korea, China, and the Soviet army movement in the Far East.
After the outbreak of the Korean War, he was captured by the North and He spent three years as a prisoner of war in North Korea. Subsequent reports suggest that the US airstrikes, which have claimed many civilian lives in North Korean settlements, have led him to believe that he is on the wrong side and thus he has joined the Soviet state security organization, the KGB. .
After the Korean War, MI6 sent him to Berlin with the task of recruiting Soviet agents for dual agency activities, but by this time he was already working as a dual agent, briefing his KGB liaison officers in detail on the issues. recognition activities in Great Britain and the United States in Germany.
British intelligence literature is clear Blake attributes his name to the complete destruction of MI6’s network of Eastern European agents in the late 1950s. According to unofficial but uncontested data, George Blake has revealed the identities of at least forty, but probably many more, MI6 agents working in Eastern Europe in nine years to Soviet intelligence.
In an interview with BBC television thirty years ago, Blake himself said that the number of Western agents who provided information to the Soviet and Eastern European secret services could be closer to five hundred.
Blake was left in the shadows after one of the Polish reconnaissance officers, Michael Goleniewski, fled west and revealed Blake’s activities.
George Blake was sentenced to 42 years in prison, but in 1966 he escaped from the infamous Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London and went to the Soviet Union.
In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the former double agent the Order of Merit for Friendship.
George Blake’s name is commonly known as members of the legendary “Five Tooth” known as Cambridge Five.
The Cambridge Five had been the most effective forward stronghold of Soviet reconnaissance in Britain since 1939, but Blake had never been a member of the spy group consisting of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross.
It was not until the early 1950s that there was a notion of British deterrence on the activities of former Cambridge students. At that time, Maclean and Burgess, on Philby’s warning, also fled to Moscow, and in 1963 Philby followed them.
It was not until 1979 that Anthony Blunt was officially identified as the “fourth man”, Cairncross, the fifth died in 1996 without ever having admitted his full membership in the “Cambridge Five”.
With the death of George Blake on Saturday, the last member of Britain’s generation of Cold War-era double agents left the ranks of the living.
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