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The life of George Blake, who died at the age of 98, could also be a fluid raw material for a best-selling John le Carré novel. After the Kim Philbys, known as Cambridge Five, an elite group of skulls spies, he was the last British double agent to be ousted during the Cold War, but perhaps his active 9-year career was the deepest and most humiliating blow for the British. external intelligence, MI6, in the 1950s. Nothing shows the esteem of the opposing side better than the commemoration in the Kremlin of his death, in which President Putin wrote:
The memory of this legendary person will live in our hearts forever.
But was George Blake the spy, little boy?
He was born in Rotterdam in 1922 to a Dutch mother and a British Egyptian Jewish father. A II. he joined the Dutch resistance in World War I, but had to flee, and in January 1943 he successfully reached England, where he joined the British Army, and a year later he worked for MI6, the Secret Service. After the war, he studied Russian at Cambridge, also served briefly in Hamburg, and was later sent to Seoul. His mission was to collect information on North Korea, China, and the Soviet Far East.
After the Korean War broke out in 1950 and North Korea captured Seoul, he was arrested and imprisoned. There he became a devout communist because, as he later said, he was outraged by the devastating American bombings against the North Koreans. He was released in 1953, returned to London and continued to work in intelligence. He was already in Berlin in 1955 and gathered information on Soviet spies and, of course, regularly sent data to Moscow on planned British and American actions in the area.
He returned to London in 1959 and was sent to Lebanon a year later. He was called home in 1961 and arrested, because a converted Polish intelligence officer, Michał Goleniewski, threw it at the British. He admitted to his nearly 10 years of espionage, which was rewarded with an unprecedented 42-year prison sentence.
His fellow inmates escaped him from jail
Yet over the years, he felt so good with many in prison that in 1966, with the help of his cellmates and two peace activists, he escaped from London’s infamous Wormwood Scrubs Prison. He was smuggled out of England in a caravan and then on an adventure trip, but he entered East Berlin, where he went to the Soviet embassy. He was immediately transferred to Moscow, where he was granted Soviet citizenship.
He left his wife and three children in England, and then when his wife filed for divorce and divorced, he remarried and married a Soviet woman from whom another child was born. Then Blake worked in one of the fund institutions of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and retired to his country house in Moscow. He never denied his Marxist-Leninist views, he confirmed it even in an interview he had with the BBC on his 90th birthday. Denying being a traitor, he said that he could not be a traitor as he never considered himself truly British.
In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the former double agent the Order of Merit, somewhat cynically.
(Cover image: George Blake speaks at a book launch in Moscow on June 28, 2001. Photo: Alexander Natruskin / Reuters)
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