George Blake died at the age of 98, he was a Russian spy in the British secret services.

Blake was born in 1922 in Rotterdam, Holland. The BBC recounts his origins: his father was a Spanish Jew who had fought with the British army during World War I and had acquired British citizenship; Blake worked in the Dutch resistance during World War II and then fled to Gibraltar, under British control.

Later he was asked to join intelligence. In an interview with the BBC in 1990, Blake said he estimated that he had betrayed more than 500 Western agents. His downfall came when a Polish intelligence agent, Michael Goleniewski, defected to the West and discovered the details of a Soviet mole in British intelligence. Blake was called back to London, arrested and sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison. He managed to escape in 1966 and escape the UK in a van. After arriving in East Berlin, he spent the rest of his life in Russia,