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George Blake, a well-known MI6 (UK Foreign Secret Service) double agent, who passed a lot of confidential information to the Soviet Union during the 1950s, revealing to the Russians the identities of hundreds of Western spies operating in Europe, died . Oriental. Blake became one of the best known secret agents of those years, because he did enormous damage to British intelligence operations abroad, demonstrating the ability of the KGB – the feared Soviet secret services – to penetrate the British state. Blake died at the age of 98, in Russia.
Blake was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on November 11, 1922, to a Dutch mother and a Spanish Jewish father who had naturalized themselves British and fought with the United Kingdom during World War I. During World War II, Blake was part of the Dutch resistance before moving to Gibraltar and in 1944 he was asked to join the British secret services. In the following years he worked for a time in the German city of Hamburg, studied Russian at Cambridge University, and in 1948 he was sent to Seoul, South Korea, to collect information on the communist regimes of North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union. . He was captured by the North Koreans during the Korean War in 1950 and began to approach communist ideas during the period of incarceration.
Blake was discovered collaborating with the Russian government in 1961, when a Polish secret agent, Michael Goleniewski, defected and told British intelligence many secrets about Soviet intelligence, including Blake’s double deal.
Blake was sentenced to 42 years in prison by a London court. In 1966, however, he managed to escape from prison with the help of other inmates and two peace activists and was dragged out of the UK hidden in a caravan. He managed to cross a piece of Europe without being discovered, until he reached East Berlin. He spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union (later Russia), where in 2007 he received a medal from President Vladimir Putin for his services, and where he was celebrated as a hero.
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In an interview with BBC In 1990, Blake said that during the Cold War, due to his espionage activity for the Soviet Union, the coverage of around 500 Western secret agents was ruined. In another interview with Reuters From 1991, he said that he believed in the system of communism: “I thought it could happen, and I did everything possible to make it possible, to build such a society. It has not been possible. But I think it’s a noble idea and he thought humanity would consider it again. In 2012, Blake said, referring to his life in Russia: “These were the best years of my life and the most peaceful.”
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