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died in Moscow, the city where he had lived for more than half a century, just days after John Le Carr. As if an existential thread linked the writer who best told the world of spies in the Cold War and the mole who inspired him together to others. He was 98 years old George Blake, the British secret agent who for nine years deceived MI6 by playing a double game with the Soviet Union and leading toarrest of at least 42 eastern informants working for western intelligence.
His disappearance was announced by the SVR, the external intelligence of the Russian Federation heir to the KGB, which defines him as a legendary agent and recalls Blake’s sincere love for our country. as well Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences, greeting Blake like a brilliant professional and a man of remarkable courage who has made an invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic equality and preserving peace.
With George Blake is the latest member of a notorious British spy dynasty, who secretly worked for the Kremlin and whose treachery shook and humiliated the Western intelligence world at the height of the Cold War. But unlike the famous Cambridge Five, the five alumni of the prestigious university who spent their weapons and luggage in the service of the communist regime in Moscow, Blake, also a Cambridge student, he was never part of their world or the British establishment. With two of them, however, Kim Philby and Donald MacLean, who also fled to Moscow after being discovered, he had become a friend and frequent visitor over the years.
Exposed in 1961, Blake was tried and sentenced to 42 years in prison. one for each agent betrayed, according to the vulgar of the time. But in 1966 he was the protagonist of a sensational break from the London prison of Wormwood Scrubs, thanks to the help of some pacifist activists, for a short time his cellmates. The Escape Plan, funded by director Tony Richardson, It also included a secret hideout, where Blake stayed for a few months before he was able to pass the Iron Curtain hidden in a wooden box and make the final leap to Moscow. leaving behind a wife and three children. From that moment, in his words of 2017, Russia became his second homeland.
Blake was born in 1922 in the Netherlands, his father was a Spanish Jew who had fought in the English army during the Great War and had become a British citizen. At the age of 18, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, he joined the Dutch resistance and in the middle of World War II he joined the voluntary reserve of the Royal Navy, where his polyglot training immediately marked him as an ideal candidate for work. In intelligence: you begin by translating the messages of the resistance to the allied commandos from Dutch, your mother tongue. After the conflict, after spying on the Soviets in East Germany and learning Russian in Cambridge, Blake was sent to South Korea and was also taken prisoner by the North Koreans when the war broke out. It was in the Far East that his earlier sympathies for communism took concrete form: Faced with the American bombardment of the civilian population, I decided to cooperate voluntarily and without compensation with Soviet intelligence.. As a double agent, Blake passed important secrets to Moscow, especially a western plan to eavesdrop on Soviet communications by digging a tunnel under East Berlin. But he has always denied that any of the men he betrayed had been executed: this was not discussed with me at the trial in London and he had made it a condition for the moment of the passage to the USSR, he once said at a press conference .
There was a ambiguous frankness in the clumsy obstinacy of this spymaster, always dressed in tweed with bow tie instead of a tie, a bon vivant that he welcomed into his apartment. For him, communism was almost a metaphysical entity: anyone who believes in the Hereafter can give me an example of what life will be like there: you will only describe a communist society, he told me in an interview in 1992 in Moscow, on the occasion of the launch of the book in which he told the novel of his life. His analysis of the collapse of the USSR and the failure of the Soviet experiment did not blame the model, but the men who were destined to run it: For communism to triumph, people of the highest moral integrity, capable of putting the general interests first. place. His conclusion was inflexible and consoling: those of us who live in this part of the 20th century are not mature enough to be able to build a communist society. Requiem for a spy who went into the cold.
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