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British-Soviet Cold War double agent George Blake has died at the age of 98, according to the Russian state news agency RIA.
Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence reportedly confirmed the news, with a quoted spokesperson saying: “We received bitter news: the legendary George Blake passed away.”
Blake was the latest in a line of spies whose work for the Soviet Union humiliated Britain’s intelligence establishment when it was discovered at the height of the Cold War.
Britain says it exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, some of whom were executed as a result.
He was the most notorious double agent along with a separate ring known as the Cambridge Five.
Blake escaped from London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison in 1966 with the help of two peace activists and other prisoners.
He was smuggled out of the country in a caravan, leaving behind his wife and three children, just a few years after being sentenced to 42 years in jail.
Blake had the Russian name Georgy Ivanovich and held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the former KGB security service.
President Putin awarded him a medal in 2007 and he never regretted his actions.
Born in the Netherlands in 1922, Blake escaped the country after joining the Dutch resistance as a courier and arrived in the UK in 1943.
He began working for MI6 in 1944 and was posted to Seoul in South Korea four years later, where he gathered intelligence on North Korea, China, and the Soviet Far East.
It was his time in a North Korean prison, after being captured in 1950, that saw him embrace communism. Blake read the works of Karl Marx and developed a sense of outrage at the American bombing of the country.
He returned to the UK in 1955 after being released and was sent to Berlin by MI6 to gather information on Soviet spies.
However, he was also passing secrets to Moscow about British and American operations.
“I met with a Soviet comrade about once a month,” he said in a 2012 interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
“I delivered movies and we chatted. Sometimes we had a glass of Tsimlyansk champagne (Soviet sparkling wine),” Blake said.
His betrayal was eventually exposed by a Polish defector and he was brought home to Britain to stand trial.
The notable escape after a few years behind bars led to a new life in the Soviet Union.
His wife Gillian divorced him and Blake married a Russian woman, Ida, with whom he had a son. Blake worked at a foreign affairs institute before the couple retired to a country house on the outskirts of Moscow.
