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Former British spy and double agent for the Soviet Union George Blake died at the age of 98.
The RIA news agency reported that Blake was killed in Russia, citing the country’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. “We got bitter news: the legendary George Blake passed away,” he said.
Blake was the latest in a line of British spies who operated secretly for the Soviet Union, exposing the identities of hundreds of Western agents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and humiliating the intelligence system when his work was discovered in the heyday. of the cold war.
Some of the agents Blake exposed were executed as a result of his treason, making him one of the most notorious double agents of the day, along with the ring of double agents known as the Cambridge Five.
When Blake’s cover was discovered in 1961, he was sentenced to 42 years in prison at London’s Wormwood Scrubs. He escaped in 1966 with the help of other prisoners and two activists, and was smuggled out of the UK in a caravan.
After crossing the Iron Curtain into undiscovered East Berlin, he spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union, now Russia, where he was honored as a hero.
In an interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake said that he had believed that communism was “an ideal that, if it could have been achieved, would have been worthwhile. I thought it could be, and I did what I could to help him, to build such a society. It has not been possible. But I think it’s a noble idea and I think humanity will return to it. “
Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1922 to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian Jewish father who was a naturalized British, he escaped from the Netherlands in World War II and arrived in Britain in January 1943. After joining the British navy, began working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1944.
After the war, Blake read Russian at Cambridge University before being sent to Seoul in 1948, where he gathered intelligence on Communist North Korea, China, and the Soviet Far East.
He was captured and imprisoned when North Korean troops took Seoul after the Korean War began in 1950, becoming a committed communist during his incarceration.
After his release in 1953 he returned to the UK, and in 1955 MI6 sent him to Berlin, where he collected information on Soviet spies, but also relayed secrets to Moscow about British and American operations.
Blake, who called himself Georgy Ivanovich in Russian, received a medal from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007 and received a pension from the former KGB security service.
“These are the happiest and most peaceful years of my life,” Blake said in the 2012 interview marking his 90th birthday.
He did not express regret for his past. “Looking back at my life, everything seems logical and natural,” he said, describing himself as happy and lucky.
