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Notorious British traitor and Cold War double agent George Blake died in Russia at the age of 98.
Blake’s undercover work for the Soviet Union repeatedly undermined British intelligence and resulted in the deaths of dozens of Western operatives.
As an MI6 mole, he exposed the identities of hundreds of agents working in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, many of whom were later executed on Moscow’s orders.
When he was finally unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1961, he was able to breathe easy knowing that he would not face such capital punishment. Instead, he was sentenced to 42 years in London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
But he escaped five years later with the help of two peace activists and was smuggled out of Britain in a caravan.
He spent the rest of his life in Russia, where he remains, to this day, celebrated as a hero.
Announcing his death on Boxing Day, Sergey Ivanov, a spokesman for the SVR foreign intelligence agency, said: “The bitter news has arrived: the legendary George Blake is gone. He died of old age, his heart stopped. “
Yet here his crimes, and the deaths they led to, remain a source of official revulsion.
When Tony Blair was called upon in the early 1990s to allow him to visit the UK to see his grandchildren, the then Prime Minister told supporters of the spy that if he traveled to the UK or any other country from Western Europe, I would. be arrested immediately.
Blake, who was born in Rotterdam in 1922, joined the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1944 after fleeing the country during World War II.
After the war, he studied Russian at Cambridge University before being sent to Seoul in 1948, where he gathered information on Communist North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Far East.
But he turned traitor after being captured, imprisoned and indoctrinated by North Korean troops in 1950.
Upon his release, MI6 sent him to divided Berlin, where he began sharing Western secrets with Russian officials.
“I would meet with a Soviet comrade about once a month,” he said in a 2012 interview. “I delivered films and we chatted. Sometimes we had a glass of Tsimlyansk champagne. “
Perhaps his biggest blow was reporting the construction of a secret underground tunnel in the scissors-split German city, stretching from the American sector to the Soviet zone, allowing Western agents to tap underground cables and eavesdrop on Russian communications.
Why did he do it? Because communism, he said in a 1991 interview, was “an ideal that, if it could have been achieved, would have been worthwhile.”
He added: “I thought it might 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. “
Only in 1961 were his crimes discovered.
A Polish defector revealed that there were moles in the heart of British intelligence, but although the clues led to Blake, the idea was deemed so far-fetched by his MI6 bosses that they rejected it. Just six months later, when the wife of one of his Berlin drinking buddies also pointed to him as a double agent, the hoax ring was undone and he was arrested.
When he escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, he left behind his wife, Gillian, and three children.
He married a Soviet woman, Ida, with whom he had a son, Misha; took a Russian name Georgy Ivanovich; and worked at an institute for foreign affairs before retirement.
He was honored by Vladimir Putin in 2007 and held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the former KGB.
Fundamentally, for the rest of his days, he maintained that what he had done was ultimately the right thing to do. “Looking back on my life,” he said in an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, “everything seems logical and natural.”
