POSTHUMOUS
George Blake (1922-2020)
Famed double agent George Blake was a 'brilliant professional', says Putin
George Blake, a famous "mole" within Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence service who spied for the Soviet Union's KGB in the 1950s, has died in Moscow at the age of 98. Putin praised Blake as a "brilliant professional."
Peter Giesen December 26, 2020, 5:07 PM
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George Blake in 1992 in Moscow. AP
George Blake, the famous British double agent, was a boy from Rotterdam, who was in the resistance, was recruited by the British secret service, was captured in the Korean War and defected to the Russians. In 1961 he was unmasked, but in 1966 he escaped from prison and was smuggled to the Soviet Union. Since then he led a quiet life as a colonel of the KGB, with a Russian wife, an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the countryside. In his condolence message, Russian President Putin called him a 'brilliant professional'.
Blake was one of the famous spies of the Cold War, when the intelligence services of the West and the Eastern Bloc fought each other to the death. It is believed that he betrayed at least forty Western agents. At least two of them were executed. He never showed any remorse. To the end of his life he maintained that he had acted out of idealism, because in his opinion communism offered the best chance for a just and peaceful world.
Dutch mother
George Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam in 1922, the son of a Dutch mother and a Spanish-Jewish father who had obtained British nationality because he had fought for Great Britain in the First World War. After the German invasion, Blake joined the resistance. 'Although I was 18, I looked much younger and that made me suitable as a courier', he later said. In 1943 he reached London, via Spain and Gibraltar. There he was recruited by the British secret service.
In 1948 he was sent to South Korea. When the South Korean capital Seoul was captured by the North Koreans in 1950, Blake was arrested. According to his own account, he converted definitively to communism in prison. He was outraged by the American bombing of Korean villages and believed that the West was endangering peace. Another source of inspiration was Karl Marx's Das Kapital, which was sent by the Russian embassy to all Western prisoners in Seoul. 'It seemed to me that it would be better for humanity if the communist system won, if it would put an end to the war,' he said afterwards. He wrote a note to the Soviet embassy and was accepted by a KGB officer.
In 1953, Blake returned to Britain a hero. Two years later, he was sent to Berlin to recruit Soviet officers as a double agent. According to the BBC, he played a role similar to Bill Haydon in John le Carré's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: the spy who seems to get excellent information from his contacts in the East, but in reality sends the information the other way. For example, he told the Russians that the British and Americans had dug a tunnel to listen in on Soviet communications. The Russians left the underground passage untouched for a while, because closing it quickly would give Blake away. Even the Red Army was not informed, so the conversations were probably authentic. The West was none the wiser. "They talked about sex," a British official said in a BBC documentary. Still, the eavesdropping was useful, historian David Stafford argued: the banality of the conversations convinced the British and Americans that the Soviet Union was not about to attack the West.
Blake is believed to have betrayed at least 40 Western agents. At least two of them were reportedly executed. Blake has never shown any remorse. AFP
Escaped from prison
Blake was exposed when a Polish secret agent defected to the West. In 1961, he was sentenced to 42 years in prison. Because many people considered this sentence excessive and inhumane, Blake was helped to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966. Outside, he was met by two anti-nuclear campaigners who smuggled him to East Berlin in a secret compartment in their van. The operation was financed by director Tony Richardson, then the wife of actress Vanessa Redgrave.
From Berlin Blake travelled on to Moscow. There he met Guy Burgess, Donald McLean and Kim Philby, who had fled to the Soviet Union earlier because they were in danger of being exposed as Russian agents. They belonged to the British elite and had studied at Cambridge. Their betrayal caused a huge shock: the finest sons had turned against the fatherland. None of these Britons could settle in communist Moscow. Burgess missed his London clubs and drank himself to death. Philby also took to drink.
Blake, with Dutch, Spanish and Jewish roots, was different. 'To betray you have to belong somewhere. I didn't belong anywhere,' he wrote in his autobiography No Other Choice. 'I've always felt very at home very quickly, no matter what country I was destined to live in.' In an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he said: 'I had the happiest time of my life in Russia. When I lived in the West, the threat of exposure always hung over my life. Here I feel free.'
Blake at a book launch in Moscow in 2001. Reuters
Reunion with son
In England Blake had had a family of three children, in Russia he married a Russian woman with whom he had a son. After the fall of communism, contact with his English children was re-established. 'I went to him hoping that I wouldn't like him,' said son James, a fireman and ex-soldier. Instead, he became very fond of his father. The Blake blended family, English and Russian, regularly met at the paterfamilias' dacha.
In 2012, Simon Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, sought him out. He was nearly blind and still spoke English with a Dutch accent. A "pious traitor," comparable to a modern-day jihadi, he still believed in communism. The fate of the men he had betrayed seemed unconcerning to him. "Blake, a kindly man, seemed to be in denial about this," Kuper wrote. "I left his dacha with the feeling that he would die happy."
