George Blake

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George Blake (born Georg Behar, November 11, 1922) is a former British spy who was actually a double agent for the Soviets.

Biography

Born in Rotterdam of mixed parentage; his mother was Dutch and his father an Egyptian who was a naturalized British citizen. Blake was active in the anti-Nazi Dutch resistance and eventually worked for the SOE. After World War II he was recruited by MI6 and worked on establishing agent networks in Soviet occupied Eastern Europe. He was sent to serve in the Korean War, and was in Seoul when it was overrun by the North Koreans. During three years as a prisoner of the North Koreans, he converted to Marxism - suggested by some as a result of "brainwashing", although he insists his conversion was voluntary. After his release in 1953, he was sent by MI6 to work as a double agent in Berlin, where he was actually a "triple agent"; he betrayed details of hundreds of MI6 agents to the Soviets.

In 1959 he was exposed by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski. In 1961 after an in camera trial, he was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker of Waddington; this sentence was said by newspapers to represent one year for each of the agents killed when he betrayed them, although this claim appears to be an invention. It was the longest sentence ever handed down by a British court, until terrorist Nezar Hindawi was sentenced to 45 years for the attempted bombing of an El Al jet.

However just five years later he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison with the help of Pat Pottle, Michael Randle and Sean Bourke, three members of the Committee of 100 whom he had met in Egypt two years before.

Blake fled to the USSR. He divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, and started a new life. In 1990 he published his autobiography No Other Choice. The book's British publisher had paid him about £60,000 before the government intervened to stop him profiting from sales.

In an interview with NBC News in 1991, Blake said he regretted the deaths of the agents he had betrayed.

As of 2004, he is still living in Moscow, Russia on a KGB pension, and remains a committed Marxist-Leninist. Blake denied being a traitor, insisting that he had never felt British: "To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged."

References

• The First Directorate by Oleg Kalugin. St. Martins' Press, 1994.

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