George Blake, a former British spy who passed information to the Soviet Union, died at the age of 98. He was unveiled in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in a London prison, but managed to escape to Russia, where he spent the rest of his life.
“George Blake, a legendary member of the intelligence services, left today. He sincerely loved our country and admired the achievements of our people during World War II,” TASS quoted Sergei Ivanov, the head of SVR’s Russian civilian intelligence, as saying.
Blake was born in 1922 in Rotterdam under the name George Behar. As a minor, he worked in the anti-Nazi resistance and later moved to England. In 1944 he began working in the Dutch section of British intelligence MI6. After the war, on behalf of Britain, he gathered information about the Russian Far East in Seoul, but when a conflict broke out on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s, he was captured and sent to a labor camp. In captivity, he allegedly realized that “the future of the world is connected with the Soviet Union and communism” and offered his services to Soviet intelligence.
The KGB provided hundreds of names for secret agents and told them about the existence of a tunnel in East Berlin, which the West used to spy.
After his betrayal, he was sentenced to 42 years in prison in Britain in 1961, but in October 1966 he managed to escape from London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison and then reach Moscow.
Blake is the author of No Other Choice, and The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake – and Why by Michael Randle and Pat Pottle was published about his escape. In Russia, Blake was considered a hero, in 2007 he received the Order of Friendship from President Vladimir Putin. He never regretted his actions, the AFP agency recalled.
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