George Blake, last in line of Cold War spies who betrayed Britain, dies at 98

[rooster59]

George Blake, last in line of Cold War spies who betrayed Britain, dies at 98

By Timothy Heritage and Polina Ivanova

 

FILE PHOTO: Soviet secret agent George Blake gestures as he speaks at a presentation of a book of letters written by other spies from a British prison, in Moscow June 28, 2001/File Photo

 

LONDON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - George Blake, who died in Russia on Saturday at the age of 98, was the last in a line of British spies whose secret work for the Soviet Union humiliated the intelligence establishment when it was discovered at the height of the Cold War.

 

Britain says he exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents across Eastern Europe in the 1950s, some of whom were executed as a result of his treason.

 

His case was among the most notorious of the Cold War, alongside those of a separate ring of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five.

 

Unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in London's Wormwood Scrubs prison. In a classic cloak-and-dagger story, he escaped in 1966 with the help of other inmates and two peace activists, and was smuggled out of Britain in a camper van. He made it through Western Europe undiscovered and crossed the Iron Curtain into East Berlin.

 

He spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union and then Russia, where he was feted as a hero.

 

Reflecting on his life in an interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake said he had believed the world was on the eve of Communism.

 

"It was an ideal which, if it could have been achieved, would have been well worth it," he said.

 

"I thought it could be, and I did what I could to help it, to build such a society. It has not proved possible. But I think it is a noble idea and I think humanity will return to it."

 

In a condolence message published by the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Blake was a professional of particular vitality and courage who made an invaluable contribution to global strategic parity and peace.

 

"The memory of this legendary person will be preserved forever in our hearts," he wrote.

 

BECOMING A COMMITTED COMMUNIST

 

Blake was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on Nov. 11, 1922, to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian Jewish father who was a naturalised Briton.

 

He escaped from the Netherlands in World War Two after joining the Dutch resistance as a courier and reached Britain in January 1943. After joining the British navy, he started working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1944.

 

After the war, Blake served briefly in the German city of Hamburg and studied Russian at Cambridge University before being sent in 1948 to Seoul where he gathered intelligence on Communist North Korea, Communist China and the Soviet Far East.

 

He was captured and imprisoned when North Korean troops took Seoul after the Korean War began in 1950. It was during his time in a North Korean prison that he became a committed Communist, reading the works of Karl Marx and feeling outrage at heavy U.S. bombing of North Korea.

 

After his release in 1953, he returned to Britain and in 1955 was sent by MI6 to Berlin, where he collected information on Soviet spies but also passed secrets to Moscow about British and U.S operations.

 

"I met a Soviet comrade about once a month," he said in a 2012 interview published by Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

 

Blake described how, for these meetings, he had travelled to the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin on a rail link joining different parts of the divided city. His contact would be waiting for him in a car and they would go to a safe house.

 

"I handed over films and we chatted. Sometimes we had a glass of Tsimlyansk champagne (Soviet sparkling wine)."

 

Blake was eventually exposed by a Polish defector and brought home to Britain, where he was sentenced and jailed.

 

When he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, he left behind his wife, Gillian, and three children. After Gillian divorced him, Blake married a Soviet woman, Ida, with whom he had a son, Misha. He worked at a foreign affairs institute before retiring with her to a dacha, or country house, outside Moscow.

 

SIPPING MARTINIS WITH PHILBY

 

Blake, who went by the Russian name Georgy Ivanovich, was awarded a medal by Putin in 2007 and held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the former KGB security service, from which he received a pension.

 

"These are the happiest years of my life, and the most peaceful," Blake said in the 2012 interview marking his 90th birthday. By then, he said, his eyesight was failing and he was "virtually blind". He did not voice regret about his past.

 

"Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural," he said, describing himself as happy and lucky.

 

Though he worked separately from the Cambridge Five - a spy ring of former Cambridge students who passed information to the Soviet Union - Blake said that during his retirement he got to know two of them, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.

 

He reminisced about drinking martinis, the preferred cocktail of fictitious British spy James Bond, with Philby but said he was closer in spirit to Maclean.

 

Maclean died in Russia in 1983, and Philby in 1988. Of the rest of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess died in Russia in 1963, and Anthony Blunt in London in 1983.

 

John Cairncross, the last to be publicly identified by investigative journalists and former Soviet intelligence officers, died in England in 1995.

 

(Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan; Writing by Timothy Heritage; Editing by Pravin Char)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2020-12-27

 

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[sanuk711]

If he had held on for another 2 years---would he have got a telegram from the Queen.............

[Tug]

Good riddance scum bag!

[Kelsall]

4 hours ago, Tug said:

Good riddance scum bag!

Suprising, coming from you.

[Bluespunk]

6 hours ago, rooster59 said:

 

"Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural," he said, describing himself as happy and lucky.

Unlike those agents who were executed after you betrayed their identities. 
 

 

Edited December 27, 2020 by Bluespunk

[ivor bigun]

only the good die young ,<deleted> lasts a long time

[robblok]

4 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:

Unlike those agents who were executed after you betrayed their identities. 
 

 

True, but isnt that what spies doe betray people. I mean those who do it for our side are heroes those who do it for the other side are thugs ?

 

He was just working for the other side our side tried to do the same its just how the world works. I would condemn him if our side had clean hands. Don't you think we used double agents too that cost people on their side their lives ?

 

Not that i admire this guy or anything but its just he was an enemy combatant from a war in the past. Not sure if i should hold grudges against them.

[Bluespunk]

29 minutes ago, robblok said:

True, but isnt that what spies doe betray people. I mean those who do it for our side are heroes those who do it for the other side are thugs ?

 

He was just working for the other side our side tried to do the same its just how the world works. I would condemn him if our side had clean hands. Don't you think we used double agents too that cost people on their side their lives ?

 

Not that i admire this guy or anything but its just he was an enemy combatant from a war in the past. Not sure if i should hold grudges against them.

Blake betrayed people he knew would face execution, while in all probability all he risked if caught was gaol.

 

His actions are unforgivable. 

Edited December 27, 2020 by Bluespunk

[Justgrazing]

Treacherous dog should have swung from a rope on the gallows .. 

[trainman34014]

And Oxbridge continues to supply Enemy Agents thanks to Leftist Tutors constantly growing in number in our Universities !

[blazes]

51 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:

Blake betrayed people he knew would face execution, while in all probability all he risked if caught was gaol.

 

His actions are unforgivable. 

 

This is pure deflection.  You fail utterly to answer the legitimate points that Robblok was making. 

To repeat (if you failed to understand Robblok) : isn't this what spies do, are expected to do?????

[Chomper Higgot]

1 hour ago, robblok said:

True, but isnt that what spies doe betray people. I mean those who do it for our side are heroes those who do it for the other side are thugs ?

 

He was just working for the other side our side tried to do the same its just how the world works. I would condemn him if our side had clean hands. Don't you think we used double agents too that cost people on their side their lives ?

 

Not that i admire this guy or anything but its just he was an enemy combatant from a war in the past. Not sure if i should hold grudges against them.

A case can be made that espionage, information gathering by other means, is as necessary a part of keeping peace as it is of making war.

 

Having zero information on what an adversary is up to is a recipe for that most dangerous fear, the fear of the unknown.

 

Espionage nothing new, it is attested in the very earliest extant written histories of international relationships and it will always continue.

....

 

George Blake is dead, a man held as a hero by an adversary of his own country.

 

What a disgraceful epithet.

[Chomper Higgot]

53 minutes ago, trainman34014 said:

And Oxbridge continues to supply Enemy Agents thanks to Leftist Tutors constantly growing in number in our Universities !

Something you have any experience of?

[Nout]

His work and that of other Soviet fellow travelers and anti western activists is alive and kicking in current modern leftists values from the feminist movement to BLM. They and similar  groups are his heritage. I was in London the night he escaped and remember the sirens and flashing blue lights around the stations. Pancras and Kings X I think.

[Chomper Higgot]

2 minutes ago, Nout said:

His work and that of other Soviet fellow travelers and anti western activists is alive and kicking in current modern leftists values from the feminist movement to BLM. They and similar  groups are his heritage. I was in London the night he escaped and remember the sirens and flashing blue lights around the stations. Pancras and Kings X I think.

Steady on.

 

 

[Nout]

15 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Something you have any experience of?

We all do. Just turn on a TV, listen to a radio or read a newspaper: eco extremists, anti freedom of speech cancellers, trans activists, feminists, so called ' anti racist groups..they all get fed and nurtured by academia. Such 'useful idiots' are more valuable than spies and agents in attacking our western democracies.

[Bangyai]

23 hours ago, rooster59 said:

Blake said he had believed the world was on the eve of Communism.

 

"It was an ideal which, if it could have been achieved, would have been well worth it,"

 

Oh yes. It is wonderful. Just ask anybody living in North Korea or ask dissidents in Communist China.

 

A failed political ideology because it cannot stand up to competition or a free vote ( to name just one of its failings )

[Sujo]

4 minutes ago, Nout said:

We all do. Just turn on a TV, listen to a radio or read a newspaper: eco extremists, anti freedom of speech cancellers, trans activists, feminists, so called ' anti racist groups..they all get fed and nurtured by academia. Such 'useful idiots' are more valuable than spies and agents in attacking our western democracies.

So you agree that those who do not share their view are the uneducated.

[Nout]

1 hour ago, robblok said:

True, but isnt that what spies doe betray people. I mean those who do it for our side are heroes those who do it for the other side are thugs ?

 

He was just working for the other side our side tried to do the same its just how the world works. I would condemn him if our side had clean hands. Don't you think we used double agents too that cost people on their side their lives ?

 

Not that i admire this guy or anything but its just he was an enemy combatant from a war in the past. Not sure if i should hold grudges against them.

He was working for a murderous monster and murderous system. Stalin's Soviet Union with its heritage of millions murdered, imprisoned, displaced and disappeared. Western agents were fighting for a different and more noble cause. Democracy, the right to self determination and a host of other positive decencies and fundamental freedoms. Blake and his ilk were no better than Nazi sympathisers.

[Nout]

15 minutes ago, Sujo said:

So you agree that those who do not share their view are the uneducated.

I don't recall saying that. Please don't put words in my mouth or try to twist what I say in defense of a treacherous monster.

[Tug]

3 hours ago, Kelsall said:

Suprising, coming from you.

Why on earth would you say that?the dude was the enemy got lots of our friends killed I don’t like traitors 

[Proboscis]

6 hours ago, trainman34014 said:

And Oxbridge continues to supply Enemy Agents thanks to Leftist Tutors constantly growing in number in our Universities !

And who exactly do these "Enemy Agents" turned by leftist tutors spy for? Presumably leftist regimes? Such as Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea? Hahahahaha. Perhaps it is the way you tell them but I have not had such a laugh this whole Christmas until you came out with that one!

[lineofentry]

We poisoned him in the nick of time

[blazes]

50 minutes ago, Proboscis said:

And who exactly do these "Enemy Agents" turned by leftist tutors spy for?

 

China.  Ask Mr Swalwell.  Sorry if it's confusing....

[Nout]

5 hours ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Comparing Blake to the proprietors of the Daily Mail, members of the British Royal Family and aristocracy is a bit harsh.

Please don't put words in my mouth. I wasnt comparing the traitor Blake to the DM or the Royal Family. You are just trolling and misrepresenting me.

[Nout]

57 minutes ago, Proboscis said:

And who exactly do these "Enemy Agents" turned by leftist tutors spy for? Presumably leftist regimes? Such as Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea? Hahahahaha. Perhaps it is the way you tell them but I have not had such a laugh this whole Christmas until you came out with that one!

The enemy agents are the useful idiots who infest the liberal left and who have formed a loose alliance of woke activists who seek to destroy our democracy, stifle free speech, undermine family values, degrade our history and at the same time hypocritically  ignore the calumny of totalitarian socialist dictatorships. When you stop laughing you might want to acquaint yourself with the mechanisms our historic enemies and currently Purina and the CCP use to weaken us.

[tgw]

1 minute ago, Nout said:

The enemy agents are the useful idiots who infest the liberal left and who have formed a loose alliance of woke activists who seek to destroy our democracy, stifle free speech, undermine family values, degrade our history and at the same time hypocritically  ignore the calumny of totalitarian socialist dictatorships. When you stop laughing you might want to acquaint yourself with the mechanisms our historic enemies and currently Purina and the CCP use to weaken us.

 

well, it looks like in UK the agents infested the right and advanced Russia's agenda by facilitating brexit.

[7by7]

I'm not defending Blake; but have to wonder if those expressing their hatred of him have the same opprobrium for defectors to our side; such as those on this List of KGB defectors.

 

Were they not just as much traitors to their country as Blake?

[7by7]

15 minutes ago, Nout said:

Please don't put words in my mouth. I wasnt comparing the traitor Blake to the DM or the Royal Family. You are just trolling and misrepresenting me.

 

You did say 

6 hours ago, Nout said:

Blake and his ilk were no better than Nazi sympathisers.

 

Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s included those mentioned by @Chomper Higgot. Not all the Royal Family, but some.

[tgw]

17 minutes ago, 7by7 said:

I'm not defending Blake; but have to wonder if those expressing their hatred of him have the same opprobrium for defectors to our side; such as those on this List of KGB defectors.

 

Were they not just as much traitors to their country as Blake?

 

well, obviously not, because our side is the "good" side and the other side is the "evil" side.

 

you can also look at the independence votes in Catalonia and Crimea to see how these were handled in the West.

 

Catalonia: evil egoist separatists ! democratic vote invalidated, democratically elected representatives criminally charged and imprisoned.

Crimea: 80% of the population is of Russian nationality and had Ukrainian citizenship and voted to get away from Ukraine, but the election was obviously rigged, all Western countries crying foul !!

 

there is no objectivity in international matters.

 

Western democratic values such as people's right to self-determination as enshrined in the UN's charter only exist when they can be used against political enemies.

 

every block is pushing its pawns over the chessboard, same before the cold war. Now China and India are playing too.

 

of course it's better if our own pawns win more territory than the others.

Edited December 27, 2020 by tgw