Notorious spy who betrayed the West
George Blake, who has died aged 98, was the most damaging spy ever known to have penetrated Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Blake was arrested in April 1961 following a tip-off from a Polish defector, and charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Act. At his Old Bailey trial the next month, at which he anticipated being sentenced to rather less than the maximum sentence of 14 years because of his confession and guilty plea, he received unexpected and unprecedented consecutive sentences amounting to 42 years.
Born George Behar in Rotterdam in 1922, the son of Albert Behar, a Jewish man born in Turkey, and Catherine, a Dutch Protestant, he was brought up by a wealthy uncle in Cairo, where he was educated at the English School.
In 1938, he returned to the Netherlands to attend high school, but after the Nazi invasion in 1940 he was interned.
He escaped and joined an underground resistance organisation, the Ordedienst, with whom he established a reputation as a daring patriot.
In July 1942, calling himselfmax de Vries, Behar was smuggled down an MI9 escape line to Spain, where he was interned briefly at the Modelo prison in Barcelona. Upon his release he reached Gibraltar and was flown to England, where he joined his mother and two younger sisters, who had changed their surname to Blake.
He took British nationality and volunteered for the Royal Navy, and after brief service on coastalmine-sweepers was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant RNVR. Being fluent in French, German and Dutch, and given his knowledge of life in occupied Europe, he was soon transferred to A-2, the SIS’S Dutch section. The appropriate checks were made into his background and he was accepted into the organisation.
It was while working at the SIS’S wartime headquarters that he fell in love. The object of his affections failed to reciprocate, and her father, a senior government minister, gave him the bad news, with what Blake interpreted as an anti-semitic slur.
Several of his colleagues, who knew of his anguish at this awkward encounter, attributed his subsequent behaviour to the bitterness he felt at his rejection.
Thereafter Blake appeared to dedicate himself to his SIS career, and, having completed the Russian course at Cambridge in 1947, he was sent to Seoul the following year to monitor Soviet activities in the Far East.
In South Korea the corruption and poverty increased his nascent anti-americanism, which was further increased by witnessing American Flying Fortresses bomb villages during the Korean War. ‘‘It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting what seemed to me a defenceless people.’’
In June 1950, as the capital was seized by the invading Communists, he was taken into custody with the rest of the British Legation
George Blake
Coldwar double agent b November 11, 1922 d December 26, 2020
His SIS colleagues considered his treachery more damaging than Kim Philby’s.
staff and remained a prisoner of the North Koreans until his release in Moscow in April 1953. During his captivity he took lessons in Marxist theory from a fellow British prisoner and by his own account came to view Marxism as preserving the ethical basis of Christianity shorn of the supernatural.
In 1955, having married Gillian Allan, whose father was also an SIS officer, Blake began a four-year posting as a case officer running agents against Eastern Bloc targets to the SIS’S Berlin station, then on the front line of Cold War espionage. During this period the KGB allowed him to run one of its controlled double agents.
In September 1960 he was sent to study Arabic at the Foreign Office’s Middle East College outside Beirut. Six months later, he was instructed to return to London to discuss a promotion, but in fact he had been identified as a Soviet mole by an anonymous CIA source who supplied information from inside both the Polish SB and the KGB.
Harold Shergold, one of MI6’S most formidable officers who was at the time running the great Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky, took the lead in the interrogation.
Blake admitted having betrayed every British and US agent he had ever learnt of, and named every one of his SIS colleagues.
He required treatment in the prison infirmary to recover from the shock of his record prison term – it was reported his 42-year sentence comprised a year for every agent betrayed.
In 1962, a pair of fellow prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs, peace protesters Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, dismayed at the length of his sentence, agreed to help him escape.
On a rainy night in October 1966, financed by the film director Tony Richardson, Blake used a rope ladder to climb over the perimeter wall, to be driven away in a getaway car, and given sanctuary by a local clergyman, John Papworth. Shortly before Christmas he was concealed in a secret compartment in a van and driven by Randle to East Berlin, where he was reunited with one of his Soviet handlers.
In Moscow, he worked at the Foreign Affairs Institute, and was introduced to Kim Philby, with whom he became a close friend until they fell out over the sale of some family photos. After his divorce from Gillian, he remarried and had a third son with Ida, his Russian wife.
As a dedicated hard-line Communist, was dismayed by Gorbachev’s reforms. In his autobiography, No Other Choice, he insisted his treachery had been ideologically motivated, having witnessed Allied atrocities during the Korean War. His SIS colleagues considered his treachery more damaging than Philby’s because of the critical period over which he passed secrets to Moscow, and the fact individual agents had died as a direct consequence of his betrayals.
Blake argued none of the agents he named perished because he had reached an agreement with the KGB that guaranteed their liveswould be saved.
Marcus Wolf, head of East German foreign intelligence, recorded that Blake ‘‘suffered terribly under his reputation as a callous agent and wanted to be regarded as an idealist . . . He refused to accept he really was the traitor his country considered him to be.’’