Found in his secret Russian hideaway: George Blake, the British spy who betrayed us
during the Korean War he became committed to work for the Soviets.
He added: “I realised back then that such conflicts are deadly dangerous for the entire humankind and made the most important decision in my life to help protect peace in the world.”
That was the turning point that made Blake’s story one of the most shocking in British military history.
Born in Holland in 1922, his mother was Dutch and his Egyptian father Albert Behar was a British subject.
Schooled in Cairo, he was back in Rotterdam when the Second World War broke out.
He joined the resistance as a courier and arrived in London in 1943.
Changing his name to Blake, he joined the Navy and with his language skills was soon recruited by MI6. After the war he was posted to South Korea to gather intelligence on the North.
When the war broke out in 1950 the Communists stormed Seoul, where Blake was stationed. Over the next three years as a PoW he read Karl Marx and decided to make it his life’s work to help his captors.
With his treachery yet unknown, he was afforded a hero’s welcome when he returned to Britain in 1953 and soon rose to become one of MI6’s most senior and respected men.
But in 1955 he got his big chance. He was sent to Berlin to recruit Russian agents. And once a month he would visit the city’s Soviet-controlled sector to hand over our most-prized secrets. In 1961 MI6 became suspicious and ordered him home. Blake freely admitted his activities and in May that year the Old Bailey heard how he had given the KGB details of hundreds of Western secret agents.
More than 40 are believed to have been killed. He was sentenced to 42 years – at the time the most severe sentence in UK history.
But this was just the start of Blake’s story...
In Wormwood Scrubs, with CND campaigners Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, and petty criminal Sean Bourke, he planned one of the most audacious escapes ever. On October 22, 1966, after the trio’s release, Blake clambered through a broken window and scaled the wall with a rope ladder made of knitting needles.
Blake was then smuggled across the Channel in a camper van.
Back behind the Iron Curtain he became a hero and enjoyed barbecues and Martinis at his dacha with fellow traitors Kim Philby and Donald Maclean.
They are now dead. So are fellow spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. But Blake still works for the “service”. In his last interview, in 2012, he said he had acclimatised well to the country, “like a “foreign car that adapted well to Russian roads”.
He is still a national hero. In 2007 Vladmir Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship and he holds the rank of lieutenant colonel in the former KGB.
Secret police chief Sergei Naryshkin even praised him for “protecting the ideals of humanism and justice”.
But Blake also seems extremely keen on protecting his own privacy and hiding away from the world.
He famously said he never felt British, adding: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.”
He has always said he has no regrets. And to this day, old and sick and with fading eyesight, he still has none.
I never felt British. To betray, you must belong ... I never belonged GEORGE BLAKE ON WHY HE TURNED TRAITOR