TRAITOR BLAKE DEAD
Cold War double agent confessed to betraying hundreds of British spies
SOVIET HERO Blake’s jail pic
NOTORIOUS double agent George Blake, dubbed Britain’s greatest traitor, has died in Russia aged 98.
His treachery is believed to have cost the lives of more than 40 MI6 agents.
Over nine years, Blake handed over information to his Soviet handlers that led to the betrayal of hundreds of spies.
He switched allegiances after seeing civilians killed by the US in the Korean War and said later: “I don’t know what I handed over because it was so much.”
Just last week he was made “patriarch” of Russian foreign intelligence.
A spokesman for the SVR foreign intelligence agency – formerly the KGB – said: “The bitter news has come – the legendary George Blake is gone. He died of old age, his heart stopped.”
Blake spent the last 54 years in Russia after escaping from London’s Wormwood Scrubs jail in 1966 while serving a 42-year sentence.
He never showed remorse and did not regard himself as a traitor, saying he never “felt” British: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.”
Blake remained a communist, saying: “I think it is never wrong to give your life to a noble ideal. And to a noble experiment, even if it doesn’t succeed.”
Two years ago The Mirror tracked him down to his stunning dacha, a pine forest home outside Moscow where lived with second wife Ida, but he refused to speak. In Russia Blake was feted as a hero.
He was made a KGB colonel and given a pension, the dacha, a flat in Moscow and the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin. He kept working into his 90s.
Like many intellectuals of his time, such as friends Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, he hated Britain’s social system. Like character Bill Haydon in John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Blake passed British intelligence to the Soviets while pretending the flow was vice versa.
Blake switched sides after seeing civilians bombed by “the US military machine”. He said: “It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people.”
A Polish secret service officer who defected to the West later outed Blake as a Soviet mole. At a trial, Blake pleaded guilty to informing the Soviets.
He fled jail using a ladder made of knitting needles and was smuggled to the Soviet border, going on to enjoy his “happiest years” behind the Iron Curtain.
In 2012, he said he was like a “foreign car that adapted well to Russian roads”.
Dutch-born Blake joined MI6 after a spell in the Navy. He deserted his wife and three children when he fled prison.