HE IS the traitorous master-spy who betrayed scores of British agents to the KGB in one of the greatest Soviet coups of the Cold War.
As a mole inside MI6, George Blake is known to have passed thousands of topsecret documents to Moscow but the fates of the people he exposed have been shrouded for decades in rumour and half-truth.
Now, for the first time, the specific punishments suffered by individual victims of Blake’s duplicity can be revealed.
Research shows that a group of six MI6 agents whom Blake identified to the KGB were imprisoned for up to 17 years inside East Germany, serving time in jails notorious for torture and psychological intimidation of inmates.
It is also thought one may have been taken to Moscow and executed.
The details were uncovered by George Carey, a British filmmaker, who trawled through archives in Berlin, including those kept by the feared East German secret police, the Stasi, which worked in tandem with the KGB.
The findings are presented in a new film by Mr Carey called Masterspy of Moscow.
Blake, 92, has always said his Russian handlers agreed not to take punitive measures against the informants whose names he supplied.
But Mr Carey managed to identify six that the Stasi had classed as “dangerous agents”. They were listed individually in the files but their names were blacked out.
He even tracked down the only one of the six still alive, but even half a century after her imprisonment she did not want to recall her ordeal.
“I could tell in her eyes that this was something she didn’t want to remember, she didn’t want to talk about,” he said. “It must have been four dread- ful years in the Stasi prison.” The filmmaker knows the names of all six victims but legally can only identify two. Four cannot be named under a German law that prevents their identification until 120 years after their birth. The agents Blake exposed were:
● Hans Moehring, an official on the East German planning commission, who was released in 1976 after the West German government paid a ransom. There was media speculation suggesting he was a victim of Blake, but no evidence was offered publicly.
The Stasi files seen by Mr Carey prove definitively that Blake exposed Moehring, who was born in 1917 but publicly named in the 1970s. He had been arrested in 1959 and held for 324 days in Hohenschoenhausen before being sentenced to life imprisonment for “serious espionage”. He served his sentence in Bautzen II, another Stasi jail. ● A colonel in the National People’s Army who does not appear in government records. Bernd-Rainer Barth, a historian who helped research the film, believes the officer may have been sent to Moscow and possibly executed there.
●An employee in the Potsdam building committee, born in 1927. The only woman on the list, she was arrested in 1961, sentenced to five years’ hard labour and released in 1964 on probation.
● Otto Georgi, a stenographer who had worked for German governments since 1918. He was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to life imprisonment. East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered his release in 1964. He then lived in East Berlin until his death.
● A planner in the ministry for mechanical engineering. He was arrested in 1960 and sentenced to 15 years in jail, later reduced to 10 years. He was freed in October 1966. ●A senior official at the ministry for foreign trade was arrested in 1959 and held in Hohenschoenhausen. He was sentenced to life for espionage. He was freed in 1969.
In a written statement for Blake’s defence team at the Old Bailey in 1961, he said he had extracted an assurance from his KGB handlers that every MI6 informant he exposed “should not be arrested and the only use the Russians should make of this information was to protect themselves from the activities of these agents”.
While the KGB may have lied to their spy, his claim now appears untenable and historians are likely to re-examine theories that other agents suffered because of Blake.
After his duplicity was discovered in 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in jail but he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966. He defected to the Soviet Union and lives near Moscow.
Roger Hermiston, author of The Greatest Traitor, a biography of the spy, said of Mr Carey’s research: “For the first time we have clear, definitive evidence of what happened to some of his victims.”
Blake grew up in the Netherlands and his mother was Dutch but he inherited British citizenship from his father, a Jew with roots in Cairo and Istanbul, and arrived in London in 1943 after Holland was occupied by the Nazis.
He was recruited by British security and sent to learn Russian at Cambridge. During a posting to Seoul under diplomatic cover during the Korean War in 1950 he was captured by soldiers from the North and held captive for three years. It was during this time that he was won over to com- munism and offered his services as a double agent to their Soviet patrons. Over the next decade, he photographed and leaked thousands of pages of MI6 documents to the KGB.
The elderly Blake has given few interviews to British journalists in the past 25 years, but Mr Carey met him briefly at his home. Almost blind but apparently in good health for his age, the spy gave little away.
“He’s a friendly, charming person,” said Mr Carey. “Clearly one part of him is a very nice guy. All spies are contradictory, they lead double lives. I think these lives gradually become more separated, living constantly in two worlds with your brain split. And in the end the two halves stop talking to each other because it’s the only way of surviving.” Masterspy of Moscow – George Blake, will be shown at the Frontline Club, London at 7pm tomorrow and on BBC Four on March 23 at 9pm