George Blake, notorious Cold War double agent, dies at 98

eorge Blake, a British intelligence official who betrayed closely guarded secrets to the Soviets and was among the most damaging traitors of the old War, then made a daring escape from a ondon prison in and lived out his days as a national hero in Moscow, has died at .

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, known as S9R, announced his death on Dec. but provided no further details. Russian 3resident 9ladimir 3utin praised Blake as a “brilliant professional” and a man of “remarkable courage.”

1ews accounts from the s described Blake as a “Super Spy,” and perhaps one secret to his successful treachery was that he hid in plain sight. $s one of his friends, a Salvation $rmy e[ecutive, told a reporter at the time, Blake resembled “a typically blasp bowler-hatted, rolled umbrella government official.”

In fact, he was the last high-profile survivor of a string of British turncoats who spied for the Soviet Union during the s and s, a badge of dishonor that included the ambridge Four $nthony Blunt, uy Burgess, Donald Maclean and .im 3hilby.

Dick White, a former chief of British intelligence, once said Blake wrought the most damage. The information he turned over reputedly led to the deaths of scores of highly placed Western agents, including Robert Bialek, a top-ranking (ast erman police official.

e also betrayed to his Soviet handlers a joint mission between British and U.S. intelligence known as Operation old. The goal was to dig a tunnel underneath (ast Berlin to tap Soviet phone lines in the early s. Blake sabotaged the multimillion-dollar operation before a shovel had ever struck erman soil.

“There was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact,” Blake confessed at his closed-door trial in , news accounts reported at the time. $ccording to a I$ report, Blake passed more than , pages of classified documents to the Soviets.

Blake spent nearly a decade leading a double life before he was arrested, tried and sentenced to years in prison for espionage. $t his trial, the presiding judge, ord hief Justice ubert 3arker, said that Blake had “rendered much of Britain’s intelligence] best efforts useless.”

Five years into his term, Blake escaped in the middle of the night using a ladder made of knitting needles and rope. e was smuggled into (ast Berlin while hidden inside a secret compartment of a camper van and later traveled to the Soviet Union.

In his adopted motherland, Blake was bestowed with the Order of enin, the highest civilian award in the Soviet Union. $ countryside dacha, a 9olga car and a pension, along with his ribbons for courage and dedication to the communist cause, were the trappings Blake earned for his years of service to the . B.

“It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake,” Sergei Ivanov, an official for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told Russian media in . “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and reat Britain could have inflicted on it.”

e was born eorg Behar on 1ov. , , in Rotterdam. is mother was Dutch, and his father was a Jewish businessman of Middle (astern descent who earned British citizenship while fighting for the $llies in World War I. $fter his father died, his mother married a man with the last name Blake.