SPY WHO WENT TO RUSSIA

GEORGE BLAKE

British traitor George Blake still living in Russia at the age of 90. He is one of the most notorious double-agents. He betrayed Britain for six years. At the same he caused the deaths of dozens of British secret agents. He is now called Georgy Ivanovitch and states bluntly that he has no regrets. He also insists that the 40 years in Russia were his happiest time. His statement was in a rare interview given to the Russian newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

SUPPOSE TO BE IN BAD HEALTH ANDBLIND

In 1961 he was caught and sentenced to 42 years in prison but he escaped in 1966 from Wormwood Scrubs and managed to get to the Soviet Union.  The 42 years sentence was one for each agent who had been executed. He was celebrated as a communist hero and given a large flat in Moscow plus a luxury dacha (country house) all rent free and a pensions of a retired colonel in the SVT. SVR is the Russian foreign intelligence service. During the following years honours were given to him; even as recently as 2007 from Mr Putin the Order of Friendship which is the highest honours and the ceremony was at the Kremlin.

When Blake fled the country he left behind a wife and three young sons, In Russia he married again and started a family. He admitted that his years in Russia were the most happiest because he was in peace. When in the West he was always looking over his shoulders.

However, by handing over documents he betrayed his colleagues at MI6 and it is assumed he practically destroyed the network in Easter Europe. His MI6 colleagues also worked under constant pressure of being exposed but never expected it from a colleague within. It is assumed that there were about 400 agents whose treatment after being exposed were far harsher and unimaginable what they must have gone through.

One master plan Blake spoiled was an operation to tunnel through to East Berlin to eavesdrop in the Russian. He informed the Soviets.

Blake was born in Rotterdam in 1922. His mother was Dutch and his father was Turkish-Jewish. His real name was Behar. He escaped from Nazi-occupied Holland disguised as a monk and joined the Special Operations Executive.

In 1948 he joined the MI6 and after a crash-curse in Russian he went to the British Embassy in Seoul, Korea. To establish a network of agents. Luck wasn’t on hi side and he was captured within a few months by the North Korean communist forces.

There he became a sympathizer of the communist party. He stated that he became a communist at 13 under the influence of his cousin Henri Curiel who became important members of the communist party in Egypt.  He also emphasized that he has no connection with Britain unlike his Cambridge spies, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess abd Anthony Blunt. He was not from Britain and therefore never felt he belonged.

He thinks his final commitment came when in North Korea as a prisoner he saw the relentless bombarding of small villages by American flying fortresses. The villages were only occupied by women, children and old people because the men were in the army. He remembered that he felt ashamed to be part of the West which fought with overpowering, technically superiority against absolute defenceless people.  He felt he was on the wrong side and started to belief communism would put a stop to war.

Blake’s first contact with the KGB was in 1955 in Berlin were he supposed to recruit double-agents instead he delivered information to the Soviet about the British and American operations. When he was posted in Berlin, Vienna, Milan and Beirut he met a KGB agent every three weeks.  He was also part of the discovery of CIA mole Major Pyotr Popev of Soviet military intelligence. Popov was executed in 1960.

In the follower year Blake was unmasked by Polish defector Michael Golenieski. Blake inmate Patrick Pottle and Michael Randle two anti-nuclear activists thought his sentence was too harsh. On their release they threw a rope ladder of the wall in Wormwood Grubs and drove him away in a van.

One of many who sheltered Blake was an Anglican vicar who was a CND supporter, Reverend John Papworth. Blake stayed in his house in London for three days.  The vicar also helped to put a false compartment in a camper van which then took Blake out of the country and to the Soviet Union.

Blake had the nerve to go to the European Court of human Rights against Britain to claim his royalties for his book ‘No Other Choice’. Guess what – he won.

He had to face a big shock when the Soviet Union collapsed but he still has no regret for what he done. He admitted that he thought the Soviet man was different being formed by the communist regime. In his previous view a higher human being but he discovered in the meantime that it was like that at all.

Blake admits that his only regret is having deceived his first wife because she knew nothing about what he was doing.  Over the years he established a relationship with his three sons. James was a soldier and now is with the fire brigade.  Patrick a vicar and Anthony a Japan specialist. His son from the second marriage Mikhail who is 40 will celebrate his 90^th birthday with his other three sons together.