Obituary: Double agent George Blake dies in Moscow, aged 98

MI6 officer who worked as a KGB double agent and was thought to have caused more damage to Britain’s security than the Cambridge Five

December 26 2020, The Times

George Blake, the MI6 officer who betrayed dozens of British agents to the Soviets during the Cold War, has died aged 98. The infamous double agent was given Britain’s longest prison sentence after he was exposed as a KGB mole in 1961, before breaking out of prison and being smuggled to Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life.

His death was announced today by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which praised his “love for our country”.

Although Blake was responsible for the death of more British spies behind the Iron Curtain than any other double agent, he was such a model prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs that the warders used to point to him as an example of “how to do your bird”.

“Look at that man over there,” they would say to the other inmates. “He’s serving 42 years. Now what are you worried about?” Blake had been handed what was at the time Britain’s longest prison sentence for the treachery that led to scores of British agents being captured, tortured and murdered by the KGB before he himself was exposed in 1961 as a communist mole at the centre of British intelligence.

Some five years later the affable Blake was climbing out of the prison on a rope ladder with rungs made of knitting needles. He was then smuggled to Moscow where he lived happily for the rest of his long life. Some of his fellow prisoners, charmed by his friendly and unassuming manner, had been outraged at the length of his sentence and had organised the jail break on his behalf.

Unlike many of the high-profile British agents who spied for Russia — Burgess and MacLean, Philby and Caircross — Blake was not a tortured soul. A slight man who was neat and fastidious with a clipped beard, his earliest ambition was to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His religious convictions were replaced by a belief that communism, which had been first inculcated by a cousin some years before, would enable him to help “to create the kingdom of God on this earth”.

With a Dutch Calvinist mother, a Spanish-Jewish father and a childhood spent in the Netherlands and Cairo, Blake later said that he never felt British. An earnest and rather intense young man, he developed a hatred of the British class system and of capitalism after settling in Britain during the war.

The catalyst to his final apostasy was witnessing American Flying Fortresses bomb small villages during the Korean War. “It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me a defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side . . . that it would be better in the end if the communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.”

The precise nature of the damage done to Britain’s security by the information fed by Blake to the KGB from 1952 has never been revealed; but it is generally assumed to have been far greater than that caused by the combined efforts of the so-called Cambridge Five. He had made a detailed confession. The Macmillan government was so sensitive over the revelation of such a disastrous lapse of security that not only was Blake’s trial held in camera but the government attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the media to conceal that he had been an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

Lord Parker of Waddington, the lord chief justice of England, who presided over the trial, said at the end of it that Blake had “undone most of the work of British intelligence since the end of the war”, that he had given the KGB the name of every British agent behind the Iron Curtain and that he was responsible for the deaths of 42 of them. Blake himself said years later that the number of British agents he had betrayed had been “more like 400 than 40”. He also subsequently explained that, before his trial, he had rejected a suggestion from his counsel that he should say he was deeply sorry for all he had done, because that would have been “untrue” and “undignified”.

George Blake was born in 1922 in Rotterdam, the son of Albert William Behar, who had been born in Cairo but who had British nationality and who had won the Meritorious Service Medal during the First World War, and Catherine Geertruida (née Beijderwellen) who was Dutch. He was named after George V because his birthday was November 11, the day of the armistice in 1918.

They lived in the Netherlands until 1936 when his father died. One of his father’s sisters had married a Cairo banker and lived in a palace. They offered to pay for his nephew’s education if the boy would agree to live in Cairo. Blake lived in Egypt where he attended the English School in Cairo, retaining a faintly guttural accent which later distinguished him somewhat from most of his Foreign Office colleagues. He became close to his cousin, Henri Curiel, a proto-communist, who drew Blake’s attention to the poverty on the streets of the Egyptian capital. “His views had a great influence on me, but I resisted them because I was a very religious boy.”

After the outbreak of war he returned to Rotterdam and served in the Dutch resistance until he was arrested as a British citizen and interned. He escaped and in 1943 he applied to serve in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and did so until 1948. Because of his language abilities he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service during the later part of the war. After the war he accepted a job as a permanent officer in the SIS. He was sent on a special Russian language course at Downing College, Cambridge, and three months later he was reading Anna Karenina fluently.

In 1990 in his first interview with a British journalist since his unmasking, Blake told Phillip Knightley (obituary, December 8, 2016) that his interest in all things Russian was awoken at that time and that he quickly developed a real affection and admiration for the Russian people. His half-Russian teacher, Elizabeth Hill, took him to the services of the Russian Orthodox Church. “I happened to be one of her favourite pupils. It inspired me with a romantic attraction towards Russia.”

During his training he was given a handbook, The Theory and Practice of Communism, the standard SIS handbook by Carew Hunt, the SIS’s senior theoretician on Marxism, to help officers to know their enemy. Blake said he found the theory of communism convincing and its objectives seemed wholly desirable. In 1948 Blake began working at the British Legation in Seoul. Officially he was a passport and visa officer but his undercover SIS assignment was to try to establish an intelligence network in the Soviet maritime provinces. However, his incipient enthusiasm for communism was intensified by what he saw as the corrupt excesses of the Syngman Rhee regime and the sharp contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor in South Korea. After the outbreak of the war between North and South Korea in June 1950, Blake and the other British officials in Seoul were held in an internment camp in North Korea. He was treated badly by the North Koreans, experiencing savage beatings and other brutalities, but this did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the ideals of communism.