George Blake

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George Blake (born Georg Behar, November 11, 1922) is a former Dutch-British spy who was actually a double agent for the Soviet Union.

Born in Rotterdam of mixed parentage; his mother was Dutch and his father was an Egyptian who was a naturalized British citizen.^{[citation needed]}. He was born as George Behar to one of the eminent Jewish families of Amsterdam. His father passed away when he was 14 and little Behar was sent to a British school in Cairo as this was the will of his father. While he was living there with his relatives, he spent most of his time with his uncle Henri Curiel who was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Egypt.

As a teenager Blake was a runner for the anti-Nazi Dutch resistance under the nom de guerre of Max de Vries. He was interned but released temporarily because of his young age. He would have been re-interred on his 18 birthday had he not escaped to London,disguised as a monk, in the meantime. In England, he changed his name to Blake and eventually began to work for the Special Operations Executive. After some time, he fell in love with an MI6 secretary named Iris Peake -later she went to work in the service of the Queen- and they decided to marry. Unfortunately the eminent "Peake" family wouldn't give its consent for the marriage as Blake was Jewish. The young girl wasn't able to bear the pressure and their relationship ended. Blake was devastated as a result and decided to take revenge on this "snobbish" English nation which he blamed for the destruction of the love of his life. He went to his uncle and confidant, Henri Curiel, who recruited him for the KGB.

During WW2 Blake served in the Royal Navy. As HMS Mauritius set off from Glasgow for the Normandy beaches in June 1944 she stopped in the Firth of Clyde and a tender came alongside and took off PO George Blake (newly promoted, still in seamans rig.

After World War II he was recruited by MI6 and worked on establishing agent networks in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. He was sent to serve in the Korean War, and was in Seoul when it was overrun by the North Koreans.

Whilst in Korea he witnessed the US bombings of unprotected villages. He was captured by the North Koreans and after reading the works of Karl Marx during his detention, he converted to Marxism. After his release in 1953, he was sent by MI6 to work as an agent in Berlin, where he made contact with the KGB and informed them of the details of British and US operations; he betrayed details of hundreds of MI6 agents to the Soviets. Two notable incidents which he was involved in were the Berlin Tunnel and the Boris affair.

In 1959 he was exposed by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski and returned to England for trial. The maximum sentence for treason was 14 years but the Crown wanted more so his activities were divided into three time periods and in 1961 after an in camera trial, he was sentenced to 14 years on each of three counts of treason - 42 years imprisonment by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker of Waddington; this sentence was said by newspapers to represent one year for each of the agents killed when he betrayed them, although this claim appears to be an invention. It was the longest sentence ever handed down by a British court, until terrorist Nezar Hindawi was sentenced to 45 years for the attempted bombing of an El Al jet.

However just five years later he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison with the help of Pat Pottle, Michael Randle and Sean Bourke. Bourke, an Irishman, was serving 7 years for sending a bomb to a senior policeman. Randle and Pottle were founder members of the Committee of 100 anti-nuclear direct action group and describe themselves as libertarians and “quasi-anarchists”. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, they had both been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for conspiracy to organise the Committee of 100 demonstrations at the nuclear base USAF Wethersfield in Essex. They both had first hand experience of prison and it was their outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on Blake that led them to attempt to free him. They believed the sentence was “unjust” and that “helping him was a decent human response.”

For 22 years the details of the escape remained a secret. Common wisdom held that it must have been a professional operation masterminded by the KGB, the Provisional Irish Republican Army or even the British security services. As Michael Randle said: “It was to be an entirely unprofessional – almost one could say DIY – affair.”

Blake fled to the USSR. He divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, and started a new life. In 1990 he published his autobiography No Other Choice (ISBN 0-671-74155-1). The book's British publisher had paid him about £60,000 before the government intervened to stop him profiting from sales.

In an interview with NBC News in 1991, Blake said he regretted the deaths of the agents he had betrayed.

As of 2004, he is still living in Moscow, Russia on a KGB pension, and remains a committed Marxist-Leninist. Blake denied being a traitor, insisting that he had never felt British: "To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged."

Recently Blake has written a new book, Transparent Walls, daily Vzglyad ("The View") reported. Sergey Lebedev, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation, writes in the book’s foreword that despite the book being devoted to the past, it is about the present as well. He also wrote that Blake, the 84-year-old Colonel of Foreign Intelligence, "still takes an active role in the affairs of the secret service."

[edit] References

• The First Directorate by Oleg Kalugin. St. Martins' Press, 1994.
• 1966: The Blake prison escape

[edit] Further reading

• Nigel West, Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991 (hard cover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).