Britain’s George Blake, a famous double agent spying for the KGB before moving to the East, was one of the last living witnesses to the fierce confrontation between the Soviets and the West in the tumult of the Cold War.
George Blake, who died on Saturday at the age of 98 in Russia, provided the names of hundreds of intelligence agents to the KGB, the armed wing of Soviet espionage. He was the last surviving of a generation of British double agents who left their mark on the times.
His career, however, has nothing to do with his well-born acolytes of the “Cambridge Five”, this network of former students of the famous British university recruited in the 1930s by the Soviet NKVD, the future KGB.
Born in 1922 under the name George Behar in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian and British father, the future spy first led a dissolute life which saw him go as far as Cairo.
When World War II broke out, he rallied resistance in the Netherlands before joining MI6, the British foreign intelligence service.
Conversion to Communism
Taken prisoner by the North Koreans during the Korean War, George Blake recounts having offered his services to the Soviets on his own initiative after having witnessed American bombings on civilian populations during this conflict.
“For me, communism was about trying to create the Kingdom of God on earth. The Communists were actually trying to do what the Church had tried to achieve through prayer, ”explained Mr. Blake, of the Protestant faith. “I concluded that I was fighting on the wrong side.”
Back in London, the agent-turned-double achieves his first big blow: he reveals to the KGB the existence of a secret tunnel in East Berlin used to spy on the Soviets.
As he gradually becomes a well of information for his Soviet employers, George Blake gets married: his wife, who knows nothing about his double life, gives him three sons.
Then the small family moved to Berlin, where he claims to have betrayed each of the “500 or 600” agents working in Germany for the British.
If the fate of these agents is not known to the general public, George Blake assures that they were not killed by the Soviet intelligence services. “I told them: I would give you this information on condition that you promise me that they will not be executed.”
New life in the USSR
From recklessness to recklessness, the net tightens around him. A Polish double agent ends up denouncing him. Blake admits to being a spy in the pay of the Soviets: after a trial behind closed doors, justice sentences him to 42 years in prison.
Five years later, in 1966, he escapes from prison using a rope ladder and his cell mates: an Irish thief and two anti-nuclear activists.
The latter take him, hidden, to the border with the German Democratic Republic (GDR): the double agent crosses the Iron Curtain and goes forever to the East.
In Moscow, he is celebrated as a hero. The KGB awarded him the rank of colonel and gave him a comfortable apartment in the center of the Russian capital.
His British wife divorces and leaves the place to Ida, who will give him a son in turn.
The former spy quickly becomes disillusioned with the reality of the “communist ideal”.
“One of the things that disappointed me the most was that I thought a new man was born here,” he told British daily The Times. “I quickly realized that was not the case. They are just normal people. Like everyone else, their life is directed by the same human passions, the same avarice and the same ambitions ”as in the West.
In 1990, George Blake published his autobiography entitled “No Other Choice”, distributed under the title “A Spy: Memories” in France.
He then retreats with his wife to a dacha near Moscow and watches the Soviet Union crumble.
Of President Vladimir Putin, he says he is part of a “constellation of strong and courageous people, brilliant professionals”.
Despite the fall of the USSR to which he had dedicated his life, he never regretted his actions: “I think it never hurts to offer his life to a noble ideal and to noble experiences, even if it is not crowned with success, ”he said during one of his rare interviews.
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