Former British double agent George Blake, the famous mole who spied for the Soviet KGB in the 1950s, before moving to the East, died at the age of 98, Russian news agencies announced on Saturday.
“Today, the legendary secret service officer (…) George Blake is no more. He sincerely loved our country, admired the achievements of our people during the Second World War, ”said Sergei Ivanov, spokesman for the state agency TASS for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
A former resistance member in the Netherlands during World War II and then an MI6 agent, George Blake offered his services to the Soviets in the 1950s, after witnessing American bombings on civilian populations in Korea. He gave the names of hundreds of agents to the KGB and revealed the existence of a secret tunnel in East Berlin used to spy on the Soviets.
Blake was one of the most active counterintelligence agents linked to British secret services, who in the Cold War decades provided a number of names for Soviet spy radars.
Denounced by a Polish double agent, George Blake was sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison in Britain, but, five years later, managed to escape from prison with the help of a rope ladder and his cellmates. On the run, George Blake crossed the Iron Curtain through the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and settled in the East.
Celebrated as a hero in Moscow, he was awarded the rank of colonel by the Russian secret services and, despite the fall of the USSR, to which he dedicated his life, he never regretted his actions.
In an interview given to the BBC in 1990, Blake revealed that he had betrayed at least 500 Western agents with the information he passed on to the Soviet Union, but rejected the charge that 42 of these spies died after revealing their identity.
Blake had worked with the Dutch resistance during World War II, having left Holland for Gibraltar. The son of a Spanish Jew who fought in the British army in World War I, he was invited to join the British secret services because of his background and curriculum.
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