Britain considered him the greatest traitor of all time. Russia loved him. Now, he’s dead.
George Blake isolated himself from the coronavirus near Moscow – his country house was a gift from the KGB – when he died on Saturday at the age of 98, Sun reported.
“I think the word ‘traitor’ can be applied to describe me – but there are reasons that can justify what I did,” he once said.
The Russians mourned the Dutchman Blake and described the man they called Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk as the oldest KGB veteran.
“The bitter news has arrived – the legendary George Blake is gone,” said Sergey Ivanov of the SVR, the renowned KGB. “He died of old age, his heart stopped.”
Blake has lived in Russia since he defected to the former Soviet Union more than half a century ago, after escaping from a British prison, where he served 42 years in prison – a record – for spying.
The Briton’s espionage work resulted in the deaths of dozens of Western agents. He once claimed that he exposed 600 of his colleagues during the early days of the Cold War.
“I don’t know what I delivered because it was too much,” he said in 2009.
Even in his later years, Blake spied on Britain listening to BBC broadcasts, his friends told the Sun.
On his birthday last month, Russia’s top spy, Sergey Naryshkin, told Blake that his adopted country had sent him “warm and sincere wishes”.
Blake started working for MI6 in 1944, after serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first mission was to interrogate captains captured from Nazi submarines.
So Britain sent Blake to Seoul, just before the start of the Korean War in 1950, to spy on North Korea, China and the Soviet Far East, Reuters reported.
Invading North Korean soldiers captured Blake – and taught him about communism. Later in life, however, he denied indoctrination and attributed his conversion to heavy American bombing in North Korea.
During his three years as a prisoner of war, Blake met a KGB officer and accepted an offer to work for the Soviet Union after his release.
Britain welcomed Blake, saluting him as a hero. So he went to his next post in Berlin, where he settled on his job at the KGB for almost a decade – until MI6 discovered him.
The traitor abandoned his wife, MI6 secretary Gillian Blake, and their three children – Anthony, James and Patrick – when he fled to Russia. He also had a son named Mikhail, with an unidentified Russian woman.
As men, all of Blake’s British sons visited him in Moscow. James was the first son to track his father.
“I explained the whole situation to him, why I did it and how I did it, and we talked for a long time,” said Blake once. “He came back and must have given a favorable report, and then the others left.”