Great Britain considered him the largest double cruiser ever. Russia loved him. Now he’s dead.
George Blake had isolated himself from the Moscow coronavirus – his mansion was a gift from the KGB – when he died Saturday at the age of 98, the Sun reported.
“I think the word ‘traitor’ can be used to describe me – but there are reasons that can justify what I’ve done,” he once said.
Russians mourned Dutch-born Blake and described the man they called Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk as the KGB’s oldest veteran.
“The bitter news has come – the legendary George Blake is gone,” said Sergey Ivanov of the SVR, the renamed KGB. “He died of old age, his heart stopped.”
Blake has lived in Russia since defecting to the former Soviet Union more than half a century ago after escaping from a British prison, where he had served a 42-year sentence – a record – for espionage.
The Briton ‘s espionage work led to the deaths of dozens of Western agents. He once claimed to have exposed 600 of his colleagues during the early days of the Cold War.
“I don’t know what I handed because it was so much,” he said in 2009.
Even in his last years, Blake spied Britain by listening to BBC broadcasts, his friends told The Sun.
On his birthday last month, Russian top spy Sergey Naryshkin told Blake that his adopted country had sent him “warm and heartfelt wishes”.
Blake started working for MI6 in 1944 after serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first assignment was to interrogate captured captains of Nazi U-boats.
Then 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 America’s heavy bombing of 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 again and called him a hero. He then moved to his next post in Berlin, where he settled in his KGB work for nearly a decade – until MI6 discovered him.
The traitor abandoned his wife, MI6 secretary Gillian Blake, and their three sons – Anthony, James and Patrick – when he fled to Russia. He also had a son named Mikhail from an unknown Russian woman.
As men, Blake’s British sons all visited him in Moscow. James was the first son his father tracked down.
“I explained the whole situation to him, why I did it and how I did it, and we talked for a long time,” Blake once said. “He went back and must have given a favorable account, and then the others came out.”