George Blake

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This article is about the British spy. For the American music publisher, see George E. Blake.
George Blake

Born George Behar
November 11, 1922 (1922-11-11) (age 85)
Rotterdam, Netherlands

George Blake (born George Behar, November 11, 1922) is a former British spy known for having been a double agent in service of the Soviet Union. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Rotterdam, Blake was the son of a Dutch mother and a Turkish/Jewish father who was a naturalised British citizen.[1] He was named George in honour of King George V.[2] His father, Albert Behar, fought against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War despite his origins in Constantinople, and received awards from the French and British for his gallantry. The Behars lived a comfortable life in Holland until Albert's death in 1936. The thirteen year-old George was sent to live with relatives in Egypt, where he continued his education at the English School in Cairo. While in Cairo, he was close to his cousin Henri Curiel who was later to become 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 SOE. 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. However, the Peake family wouldn't give consent for the marriage because Blake was Jewish. Iris wasn't able to bear the pressure and their relationship ended. Blake was devastated as a result and allegedly 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.[citation needed]

This explanation was however contradicted by Blake himself, who said later that he switched sides during the Korean War. "It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side ... that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war." [3]

[edit] Espionage activities

For the duration of the War, Blake's work involved translating German documents captured by British agents, and interrogating Germans captured in France following the D-Day landings. At the end of the war, he was posted to Hamburg and put in charge of the interrogation of German U-boat captains. Following a crash-course in Russian he was recruited by MI6 in 1948 and was posted to the British Embassy in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea.

Within months of his arrival in Seoul, the city was captured by the advancing North Korean Army and Blake was taken prisoner by the Communist forces. After capture by the North Koreans, and after reading the works of Karl Marx during his three-year detention, he converted to Marxism. Following 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 1961 he was exposed as a Soviet agent by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski and arrested while he was enrolled at a small language school near Beirut, Lebanon, The Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS).

The maximum sentence for any one offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 is 14 years, but his activities were divided into five time periods charged as five offences, and in May 1961 after an in camera trial at the Old Bailey he was sentenced to the maximum term of 14 years consecutively on each of three counts of spying for a potential enemy and 14 years concurrently on both the two remaining counts - a total of 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 (excluding life terms) 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.

[edit] Escape from prison

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 seven 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 described themselves as libertarians and “quasi-anarchists”. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, they had both been jailed for 18 months 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 full details of the escape remained a secret, although Bourke revealed his role in his 1970 book The Springing of George Blake. 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.”

[edit] Moscow

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. He later filed a complaint charging the British government with human rights violation for taking nine years to decide on his case and was awarded £5,000 in compensation by the European Court of Human Rights. [4]

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

As of 2007, 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."

In late 2007, Blake was awarded the Order of Friendship on his 85th birthday by Vladimir Putin[5].

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 85-year-old Colonel of Foreign Intelligence, "still takes an active role in the affairs of the secret service."

[edit] George Blake in popular culture

  • Escape in Time (1967), was an episode of The Avengers, in which a signboard said, "Where is Blake?" The episode itself featured super criminals following an "escape route" where they disappear to get away with their ill-gotten gains.
  • George Blake appears as a character in the 1990 novel by Ian McEwan, The Innocent.
  • The play Cell Mates by Simon Gray is about George Blake and Sean Bourke. The original production starred Stephen Fry as George Blake and Rik Mayall as Bourke. The production was famously thrown into turmoil when Fry walked out following a bad review.
  • After the Break (2002), a radio play by Ian Curteis, centred on the uncomfortable relationship between Blake and Bourke after they had both fled to Moscow.

His story appears in "Shadow of Shadows" by Ted Allbeury - a classic espionage novel

[edit] References

  1. ^ See George Blake No Other Choice. Jonathan Cape, London, 1990
  2. ^ See H Montgomery Hyde George Blake Superspy 1987
  3. ^ George Blake: I spy a British traitor - People, News - Independent.co.uk
  4. ^ BBC ON THIS DAY | 22 | 1966: Double-agent breaks out of jail
  5. ^ "Vladimir Putin honours traitor George Blake with tit-for-tat birthday medal" by Tony Halpin; The Times published on 14 November 2007; Recovered on 14 April 2008

[edit] Further reading

  • Nigel West, Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991 (hard cover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).
  • Biography George Blake
  • Sean Bourke, The Springing of George Blake. London: Cassell, 1970. ISBN 0 304 93590 5
  • Michael Randle & Pat Pottle, The Blake Escape. How we Freed George Blake and Why. London: Harrap, 1989. ISBN 0 245 54781 9
  • Kevin O'Connor, Blake, Bourke, and the End of Empires. London: Prendeville Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0 95356 973 X
  • David Stafford, Spies Beneath Berlin. London: John Murray, 2002. ISBN 0 7195 6323 2