As the death of the spy novelist John le Carre reminded us last month, the Cold War was a golden age for espionage fiction. The death last week in Moscow of the British double agent George Blake reminded us, too, that the record of actual espionage was mixed.
Of the various secret agents whose treachery embarrassed the British intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s, including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, and others, Blake was probably the most dangerously effective but least known to the public. The paradox may be easily explained: Philby, Burgess, and company sprang largely from Britain’s genteel classes and elite schools and universities — their attraction to the Soviet Union seemed especially contradictory. Blake, by contrast, was born in the Netherlands of a Dutch Protestant mother and a Spanish Jewish father who had grown up in Turkey and was a naturalized British subject.
“To betray, you first have to belong,” Blake once told an interviewer. “I never belonged.”
Born George Behar in 1922, Blake grew up in Rotterdam. When his father died in 1934, he was sent to Egypt to live with a cousin, who later became a leader of the Egyptian Communist Party. He was visiting his mother in Rotterdam when World War II broke out, and stranded in the Netherlands, he joined the Dutch resistance. Three years later, he escaped safely to Britain, where he changed his surname to Blake, enlisted in the Royal Navy, and was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1944.
Fluent in several languages, Blake was sent to Cambridge University after the war to study Russian, and in 1948, he was posted to South Korea to gather intelligence on Communist China and the Soviet Far East. Captured and imprisoned when North Korean troops occupied Seoul, he spent three years as a prisoner of war before being released after the 1953 armistice.
In 1955, Blake was sent to Berlin as a counterintelligence agent under diplomatic cover, but by then, he had already begun passing secrets about Anglo-American operations in Eastern Europe to Moscow. It is not clear when Blake chose to betray his adopted country and work as a Soviet agent. In his later years, he had the habit of telling Western inquisitors what he guessed they wanted to hear and once explained to a PBS interviewer that he was “ashamed” of the United States bombing of Korean villages and “felt I was committed to the wrong side.” Of course, it is possible, even likely, that Blake had been recruited during World War II or even by his cousin in the 1930s. We may never know.
In any case, his success in the late 1950s was unparalleled and deadly. During his five-year tenure in Berlin, he supplied Moscow with thousands of pages of documents on Western operations within Soviet satellite nations, including tunnels in Vienna and Berlin that enabled the CIA and MI6 to tap military telephone lines, and destroyed networks of agents connecting democrats and dissidents with London and Washington. Not least, Blake betrayed the identities of some 350 to 400 MI6 agents and assets to the KGB. The exact number is unknown, but at least a dozen were subsequently tortured and executed.
In 1960, a Polish defector identified Blake as a double agent, and he was tried by a secret British intelligence court and imprisoned in London. In 1966, however, he managed a sensational escape with the assistance of fellow inmates who were anti-nuclear activists and, with help from a network of left-wing sympathizers, was successfully ferried to Moscow, abandoning his wife and three young children.
He changed his name to Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk, was promoted to colonel in the KGB, divorced his English wife, and married a Russian. Similar to Maclean, Burgess, and Philby, he was rewarded with a pension and a modest apartment.
“He was a brilliant professional of a special kind and courage, ensuring strategic parity and preserving peace on the planet,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared last week.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
