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| George Blake |
In 1961 a British Spy was
imprisoned in the UK for 42 years. His name was George Blake. The British agent
was found guilty of being a Soviet mole and had been giving away secrets since
the Korean War.
George Blake was born in the
Netherlands in 1922. His mother was Dutch and his father was an Egyptian Jew.
His real name was George Behars, but he changed the surname to Blake upon
arrival in Britain when World War II was beginning.
The Netherlands was
occupied and George Blake (AKA George Behars) was part of an anti-Nazi group.
He had been interned once but fled before a second arrest could be made.
George Blake (AKA Behars) was
already installed with some elementary communist values because he had been
sent to an English school in Egypt in 1936. In Cairo he associated with his
cousin Henri Curiel. His cousin was 10 years his senior and heavily involved
with the Communist Party of Egypt.
The British Secret IntelligenceService recruited him into MI6 and George Blake became his new name. He became
deeper embroiled in the British Secret Service as the war progressed. He was
translating captured German Documents and after D-Day helped to interrogate
German prisoners. He also interrogated German U-boat captains at the end of the
war.
In 1948, George Blake was sent to
Cambridge University where he was taught to speak Russian. He picked the
language up quickly and the course he took was believed to have been very
intense. He was then sent to Seoul in South Korea with instructions to set up a
spy network of informers into North Korea. It was here that things took a bad
turn for the British secret service that employed him. Seoul, the South Korean
capital, was overrun by North Korean troops as the Korean War began. George
Blake was captured by the communist where he had been staying at the British
Embassy.
While in captivity, George Blake
changed sides and became a committed communist. He would later talk of air raids
by the American Air Force upon a small town in the North of Korea. He stated
that this continuous act of bombing a small town of peasants and technically
inferior people made him ashamed of the western powers he represented. This
coupled with his youth in Egypt alongside Cousin Henri Curiel, plus brain
washing by the strict communist North Korean system helped make up his mind
that communism was the way forward for all peoples. He would became a Soviet
agent.
Blake was released from communist
captivity in 1955 and sent back into the British Secret Service, where he was
regarded as a hero. He went to Berlin where he was instructed to try and recruit
Soviet agents and help the western powers during the Cold War struggle. Instead
Blake allowed the Soviets to know his intentions and he was a KGB operative giving
plans to the Soviets in exchange for neatly packaged pretend Soviet defectors. Blake
handed over so much information to the Soviets that he could not remember
everything he did for them.
With the Cambridge Spies still
operating at this time, the British Secret Service was well and truly compromised
on many fronts. It could be said that it was rotten to the core. Blake was not
one of the Cambridge spies, he was a freelancer that worked alone and independent
of Kim Philby and Co.
As a sole double agent betraying
MI6 and her American allies, Blake was responsible for the betrayal of up to 40
MI6 agents to the Soviets and all of British Intelligence’s Eastern EuropeanNetwork collapsed during the late 1950s period. He was also privy to
information that was gold dust to the American CIA. They had a Russian mole
acting for them inside the Soviet GRU. (Soviet Foreign Intelligence Agency)
This man was P.S. Popov. Blake blew the man to the KGB.
P.S. Popov was executed in 1960
by the Soviet Union as a National traitor. However, by this time, George Blake
was exposed by another CIA Mole working in Polish Intelligence. The Polish
defector named Michael Goleniewski exposed George Blake as a Soviet mole. The
information was passed on by the Americans to the British Secret Service.
Blake, who was in the Lebanon in 1961 taking part in Arabic studies, was
summoned to London on a minor matter. With little suspicion, George Blake
returned and was arrested at the airport upon arrival back in the UK.
George Blake was found guilty of
espionage against the UK, for a foreign power, and the maximum sentence for
such betrayal was 14 years. However George Blake was convicted on 3 accounts
with the sentences running concurrently. This amounted to 42 years and was the
longest sentence to be handed out at the time. It is said he was given a year
for every MI6 operative he betrayed to die.
George Blake’s story did not end
here. In autumn of 1966 after a little over 5 years of his sentence, he managed a daring escape from Wormwood Scrubs with an inmate he befriended and two anti-nuclear
campaigners. He moved from several safe houses while a nationwide search was
made for him, but he managed to escape to the Soviet Union as a hero.
There are many who think the
escape was stage managed by the British Secret Service, but no explanation has
ever come to light. Just speculation at what seemed a rather cosy escape with
garnished trimmings for conspiracy theory enthusiasts.
Whatever – by design, or stage
managed; George Blake got away with it and lives to this day, (6th July 2014)
aged 91 in the Soviet Union on a KGB pension plus many honours, including one
from President Putin in 2008.
He had a book of his exploits
published, which understandably caused much controversy in the UK. George Blake
said he did regret the deaths of the MI6 agents but did not feel he betrayed
the British because he never felt part of them. His Dutch and Egyptian birth
right making him unacceptable to being loyal to Imperial Britain. Others say he was brainwashed during his capture by North Korean troops. The communist powers may have certainly played on this none British nationality of birth. Then maybe George Blake was a committed communist that turned after his capture in the Korean War. Who knows for sure.
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