George Blake (secret agent)
George Blake (born November 11, 1922 in Rotterdam as Georg Behar ; † December 26, 2020 in Moscow ) was a secret agent of the United Kingdom who also operated as a double agent for espionage for the Soviet Union and later went to Moscow .
Life
Blake was born Georg Behar in Rotterdam, the son of a Dutch - Egyptian couple of Jewish origin who were active in the Dutch resistance , and eventually also worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of the British intelligence service that dealt with covert operations . After the Second World War he was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and recruited agents for the British secret service in Eastern Europe, which was dominated by the Soviet Union during the Cold War .
MI6 later dispatched Blake to Korea , where he was at the British Embassy in Seoul in 1950 . According to his later statements, the immediate proximity of the war and the atrocities committed against the civilian population shook his view of the world and made him believe that he was on the wrong side. When the South was overrun by the North Korean military during the Korean War , he was taken prisoner by North Korea . He spent three years in North Korea, which made him a staunch communist . This has been considered brainwashing by some , even though Blake insisted on being a volunteer of communism. The British secret service sent him to Berlin as a double agent , where he actually worked as a triple agent. He revealed hundreds of details of MI6 agents and the identity of the agents he had recruited in Eastern Europe as well as the secret tunnel of Operation Gold from West Berlin to an underground telephone node on the East German side to the Soviet Union. Decades later, on a visit to the GDR, he remembered: “Now I have to tell you that our Soviet comrades knew that this tunnel was being built long before the first spade was stuck in the ground. Nevertheless, so to speak, they allowed this operation to be carried out. "
In 1959 Blake was exposed by the Polish defector Michał Goleniewski . In 1961 a closed court sentenced him to 42 years in prison, which some newspapers interpreted as one year in prison for each agent killed as a result of his intelligence. It was the second longest prison sentence ever imposed by a British court after bomb bomber Nezar Hindawi, who was sentenced to 45 years .
Escape from prison and escape from England
When Blake realized after five years in prison that he would not get a chance at an agent exchange , he tried to get a prison break from Wormwood Scrubs, which he finally succeeded with the help of Pat Pottle , Michael Randle and Sean Bourke . Pottle and Randle were anti-British nuclear weapons activists who had served prison terms in Wormwood Scrubs . Pottle saw the sentence of 42 years imprisonment for Blake's betrayal as an excessive " death penalty " according to his own statements . Bourke was an IRA terrorist who was also serving a prison sentence at Wormwood Scrubs.
In preparation for Blake's outbreak, Pottle managed to smuggle a walkie-talkie into the prison. At that time, neither the police nor the prison administration had such a modern device. Unnoticed by his guards, Blake communicated with his rescuers lying on his bunk, watched an opportunity on a rainy Sunday when his fellow inmates and the guards attended a film screening, climbed out of a window unnoticed and waited hazy with the walkie-talkie -a rainy day at the wall, until Pottle threw him a self-made rope ladder reinforced with knitting needles over the seven-meter-high outer wall. After climbing the wall, Blake jumped down from there, injuring his face and wrist. Pottle drove the temporarily unconscious Blake to a hiding place, from where he took him to a doctor who looked after him.
Randle then transported Blake and his family hidden in a camper van by ferry to Belgium at night and on to the inner-German border , where he went alone to the GDR. Allegedly, his former Soviet command officer was there by chance at that point in time. Blake ended up in the Soviet Union, divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, and started a new life.
Life in the Soviet Union and Russia
Blake last lived in Moscow with the rank of Colonel aD of the KGB from a pension as a former employee of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations and remained an avowed communist. With an arrest warrant against him still in place in the UK, if he had returned to the UK he would have been arrested and served the remainder of his sentence. He denied being a traitor and insisted that he never felt like a British man: “ To cheat you have to feel you belong first. I never felt a part of it. "
1990 published Blake an autobiography titled No Other Choice ( no other choice ). His British publisher had already paid him £ 60,000 before the British government prevented him from profiting from further sales.
In 2006 his book Transparent Walls was published , for which Sergei Nikolajewitsch Lebedew , at the time head of the foreign intelligence service SWR , wrote the foreword. In 2007 Blake received the Order of Friendship from Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on his 85th birthday .
The ZDF shone in 1969, a documentary made with Gerd Vespermann in the lead role as George Blake.
Publications
- No other choice. An autobiography . Simon & Schuster, New York 1990, ISBN 0-671-74155-1 .
- No other choice. The autobiography of the most important double agent of the Cold War era . Translated from the English by Jürgen Schebera, Edition q, Berlin 1995, ISBN 978-3-86124-284-0 .
literature
- Sean Bourke: The breakout . 1972, ISBN 3455005357 (German)
- Sean Bourke: The Springing of George Blake . Cassell, London, 1970, ISBN 0304935905 (English)
- Michael Randle, Pat Pottle: The Blake Escape: How we Freed George Blake - and Why . Harrap, London, 1989, ISBN 0245547819 (English)
Web links
- George Blake in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Literature by and about George Blake in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blake, George |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Behar, Georg (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British secret agent |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 11, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rotterdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 26, 2020 |
| Place of death | Moscow |