George Blake

George Blake ( Behar; 11 November 1922 – 26 December 2020) was a spy with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union.

He became a communist and decided to work for the MGB while a prisoner during the Korean War.

George Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1922.

He was the son of a Protestant Dutch mother, Catherine (née Beijderwellen), and an Egyptian father of Sephardi Jewish origin who was a naturalised British subject.

He was named George after George V of the United Kingdom.

His father, Albert Behar, served in the British Army during the First World War.

While Albert received the Meritorious Service Medal, he embellished his war service when recounting it to his wife and children, and concealed his Jewish background until his death.

The Behars lived a comfortable existence in the Netherlands until Albert's death in 1936.

The thirteen-year-old Behar was sent to live with a wealthy aunt in Egypt, where he continued his education at the English School in Cairo.

He later attended Downing College, Cambridge, to study Russian.

While in Cairo, he was close to his cousin Henri Curiel, who was later to become a leader of the Communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation in Egypt.

In 1940, Germany invaded and quickly defeated the Dutch military.

Behar was interned but released because he was only 17, and joined the Dutch resistance as a courier.

In 1942, he escaped from the Netherlands and travelled to Britain via Spain and Gibraltar, reaching London in January 1943.

There, he was reunited with his mother and his sisters, who had fled at the start of the war.

In 1943, his mother decided to change the family name from Behar to Blake.

After he reached Britain, Blake joined the Royal Navy as a sub-lieutenant before being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1944.

For the rest of the war, Blake was employed in the Dutch Section.

He intended to marry an MI6 secretary, Iris Peake, but her family prevented the marriage because of Blake's Jewish background and the relationship ended.

In 1946, he was posted to Hamburg and put in charge of the interrogation of German U-boat captains.

In 1947, the Navy sent Blake to study languages, including Russian, at Downing College, Cambridge, where his fellow students included the future foreign policy analyst Michael MccGwire.

He was posted thereafter to the British legation in Seoul, South Korea, under Vyvyan Holt, arriving on 6 November 1948.

Under cover as a vice-consul, Blake's mission was to gather intelligence on Communist North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Far East.

The Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950, and Seoul was quickly captured by the advancing Korean People's Army of the North.

After British forces joined the United Nations Command defending the South, Blake and the other British diplomats were taken prisoner.

As the tide of the war turned, Blake and the others were taken north, first to Pyongyang and then to the Yalu River.

After seeing the bombing of North Korea, and after reading the works of Karl Marx and others during his three-year detention, he became a communist.

At a secret meeting arranged with his guards, he volunteered to work for the Soviet Union's spy service, the MGB.

In an interview, Blake was once asked: "Is there one incident that triggered your decision to effectively change sides?"

Blake responded:

"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."

Following his release in 1953, Blake returned to Britain as a hero, landing at RAF Abingdon.

In October 1954, he married MI6 secretary Gillian Allan in St Mark's Church (North Audley Street) in London.

In 1955, he was sent by MI6 to work as a case officer in Berlin, where his task was to recruit Soviet officers as double agents.

But he also informed his KGB contacts of the details of British and American operations, including Operation Gold, in which a tunnel into East Berlin was used to tap telephone lines used by the Soviet military.

Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he resided until his death in 2020.

He was not one of the Cambridge Five spies, although he associated with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby after reaching the Soviet Union.

However, in his first interview, in 1990, with Tom Bower for 'The Confession', a BBC TV documentary, Blake said that he had been tempted towards communism during his Russian course in Cambridge while serving with MI6, and had been finally convinced while reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital during his imprisonment in North Korea.

In 1991, Blake said that his encounter with Curiel, who was a decade older and already a Marxist, shaped his views in later life.

When the Second World War broke out, Behar was back in the Netherlands.