The Death of George Blake by Brian Bamford

GEORGE Blake, a notorious British double agent who betrayed Cold War secrets and Western spies to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and, after being caught, staged a spectacular escape to live out his life as a K.G.B. colonel in Moscow, has died. He was 98.

Like the Cambridge-educated moles Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Mr. Blake became a dedicated Marxist, disillusioned with the West, and a high British intelligence officer while secretly working for the Soviets. His clandestine life had lasted less than a decade, but cost the lives of many agents and destroyed vital British and American operations in Europe.

Unlike the Cambridge clique, who defected when the authorities closed in, Mr. Blake was caught in 1961, tried secretly and sentenced to 42 years in prison. Five years later, with inside and outside help, he escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs prison in London and fled to Moscow. He left behind a wife, three children and an uproar over his getaway, the tatters of a case that encapsulated the intrigues of a perilous nuclear age, with flash points in Korea and Germany, where Blake served.

Settling into a new life in Moscow in 1966, Mr. Blake assumed the identity of Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk and was awarded the Order of Lenin and given a pension and an apartment. He divorced his wife, remarried and had a son and grandson, helped train Soviet agents and in 2007, on his 85th birthday, received the Order of Friendship from President Putin. He wrote an autobiography, “No Other Choice” (1990), and a memoir, “Transparent Walls” (2006).

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IN HIS AUTHORIZED HISTORY OF MI5 'The Defence of the Realm' Christopher Andrew wrote:

'To general astonishment, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced [George] Blake to forty-two years' imprisonment, the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. Blake appeared stummed. Sir Dick White later said that he too had been shocked by the severity of the sentence. J.Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was delighted, telling the Washington SLO approvingly: "Anyway, the British have guts!" Macmillan, however, found the spy scandals of the early 1960s even more distastful than the furore which had surrounded his clearing of Philby in 1955. Instead of congadulating MI5 for its part in tracking down a series of Soviet spies, he blamed the Service for causing him public embarrassment. The Prime Minister complained in his diary after Blake's conviction that he public, already shocked by media reports, "do not know and cannot be told that he belonged to MI6, an organisation which does not theoretically exist. So I had rater a rough passage in the House of Commons..." Though the British press did not reveal that Blake was an SIS officer when repoting the verdict, the foreign press had no such inhibitions and the secret soon leaked out.'

This incident seems to capture the thankless job of spy-catching by MI5.

Later when Sir Roger Hollis had alerted Macmillan of the arrest of the spy John Vassal it was claimed that Hollis had told him 'I've got this fellow [Vassall], I've got him!' When Macmillan failed to show any enthusiasm for this MI5 success, Hollis allegedly remarked, 'You don't seem very pleased, Prime Minister.' Macmillan, by his own account, replied:

'No, I'm not pleased. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn't go and hang it up outside the Master of the Foxhounds' drawing room; he buries it out of sight. But you just can't shoot a spy as you did in the war. You have to try him... better to discover him, and then control him, but never catch him... There will be a terrible row in the press, there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the government will probably fall. Why the devil did you catch him?'

This is the curious paradox presented by Sir Roger Hollis the spy-catcher to the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1960s, it was not unlike that described in the essay 'Shooting an Elephant' by George Orwell: 'The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant, like a mad dog, if the owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and gave me sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.'

Appearances are often more important than crude political considerations, and that's why cases like that of George Blake are so significant in so far as they often serve to ridicule and undermine political authority.

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