On July 31, 2020, the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda published a chapter from the upcoming book on the Soviet intelligence officers by journalist Ilona Yegiazarova. The chapter is based on an interview of George Blake, an MI-6 officer who was a double agent for the KGB. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, Blake was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1961, sentenced to 42 years in prison, but escaped to Moscow in 1966 where he lives to this day [Blake passed away on December 26, 2020]. Below is my English translation available only on this blog.
Ilona Yegiazarova: My Name is Blake, George Blake
Moskovskaya Pravda July 31, 2020
We continue to publish a series of materials dedicated to the centenary of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Today, our columnist Ilona Yegiazarova, in a new chapter of an upcoming book, talks about her meeting with a man who worked simultaneously for the British (MI-6) and Soviet intelligence (KGB), was captured in North Korea, sentenced to 42 years in prison in Great Britain and fled from there to Moscow…
Like A London Dandy
Colonel George Blake will turn 98 on November 11, 2020. He is almost the same age as the SVR. Our meeting took place a few years ago, and looking at this imposing gentleman, it was impossible to believe that he was so old and that everything he went through was true. His elegant three-piece suit, his massive silver watch chain hanging from a waistcoat pocket, his posture, his “foreign” accent, his wooden cane with a knob in the form of a setter’s head...
-You’re just a London dandy, I tell him, and he beams with pleasure.
George Blake, or, as we call him, Georgy Ivanovich, is a man with a unique life story even by the standards of the SVR, which has seen a lot in its century-long existence.
He was born as George Behar in Rotterdam in the family of a Dutch mother and a Sephardic Jew father from Constantinople. His father died when George was 12, the family was in financial difficulties, and it was decided to send the boy to Cairo, to the house of his rich aunt, who married a local merchant. Here George received great education - first at a French lyceum, then at an English college. He grew up very religious and dreamed of becoming a pastor in his native Rotterdam. The plans were thwarted by the Second World War.
-My youth, Blake recalled, is associated with the horrors of the occupation. On May 10, 1940, Rotterdam was subjected to barbaric bombardment by German aircraft. The city almost burned to the ground. Thirty-one thousand houses were destroyed.
His mother and sisters left for England, fleeing from certain death. And 17-year-old George, who came from Cairo to his homeland to finish his education, remained in Holland - to participate in the Resistance movement: he acted as a liaison and distributed anti-fascist leaflets.
In 1942, he moved to England to stay with his family and continued the fight against the Nazis from there. He changed the “dangerous” family name Behar to Blake and in 1943 volunteered for the British Navy. In the last year of the war, he was already employed by the Secret Intelligence Service.
Assessing the balance of power in the world at that time, British intelligence already realized that after the war the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe would gain a great deal of power and it tried to counteract this trend in every possible way.
- At that time, I still did not understand anything about politics, I did not know anything about Russia, but the feats of Soviet soldiers during the war impressed me, - says Blake. - I regretted that after the victory [in Europe], there was a break between the West and the East, that the Cold War began. In the West, everyone was convinced that the Soviets were about to attack. I thought so, too...
The Bible of a Marxist
British intelligence sent Blake to courses at Cambridge University to study Russian.
-I was considered a promising young man, Blake smiles. - Professor Hill taught Russian at the university - her mother was of Russian descent, she was fluent in the language and was Russian Orthodox. Mrs. Hill took the students whom she especially liked (and I was one of them) to the Russian Orthodox Church. She inspired love and interest in the culture and the sad fate of the Russian people, who constantly suffered from the external and internal enemies. In general, while at the university, I already had a colossal interest and respect for everything Russian...
After Cambridge, Blake, an MI-6 officer, successfully recruited agents in Eastern Europe. The MI-6 leadership was interested in the information about the Soviet Union, and George was sent to Hamburg to collect information about Soviet troops in Germany.
One of his first major assignments was to Korea. Working at the British Embassy under the cover of a vice-consul, George Blake, an MI-6 station chief in Seoul, was supposed to monitor the course of hostilities between North and South Korea, and also to collect information on the Soviet Far East, the Primorye region, Siberia, and Manchuria.
It was then that a turning point occurred in his world view.
-The war was fierce, the South Korean government was pro-fascist, Blake recalls. The closer I observed Syngman Rhee’s regime, the more disgusted I felt. This old dictator did not tolerate any opposition, people were arrested and persecuted using the Gestapo methods, and the Minister of Education openly admired the Nazis and even hung a portrait of Hitler in his office. The United States assisted the regime. American planes - flying fortresses - bombed small, defenseless Korean villages. We also came under fire. I began to wonder: can it be [morally] right to be on the side of the aggressors? As a representative of the Western world, I felt guilty about everything that happened. So, I made a decision not to work against the communists. And then my colleagues and I were taken prisoner by the North Koreans...
Blake was detained in a remote village for three years. That was a difficult time. For a long time afterwards, he was haunted by the physical effects of that captivity: because of the cold in the huts, he developed the so-called “sleeping sickness.” Upon his return to England, he often had to lock himself up in the office in the middle of the working day to get a half an hour of sleep that his exhausted body craved. The hunger he had lived through gave rise to his passion for gourmet restaurants. And because of the uncomfortable shoes that he had to wear in Korea, he developed the habit of taking off his shoes every chance he got, even at his work…
While in captivity, Karl Marx’s Capital in Russian came into his hands and he read it in order to occupy himself with something and to practice the language, but…
- This book turned my mind upside down, it affected me almost like... the Bible in an earlier time. I passionately wanted to bring closer that very bright future which Marx wrote about... Now I understand how naive I was, how much I acted under the influence of romantic impulses, but that is how I became a convinced communist...
Blake told the North Korean guards that he was ready to work for the Soviet Union. After leaving prison, he returned to London to his previous job as if nothing had happened and... became a double agent.
The value of the information that Blake passed on to the USSR can hardly be overestimated: in 10 years, he exposed the names of 400 MI-6 officers and agents whom they recruited in Eastern Europe and he photographed classified documents. But, most importantly, he warned about the existence of secret cable lines thanks to which the British were eavesdropping on the Soviet military units and airfields in the Soviet zone of occupation in Vienna.
In December 1953, at a secret meeting between the Secret Intelligence Service and the CIA, it was decided to lay a tunnel with wiretapping systems to the communication lines of Soviet troops in the GDR. Blake informed Soviet intelligence about the impending operation, and the Center began to use the tunnel to misinform the adversaries. Having used up this resource to the maximum, three years later, the Soviet foreign intelligence “accidentally” found the tunnel. There was a world-wide scandal and our country used the situation to advance its political agenda.
George Blake did not receive a dime from Soviet intelligence - that was the condition he made himself. He solely worked for the idea [the ideology].
On April 12, 1961, on the day of Yury Gagarin’s flight into space, the British newspapers published the news of Blake’s arrest. He was exposed by a Polish defector. Interrogations followed. The interrogators were quite polite since Blake’s ex-colleagues looked at him as if he were a madman: “You worked for the Soviets for free, you believed in communism?!”... He was sentenced to 42 years in prison. But the worst thing was that his family learned about his covert activities not from him, but from the newspapers.
His wife Gillian, who by that time already had two sons with him and was pregnant with the third, did not share her husband’s communist ideas. She worked as a secretary for the British intelligence, and her father, a colonel, was involved in the Soviet monitoring in the past. A few years after the verdict was announced, she told Blake that she found a new love interest and asked for a divorce...
Imprisoned in one of the toughest English prisons, Wormwood Scrubs, Blake was looking for the ways to get out.
-In prison, I practiced yoga, improved my Arabic and... all the time I thought hard how to make an escape. Six years passed like that. And then…
Several Irish dissident prisoners helped him get a radio communication set.
-Through the radio, I sent the message out, Blake says, noting the time when I could make an escape. Seizing the moment - during the broadcast of a football match, when the whole prison was glued to the TV screens, I sawed off the decaying window bar and went down the rope ladder thrown by my friends. The car was already waiting for me below...
Even today, more than half a century later, Blake remembers this story with anxiety and considers his luck to have been fantastic.
- Is it true that one common criminal knew about your impending escape and did not betray you? I asked Georgy Ivanovich.
Blake laughs contentedly:
- Not only that criminal, but also another prisoner was a banker in his previous life. I even gave him the Koran in Arabic as a goodbye gift. They both said: “You are working against the state and so are we! We are on the same side of the barricades ... An English couple active in the peace movement also helped me in my escape... Every year - on the day of my escape - I call them to express my gratitude.
This is just a simple listing of facts, of words ... But, for a moment, think about what charm and power of persuasion you need to possess so that people would help you risking their own lives... They took Blake from England to Berlin in a car with their two children. The fugitive was lying in the trunk ... It’s scary to imagine what would have happened to them had they been found out… Soon he was in the USSR - the country of his dreams.
To Understand and Forgive
- I am often asked whether I experienced shock or disappointment when I saw the realities of Soviet life. Did I regret what I had done? No! There were no ten different types of sausages in the USSR, but here I felt complete freedom, after all, I had just escaped from prison! And my personal life took a positive turn - I married a beautiful Russian woman Ida Kareyeva, my son Misha was born...
The SVR awarded Blake the status of a veteran of the Great Patriotic War - with all the attendant benefits. He was granted a four bedroom apartment and employed as a trade union official at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO). According to him, that was a great job:
- We [often] went on business trips. I organized various official celebrations, I vividly remember that [a bottle of] Algerian port then cost only 7 rubles... We did hardly any work and we had a lot of fun...
And yet his past would sometimes catch up with him. He missed his three sons who were growing up in London.
-When I was in prison, I asked my wife Gillian not to bring them to visit me, Blake recalls. I made an attempt to get closer to them 20 years after the separation. I wrote to my middle son, and he came with my mother and sister to Berlin which I often visited. We talked for two weeks. He left and shared everything with his brothers. Soon they also came to see me. We had a long and difficult conversation on the first evening. My sons did not share my beliefs, but they understood me! They are very religious people and believe that if a person is convinced that something is holy, that can justify his behavior. In England, ideological convictions are generally well-respected. Voltaire’s phrase: “I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it” is taken seriously. In addition, two more circumstances helped my case: my mother [their grandmother] never let my children forget about me, and my first wife did not turn my children against me, for which I am grateful to her.
Now all his four sons - Russian and English – keep in touch, and his Russian grandson even visits his relatives in England to practice the language.
-He’s a modern kid and spends all his time on the Internet, Blake says with a smile.
All Blake’s sons have had successful careers. The oldest son is a scholar of Japan and works in a Japanese firm in London. The middle son is a former military man and now works as a firefighter.
-He will soon turn 60, he is strong and healthy, he already speaks Russian quite well, says Georgy Ivanovich with pride. He has a high social status, because he has a smart wife - she founded a company for helping people with disabilities, that’s a worthy cause.
-My third son, an Anglican priest, worked in a mission in Paraguay. It turns out that he made my youthful dream of pastoral service come true. And my Russian son is a professor at the Higher School of Economics. I have 9 grandchildren. Perhaps, that’s what happiness is all about…
However, in order to be perfectly happy, George Blake still finds something missing.
-Don’t laugh, he warns me. I miss the victory of communism. That which was constructed in the USSR and China is far from the [communist] ideals I believed in. It’s true that the USSR took on global responsibility for the great experiment, but it was not crowned with success. Stalin’s repressions, the persecution of the church, and many aspects of today’s Russia - I cannot approve of any of that. There is more order in the West now than here. However, I predict: the American empire will soon perish, because “all who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” And the decades will pass and the world will understand that there simply cannot be a better model of society than communism - and then all wars will stop...
And what about the religious beliefs of our hero, you ask? During the war, in captivity, and in foreign lands, Blake always found time to attend the services and pray, but his views have undergone great changes.
-I was a Calvinist and believed in predestination, says Blake. And today, having gone through so much, I think: if everything is predetermined, then what is the point of living? I acknowledge Christ as a great man, but not a son of God. I don’t believe in life after death. There is no eternal salvation. And there is no eternal punishment. Only silence all around...
- That sounds like a very sad toast. By the way, what are you drinking? I ask him.
- Oh! Blake perks up. I love dry red wine and make mulled wine from it with pleasure.
-Write down the recipe: the wine is diluted with hot water, sugar is added to taste, a little clove is stuck into the orange slices and immersed in the diluted liquid, and then put on low heat for half an hour - just watch it not to boil!
-I hate gin and whiskey, Blake continues. My wife and I sometimes drink vodka. But often she gets annoyed: I can stay with one glass for two hours, and I also dilute vodka with balsam [herbal liqueur].
Finally, I cannot but ask this wise man whose actions affected History in many ways:
- Georgy Ivanovich, do you dream of some future time when intelligence work won’t be needed?
- Yes, but, unfortunately, this won’t happen anytime soon. We live in the world of deception, violence, and competition. This means that our Service [SVR] is very much needed.
George Blake often calls himself “a very lucky man” [English in the original]. But as Herodotus said, good luck follows the brave. Perhaps many of our readers won’t understand how it was possible to work against the country in which your children live. But ... did you ever have a burning idea or a fervent conviction? Have you ever believed in something you were ready to give your life for?
