It was during his time in a North Korean prison that he became a committed Communist, reading the works of Karl Marx and feeling outrage at heavy U.S. He was captured and imprisoned when North Korean troops took Seoul after the Korean War began in 1950. After joining the British navy, he started working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1944.Īfter the war, Blake served briefly in the German city of Hamburg and studied Russian at Cambridge University before being sent in 1948 to Seoul where he gathered intelligence on Communist North Korea, Communist China and the Soviet Far East. He escaped from the Netherlands in World War Two after joining the Dutch resistance as a courier and reached Britain in January 1943. 11, 1922, to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian Jewish father who was a naturalised Briton. Two faces of George Blake: infamous spy and affable party host BECOMING A COMMITTED COMMUNISTīlake was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on Nov. Reflecting on his life in an interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake said he had believed the world was on the eve of Communism. He spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union and then Russia, where he was feted as a hero. He made it through Western Europe undiscovered and crossed the Iron Curtain into East Berlin. In a classic cloak-and-dagger story, he escaped in 1966 with the help of other inmates and two peace activists, and was smuggled out of Britain in a camper van.
Unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison. His case was among the most notorious of the Cold War, alongside those of a separate ring of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five. File Photoīritain says he exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents across Eastern Europe in the 1950s, some of whom were executed as a result of his treason. FILE PHOTO: Soviet secret agent George Blake gestures as he speaks at a presentation of a book of letters written by other spies from a British prison, in Moscow June 28, 2001.
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