He was caught spilling secrets to the Soviets in 1961 and imprisoned. Five years later, he escaped and fled to Moscow, where he was hailed a hero.
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. The Kremlin confirmed his death on Saturday. “Colonel Blake was a brilliant professional of a special kind and courage,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said in a statement. “In the years of his difficult and intense service, he made a truly invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic parity and preserving peace on the planet.” Like the Cambridge-educated moles Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Blake became a dedicated Marxist, disillusioned with the West, and a high British intelligence officer while secretly working for the Soviets. His clandestine life lasted less than a decade, but had cost the lives of many agents and had destroyed vital British and American operations in Europe. But unlike the Cambridge clique, who defected when the authorities closed in, 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 London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison 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, Blake assumed the identity of Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk, 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 on his 85th birthday in 2007, received the Order of Friendship from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He wrote an autobiography, “No Other Choice” (1990) and a memoir, “Transparent Walls” (2006). In a 1991 interview with NBC News, Blake voiced regret over the deaths of agents he had exposed, but not over his espionage. He denied being a traitor, insisting he had never regarded himself as British, though he was the son of a naturalized subject. “To betray, you first have to belong,” he later said.
