George Blake, British double-agent, dies in Moscow at age 98

Dec. 26 (UPI) — British double agent George Blake, a former MI6 spy who revealed a secret tunnel in Berlin to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and escaped from a London jail in 1966, has died in Moscow at age 98.

“Books have been written about him, films have been made,” Sergei Ivanov, the head of the press bureau of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti on Saturday. “In intelligence he was highly respected and appreciated. [Blake] himself jokingly said: ‘I am a foreign car that has adapted to Russian roads … ‘ Now this foreign car has completed its almost century-old run.”

Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1922 to a Dutch mother and Anglo-Egyptian father, Blake served as a Dutch resistance fighter in World War II, and then served in the British navy and became a British diplomat after obtaining British citizenship.

Through MI6, Blake was sent to Seoul before the Korean War in 1948. During the war, he was captured and interned in a North Korean prison camp for 17 months. It was there that Blake decided he wanted to work for the Soviet Union.

When released, Blake went back to working for British intelligence and in 1953 was sent to Berlin, where he is said to have exposed the entire British spy network of 40 agents in Eastern Europe and the Middle East to the Soviets. Some of those agents were executed and others imprisoned.

Blake told Pravda in 1990 that his “greatest exploit” was revealing to the Soviets the existence of the “Berlin tunnel” built by the CIA in the 1950s.

“If I had to live my life over again, I would choose the same path,” Blake said in 1990. “I desperately needed espionage work in my life. Time itself summoned me to serve socialist ideals.”

Blake was convicted in Britain as a Soviet spy in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison.

Blake escaped from Wormwoods Scrubs Prison in 1965 with the help of two British sympathizers, who smuggled in a two-way radio, a saw and a rope ladder strengthened with knitting needles. He fled across Europe to the East German border and into the Soviet Union, where he lived in relative obscurity.

In 2000, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Blake was supposedly working as an advisor at Moscow’s foreign intelligence SVR school for future spies, helping to polish their English and manners.

In 2007, he was awarded a medal by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and received a pension from the former KGB security service.

He married a Russian woman and went by the Russian name Georgy Ivanovich, sometimes socializing with British double agent Kim Filby in Moscow. Blake authored two memoirs, No Other Choice and Transparent Walls.