George Blake (né Behar; 11 November 1922 – 26 December 2020) was a spy with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union.

[2] He was the son of a Protestant Dutch mother, Catherine (née Beijderwellen),[3] and an Egyptian father of Sephardi Jewish origin who was a naturalised British subject.

[9] While in Cairo, he was close to his cousin Henri Curiel, who was later to become a leader of the Communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation in Egypt.

[13] He intended to marry an MI6 secretary, Iris Peake, but her family prevented the marriage because of Blake's Jewish background and the relationship ended.

[17] At a secret meeting arranged with his guards, he volunteered to work for the Soviet Union's spy service, the MGB.

[10]However, in his first interview, in 1990, with Tom Bower for 'The Confession', a BBC TV documentary, Blake said that he had been tempted towards communism during his Russian course in Cambridge while serving with MI6, and had been finally convinced while reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital during his imprisonment in North Korea.

[20] In October 1954, he married MI6 secretary Gillian Allan in St Mark's Church (North Audley Street) in London.

[24] In the course of nine years, Blake is said to have betrayed details of some forty MI6 agents to the KGB, destroying most of MI6's operations in Eastern Europe, although this remains unsubstantiated.

[19] In 1959 Blake became aware of a Central Intelligence Agency mole inside GRU, and was possibly instrumental in exposing P. S. Popov, who was executed in 1960.

He was arrested when he arrived in London after being summoned from Lebanon, where he had been enrolled at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS).

[11] Five years into his imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, Blake escaped with the help of three men he had met in prison, Sean Bourke and two anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle.

Then between 6 and 7 p.m., while most of the other inmates and guards were at the weekly film showing, Blake climbed through the window, slid down a porch and made his way to the perimeter wall.

They smuggled Blake across the English Channel in a camper van,[33] then drove across northern Europe and through West Germany to the Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing.

[8] Having safely crossed the border without incident, Blake met his handlers in East Germany and completed his escape to the Soviet Union.

Their defence was a claim of moral justification for aiding Blake, whose 42-year sentence they considered to be excessively long and "inhuman".

[35][36] Bourke was not prosecuted for his role since Ireland refused to extradite him to the United Kingdom to face charges that were political in nature.

[37] In November 1966, his wife Gillian, with whom he had three children, began divorce proceedings against him, and in March 1967 Mr Justice Orr granted a decree nisi in Blake's absence, on the grounds that the conviction of a spouse for treason can amount to cruelty or constructive desertion.

This caused Blake a good deal of grief, though he knew that Gillian would have struggled to settle into life in the Soviet Union.

[43] In a 1992 interview for the programme As It Happens, aired by Canada's CBC Radio, Blake praised the general concept of communism.

"[45] In the 1992 CNN series Cold War, former KGB general Oleg Kalugin remarked, "George Blake had that innocent mind, in a sense.

He also wrote that Blake, the 85-year-old colonel of foreign intelligence, "still takes an active role in the affairs of the secret service".

[50] In a November 2017 statement, he claimed that its spies now have "the difficult and critical mission" of saving the world "in a situation when the danger of nuclear war and the resulting self-destruction of humankind again have been put on the agenda by irresponsible politicians.

[55] Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself an ex-KGB agent, expressed his "deep condolences" to Blake's family and friends.

In a message published on the Kremlin website, the Russian leader noted Blake's "invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic parity and maintaining peace on the planet.

[60] Desmond Bagley's 1971 novel The Freedom Trap and its screen version, John Huston's The Mackintosh Man from 1973, were loosely based on Blake's prison escape.

Le Carré later recalled "when I started putting together my little bestiary of suspects, I made sure there were at least two of them...who were alienated by birth from the class structure that they served.

It covers his escape from prison and his flight to a Czechoslovakian border post with East Germany in a camper van's hidden compartment.