George Blake, a double spy who handed over secret Western information to the Soviet Union while belonging to a British intelligence agency during the Cold War, died on the 26th. Blake is holding a press conference in Moscow, Russia in January 1992. Moscow = AP Newsis
George Blake, a “double spy” of the former Soviet Union, died at the age of 98.
A spokesman for the Russian intelligence agency’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said through his own communications TASS that Blake died on the 26th (local time). President Vladimir Putin mourned his death, evaluating the deceased as “an outstanding expert and a man of great courage.”
Blake, who worked for the British intelligence agency MI6, famous for the spy movie 007, was a person who shocked the West during the Cold War when it was revealed that he was a Soviet Union agent. In the 1950s, he handed over the identities of 400 Western spies active in Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, drove them to death, and inflicted a blow to the West. Born in the Netherlands, he stole the secrets that Britain and the United States installed military eavesdropping devices in an underground tunnel leading to East Berlin. It is said that the Soviet Union used the device as a tool for spilling disinformation (false information deliberately leaking out to trick the enemy) to Britain and the United States for over a year.
Blake’s identity was revealed in 1961. He was sentenced to 42 years in prison and imprisoned in British prison. However, five years later, in 1966, he passed the prison wall and escaped. A fellow prisoner and an released prisoner helped him. He broke through the Iron Curtain, settled in East Berlin and crossed over to the Soviet Union.
Following the Soviet Union, he was also a national hero in Russia. President Putin, who appreciated his Cold War merit, gave him a medal in 2007. President Putin’s support for Blake was once the subject of a diplomatic conflict between Russia and Britain.
It seems that Blake’s life was comfortable. As a former lieutenant colonel of the National Security Council (KGB), he received a pension, and under the Russian name Gregory Ivanovich, he helped educate spies.
From the start, Blake wasn’t a double spy. He came to Seoul with the title of deputy consul at the British Embassy in Korea in 1948, collected information on North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union on the East Asian side, and established an intelligence system. He was captured by the North Korean People’s Army along with other diplomats during the Korean War in 1950. I was in captivity.
It was then that Blake became disillusioned with the West. In an interview with the British Independent in 2011, he asked a question about the moment of his transformation, “I was embarrassed to see that huge US bombers raid small North Korean villages with only women, children, and the elderly without appreciation, and that they belong to Western countries.” I thought it would be better for mankind when the system was victorious and the war was over.”
Kwon Kyung-seong reporter [email protected]
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