Cold War British-Soviet double agent George Blake dies at age of 98

Former Cold War British-Soviet double agent George Blake, who was convicted of five charges relating to the Official Secrets Act for exposing British MI6 agent's identities to Russia died on December 26. After he was convicted for treason by the British government, Blake had fled to Moscow the 4th year after he was sentenced to Wormwood Scrubs prison for collusion. The spy turned popular after his life was adapted in a 1995 play by Simon Gray. According to Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency’s report, he died aged 98 SVR, spokesman Sergei Ivanov told RIA news agency. Ivanov reportedly announced that Russia received some ‘bitter news’, adding that the legendary George Blake passed away.

Blake was accused by the British government of treason for revealing sensitive intelligence information to Russia Eastern Europe in the 1950s. He was among the last handful of notorious spies in the 1960s and 1970s Cold War era who belonged in a separate ring of British double agents and not the Cambridge Five. Blake was sentenced to 42 years after he was exposed as a Soviet spy by KGB defector Michael Goleniewski in 1961. But in a case that shook Britain, he was smuggled out of London prison with the assistance of inmates and two peace activists, through Western Europe as he managed to cross the Iron Curtain and escaped to the East Berlin. The spy then spent real of his life in the Soviet Union and later, in Russia. In an exclusive interview with Reuters in Moscow in 1991, Blake purported that the world was on ‘eve of communism’ and propagated the idea largely. 

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Sent to Berlin by MI6

Blake, according to reports, was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on November 11th, 1922, to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian Jewish father who were both neutralized in Britain. In 1948, Blake was in Seoul where he gathered intelligence on communist North Korea and China. In 1950, he was imprisoned in North Korea and returned to Britain in 1953. Blake was then sent to Berlin by MI6 to spy on the Soviet Union, he, however, turned against Britain. Internet remembered the double agent on his passing. 

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