One of the most famous western defectors, former British intelligence officer George Blake, aka George Bekhter died in Moscow

He never doubted the correctness of his choice and was a convinced communist

Anti -fascist adolescence and youth in the British Fleet

On December 26, 2020, in Moscow, at the age of 98, George Blake died of heart stop, the famous British and then Soviet intelligence officer. He was born in 1922 in Rotterdam under the name George Behar in the family of an Egyptian Jew, who became a British citizen and Dutch. When his father died in 1936, the Bukharov family moved to relatives in Egypt, where George became close to his senior cousin Henri Curiel, a prominent activist of the anti -colonial movement. Curiel was a convinced Marxist, which influenced the formation of George's life views.

By the beginning of the Second World War, George returned to the Netherlands, which soon after his arrival occupied the Nazi troops. George was captured for a while, but was released because of his minority: he was then 17 years old. He joined the Dutch anti -fascist resistance, and in 1942 he fled from the country to the UK, where he reunited with his mother and sisters. In 1943, George's mother changed her name from Behar to Blake.

Having reached the age of majority, George has already become a sailor in the British Royal Fleet and soon recruited a foreign intelligence service (SIS, a secret intelligence service, better known as Mi-6). In 1947, he entered the Dauning College of Cambridge University, where he taught the Russian language (this period of his life came in the last years of the Cambridge Five , but Blake met its members only many years later in Moscow).

In 1948, Blake was sent to the British embassy in Seoul, where he was engaged in espionage for the North Korean Communists and the Soviet Far East as vice-consul. In 1950, the Korean war began, and soon Seoul was taken by the troops of the Communist Korean People’s Army. So Blake was captured again.

How Blake became a Soviet spy

It was in the North Korean captivity that Blake was recruited by Soviet intelligence - and as he declared himself, his transition to the side of the ideological enemy was a voluntary and conscious step. Subsequently, Blake said that this decision was influenced by the destruction of peaceful Korean villages what he saw by American bombers, whose victim he almost became.

In 1954, freed from the North Korean captivity, Blake returned to Britain, where he was met as a hero, married and continued to work for British intelligence - already as a double agent. He was sent to Berlin, where he was supposed to overlap Soviet agents. At the same time, he reported everything to Moscow. The most successful operation of the KGB with its participation is the introduction of the CIA and Mi-6 Gold into a joint operation. During this operation, a tunnel was dug under the eastern Berlin, with the help of which Western intelligence listened to negotiations on a telephone cable between the GDR and the USSR. At the same time, the KGB knew about this operation from Blake and, in order to preserve his agent, did not interfere with the activities of Western intelligence officers.

In total, during his work at the KGB, Blake handed the Soviet side the data of hundreds of Western agents, informants and defectors (for example, the GRU employee Peter Popov recruited by the CIA). It is believed that Blake handed over about 40 people alone. Six of them were found in the archives of the Stasi British journalists. Some of those whom Blake opened spent 17 years in East German prisons. At least one was transported to Moscow and shot there.

Blake himself passed the Polish defector Mikhal Golenevsky. In 1961, Blake was urgently recalled from Lebanon to London. During the interrogation, he did not deny anything - besides the fact that he was tortured in North Korean captivity - and confessed to everything.

Under British laws, the maximum term for violation of the law on state secrets in peacetime is 14 years. The court appointed Blake three such periods in a row - 42 years in total. At that time, it was the longest prison term ever awarded by the British court (the record was beaten only in 1986 by the Jordan Nazir Hendavi for trying to undermine the aircraft of the Israeli Ale Al ali; he received 45 years in prison).

George Blake began to serve his term in the London prison of Wormwood-Skrabs. Five years later, he managed to flee with the help of his cellmate, the Irish, who was serving the deadline for sending a bomb by a police constel, and two anti -war activists. Then he was transported by a ferry through the La-Channel to Europe, where he crossed the border between Germany and the GDR was transported in a converted van with a secret luggage department. From there he was transported to Moscow, where he lived until his death.

His liberators, activists of the nuclear disarmament Michael Randle and Pat Potl, wrote the book “How we freed George Blake - and why” in 1989.

Colonel Georgy Ivanovich

In the USSR, George Blake received a Soviet passport in the name of George Bekhter, the title of Colonel of the KGB and the position of an employee of IMEMO . In addition, in Moscow he married a second time (his first wife filed for divorce after his transition to the Soviet side). He was introduced to the future wife of Ida was introduced by the wife of Kim Filby Rufin Pukhov-Filby. In 1990, he released an autobiography entitled “There is no other choice” (the British government tried to ban the publisher Blake to pay him a fee for the book).

In the same year, Blake first appeared on television screens in the documentary “Confession” of the joint production of “BBC” and APN (future RIA Novosti). In it, Blake, among other things, tells about his spiritual evolution: “I could no longer remain a believing Christian, and a vacuum formed in my philosophical worldview. <...> Although I was not a Christian already in the full sense, many Christian ideas were still close to me, especially the desire of the Church with a prayer and preaching to create the Kingdom of God. The Communists sought to achieve the same, but with the help of action. As a result, I came to the conclusion that I was fighting on the wrong side. I mean that, as an officer of SIS, I was not just an outside observer, but an active participant in the Cold War against communism. <...> There is no need to fight communism - we must give him a chance. "

Director Ksenia Shergova, who spoke a lot with Blake during the filming, told Medusa that he was a man who deeply believed in what he was doing a right -handed thing. “And even perestroika did not very move him from the communist idea. - says Shergova. “He really was a convinced fighter for the best future of all mankind.”

Blake, until his death, had never expressed doubts about the fidelity of the chosen path. The only thing he repented was that his reports led to the death of many people, as he admitted in an interview with the American television channel NBC.

Before his death, Blake lived near Moscow at his cottage in Kratovo. One of the first condolences to his family was expressed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The message on the Kremlin’s website under the heading of “relatives and friends of George Ivanovich (George) Blake” says: “Colonel Blake was a brilliant professional - a special life hardening and courage. Over the years of difficult, hard work, he made a truly invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic parity, preserving peace on the planet. The bright memory of this legendary man will forever remain in our hearts. ” And the British newspaper The Sun in her necrologist called Blake "a sadly famous traitor."

Alexey Kovalev