UK Edition
'Russian spies must save the world', urges former British double agent and defector George Blake
George Blake, the former British spy who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union, has told Russian spies they must save the world from terrorism and nuclear war, as he prepares to celebrate his 95th birthday.
Blake, who as a member of MI6 reportedly betrayed more than 400 British agents to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has lived in Russia since he escaped prison in the UK and was smuggled into East Germany in 1966.
The dedicated communist now lives in a country home outside Moscow, where he used to socialise with fellow double agent Kim Philby. He will turn 95 on Saturday.
In a statement released by Russia's foreign intelligence agency, Blake warned younger agents in Russia's foreign intelligence service that the world is gripped in a “real war of good and evil” but said he believed they could achieve a “final victory over the villainous enemy”.
“You face a difficult and important mission to save the world in a situation when the danger of nuclear war and the corresponding self-destruction of humanity has again been put on the agenda by irresponsible politicians, when terrorism has raised its head and leaves its bloody traces in many corners of our planet,” Blake wrote.
He also recalled his decision to began collaborating with his new “motherland” after seeing civilians he said were killed by US forces in Korea.
Sergei Naryshkin, head of the foreign intelligence service, congratulated Blake on his birthday and said he was an “example for all SVR staff to follow”.
Blake was born in Rotterdam in 1922 and fought for the Dutch resistance in the Second World War before moving to Britain and joining the secret service.
He began working with the Soviets as a prisoner of the north during the Korean War. When he was freed and deployed to Berlin, he began betraying secrets including a British-American plan to intercept Soviet communications from a tunnel into East Berlin.
Exposed by a Polish defector in 1961, he was sentenced to 42 years, but escaped Wormwood Scrubs prison five years later via a ladder made of knitting needles.