George Blake, originally surnamed Beha. Recipient of the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of the USSR.
George Black
Born on November 11, 1922 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father, Albert Beha, was an English Turk and his mother was descended from dutch aristocrats. After his father died of illness, 13-year-old Blake went to live with his aunt in Egypt. In Cairo, Blake spent three years with his uncle, Henry Kurier, who later became the leader of the Egyptian Communist Party, and the young Blake, influenced by his uncle, received an early communist education. At the age of 16, Blake returned to the Netherlands.
Blake in his youth
When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the Gestapo arrested Blake and put him in a concentration camp. Although the camp was heavily guarded by the SS, Blake managed to escape and successfully escape to his uncle's house, his first escape. Soon he joined the local resistance movement, acting as a messenger for the resistance, carrying out several dangerous missions to pass on intelligence. After the war, Blake was also awarded the Order of the Cross of Nassau, 4th Class by the Queen of the Netherlands.
Order of Nassau
In order to escape the Gestapo, Blake traveled to England and signed up for the British Navy. A few months later, his superiors discovered Blake's gift for languages — proficiency in English, Dutch, French, and German. Therefore, he was sent to the officers' school for training. After training, Blake worked for a time in the naval intelligence department before moving to the Dutch branch of the Special Operations Committee to intercept and decipher codes.
By the end of World War II, Blake had been promoted to captain and served as an intelligence officer on a British warship in Hamburg. In 1947, on the recommendation of Kenneth Cohen, an official of the Special Intelligence Service, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to hire Blake and sent him to downing college, Cambridge, to study Russian. Blake's studies at Downing College lasted a year and he graduated fluently in Russian. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs assigned him to the Ninth Division and One Section of the Foreign Affairs Bureau and temporarily served as Acting Consul. In fact, Blake's real identity is that of a Secret Intelligence Agency (MI6) agent.
A view of the Downing College building
A few months later, Blake was notified to take up a post in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. So, in 1949, when Blake arrived in Seoul, no one expected it, and the trip to the Far East completely changed its fate.
On June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out. When the Korean People's Army invaded Seoul, everyone in the British legation, including Blake, immediately became prisoners. Later, members of the British and French missions were detained by North Korea in Manchuria on the Yalu River.
KPA T-34 tanks entering Seoul
In North Korea, he witnessed the fainting incompetence of Syngman Rhee's regime and was deeply touched by the brutal bombing of North Korean villages by American planes, according to Blake's memoirs in his later years. In North Korean internment camps, the Soviet Union and North Korea began to "brainwash" Blake and others, instilling communist ideas in them. The Ministry of Political Education of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR also sent ideology expert Glegory Kuzmić to try to plot against these "prisoners of war". In the 17th month after his arrest, Black told Kuzmić that he was already a believer in communism and was willing to serve the KGB
(Interestingly, Kuzmich later defected to the United States to join the CIA.)
But he proposed three conditions for working for the SOVIET UNION:
First, he provided only information on British intelligence activities related to opposition to communist countries;
Second, he does not accept honorariums;
Third, there is no need to release him early. In short, since then, Blake has been a SPY for the KGB.
In March 1953, Blake and British ministers, consuls and others returned to Britain via Beijing, Moscow and West Berlin under the arrangement of the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. There they were warmly welcomed by senior officials at the British Foreign Office. After a period of recuperation, Blake was assigned to the Cromwell Street division of MI6, specializing in eavesdropping and secretly unsealing diplomatic pouches.
MI6 - Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
In the spring of 1955, Blake was assigned to the secret intelligence station of the Olympic Stadium in West Berlin as deputy director of the Technical Operations Department, and his special mission was to study the situation of soviet troops in Germany and to identify possible traitors among Soviet officers. It was at this point that Blake's superiors discovered that he was in contact with the Soviets, but thought he was only trying to pass on false information to the Soviets. As a result, Blake served the Soviet Union, later chartered by the Secret Intelligence Service. But they never imagined that Black's true allegiance was to the KGB, not to the MI6.
KGB (KGB) logo
While working at MI6's London headquarters, Black provided the Soviet Union with the Secret Intelligence Agency's "battle sequence": a global staff list and job profile.
The most important intelligence was during his four years in Berlin, where he reported to the KGB on the establishment of a spy network by britain's secret intelligence service, which included a list of nearly 400 spies recruited in communist countries. Allegedly, 42 British spies died at his hands as a result of Blake's defection, for which the British judicial authorities sentenced Blake to 42 years in prison.
The first life Blake owed was lieutenant general Biawek, the head of the East German National Security Agency. In 1953, he defected to West Berlin, where he changed his name and surname and was secretly placed in a safe place in West Berlin. Białek received special care, with the Secret Intelligence Service installing safety locks in his apartment and alarms to contact British security officials, who knew that the KGB would never be merciful to traitors.
Unfortunately, one day in February 1956, Biawick was very happy, and went out for a walk without security personnel, and as soon as he reached the entrance of the alley, two people flashed out of the shadows, pounced on Biawick, and dragged him into a small car that was already waiting there. The British government repeatedly made representations to the Soviet government, but the Soviet authorities denied that they knew the whereabouts of Białek, and the British were "dumb and eating yellow, and they could not say anything about it." It turned out that Białek's house was in an alley with Blake's residence, and Blake immediately informed the KGB when he discovered the secret. Since then, Białek has disappeared from this world.
Former East German soldiers
Another one who was betrayed by Blake was
GRU (Soviet Military System Intelligence System)
Peter Popov. In Vienna in 1953, Popov secretly defected to the CIA and soon became the most effective spy in the postwar service to the West. During his two years in Vienna, he provided intelligence on more than 400 Soviet spies lurking in the West. When he was transferred from Vienna to East Berlin, he temporarily lost contact with the CIA, so he wrote a letter to the liaison to forward to the British military mission that was visiting East Germany. According to the workflow, the letter should first be handed over to the local intelligence station of the Secret Intelligence Service, which will then contact the CIA. The letter then reached Blake of the Berlin Intelligence Service. Blake lived up to his mission and handed the letter to the CIA as scheduled. However, before handing over the letter, he had read the contents of the letter.
Upon receiving the report, the GRU immediately recalled Popov to Moscow and secretly monitored his whereabouts. One day in October 1959, Popov was caught on the spot by GRU while passing information on a Moscow bus to a CIA spy at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Popov's fate was tragic, and in front of many GRU colleagues, he was thrown alive into a fiery furnace and burned to death.
Interior view of the Berlin Tunnel
On April 22, 1956, while repairing cables, a signal engineer of the Soviet Union suddenly fell into the tunnel, and the Berlin Tunnel was inadvertently exposed. The Soviet Union immediately held a press conference, accusing the Americans of invading Soviet jurisdiction and asking many journalists to visit the tunnel leading to the American occupation zone. At the same time, the Media of the United States and Britain also hyped up, saying that the eavesdropping operation of the tunnel in the past three years was the greatest success of the West in the Cold War. It wasn't until 1961, after the Black spying case, that British and American intelligence realized they had been tricked by the Soviets.
After four years in Berlin, Blake was transferred back to the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service in London in 1959. However, he did not stay in London for long. After the Suez Canal crisis, Britain, France and Israel launched a war of aggression against Egypt in a vain attempt to retake the canal, but they were unexpectedly defeated. Britain felt compelled to send a multi-Chinese man to the Middle East so that it could maintain its due influence in the Arabic-speaking countries of the Persian Gulf, such as Jordan, Kuwait and other Persian Gulf. So they remembered the "language genius" Blake and sent him to Lebanon to learn Arabic.
While in Berlin, Blake developed a double-agent named Horst Etna, who had previously served in the agency of General Reinhard Glenn, the head of West German intelligence, and was later fired for living extravagantly. The British Secret Intelligence Service agreed that Etner would provide false information to the KGB under Black's leadership.
In the same month that Black arrived in Lebanon, Etna's wife, because her husband was having an affair, was furious and reported him to the Federal German Secret Service. The Secret Service arrested Etna, accusing him of providing intelligence to the Soviet Union. In prison, Etna confessed to his dual agent status and confessed that he had gathered intelligence for the Soviets at the instigation of an Englishman named "Van Frith", who was Black's pseudonym. The Federal Republic of Germany informed the Secret Intelligence Service, but they ignored it, since Blake's contact with Etna was approved by the Secret Intelligence Service. Blake was lucky enough to pass this time, but soon after, he was not so lucky.
"Sniper" is the code name of Michael Golenezki, deputy director of the Intelligence Department of the Polish General Staff, who is a spy for the CIA. The man's whereabouts were so mysterious that before he defected in 1961, even the CIA did not know his nationality and true identity, only that he had close ties to the KGB.
One intelligence provided by the Sniper said the KGB had obtained a secret intelligence agency document listing British spies in Poland. The CIA informed the Secret Intelligence Service of this information, and the leaders of the Secret Intelligence Bureau looked at each other in disbelief and could not believe that there was another Philby. The Sniper also revealed that an extremely active KGB spy was hidden inside the Secret Intelligence Bureau, code-named "Diamond". However, the Secret Intelligence Service searched all the agents at the headquarters and the Polish spy station, but found nothing, not only did the "diamond" not be found, but the existence of the "sniper" was exposed. Diamond immediately reported to the KGB that there was a spy in the Polish Intelligence Service working for the West, code-named "Sniper", but his identity was not known. Both the Sniper and the Diamond are aware of each other's existence and are aware that the other can put themselves to death, so they eagerly demand that their masters eliminate the traitors.
The KGB moved faster than MI6, but alas, they found the wrong person. Since Golenniewski was the direct head of counterintelligence within the Polish Ministry of Intelligence and had always received the KGB's weight, the KGB entrusted him with the task of digging up the 'pig' ("pig" is the KGB's name for traitors), and A surprised Golennezki fled to the United States after learning about the situation.
MI6 experts immediately traveled to the United States to investigate the status of the list. After learning that MI6 had not yet found the "diamond", Golennezki was frightened, he was afraid that the person who came to interrogate him was the "diamond", and perhaps he was ordered by the KGB to kill him, so he denounced MI6's incompetence. Eventually, however, he cooperated with the Secret Intelligence Service, telling them that the KGB had obtained not a list from the secret intelligence service headquarters and Poland, but from an intelligence officer at a Berlin intelligence station. Moreover, after 1960, the confidential documents provided by Diamond were abruptly interrupted, and at that time, Blake happened to be sent to Beirut to learn Arabic.
Waking up from a dream, MI6 believed in the existence of the Diamond, and the spy was George Blake. They hastily transferred Blake from Beirut back to London, and from then on, Blake was subjected to endless scrutiny and eventually confessed to all the espionage he had carried out for the KGB.
On 3 May 1961, the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced George Black to 42 years in prison for treason, britain's harshest sentence since the abolition of the death penalty. Black was initially held in Scraboo prison in north London and was classified as a "special guardian" prisoner, a special measure for inmates at risk of escaping. However, four months later, the Head of the Secret Security Service, Sir Roger Hollis, informed the prison director that the investigation into Blake had been concluded and demanded that Blake's "special custody" be lifted. So the warden placed Blake in an ordinary single cell in the fourth row of cells and made him a correspondence teacher of Arabic at the prison.
Aerial view of British prisons
Four of the inmates at Scraboo prison played a positive role in Blake's escape from prison. Kenneth Decusi, a financial magnate, was arrested and jailed for fraud and framing. Sean Burke was young and resourceful and played a key role in Black's escape. Michelle Rand and Pat Porter, both Irish, both believed that the British judiciary's verdict against Black was too harsh.
In 1966, Burke was released from prison and began planning an escape for Black. During the film's release on Saturday, Oct. 22, an iron rod was shoved into Black's cell. Blake pried open the iron window with an iron rod and climbed out of the roof. At this time, it was dark and heavy rain was pouring. He ran quickly to the fence 15 feet away, grabbed the nylon rope ladder that Burke had already placed on the wall, and quickly climbed over the wall to escape, unfortunately breaking his arm when he jumped off the wall. Blake hid for two months at a residence north of London, avoiding the peak of police pursuit. Later, Rand Michelle hid Blake under the bed of a sleeper car and crossed the Dover ferry port to Belgium. He then traveled via West Germany to East Germany, where Blake was warmly welcomed by KGB officials and flew to Moscow.
Order of Lenin
Upon his arrival in Moscow, George Blake was warmly received by the Soviet authorities, who awarded him the Order of Lenin and the Red Banner Medal. Since then, Blake has worked in obscurity at the Institute of World Economics and International Relations in Moscow. Nearly 1/4th of a century later, he finally broke the silence and wrote the book "My Spy Career", showing the world's readers an extraordinary life.
The famous Philby (the greatest KGB spy in the history of the Cold War) plunged the British Secret Intelligence Service from the aura of "super secret" into the dark abyss, and Black sprinkled a handful of salt on the wounds of the Secret Intelligence Bureau, completely destroying the reputation of the British intelligence system.
Order of the Red Banner
On November 12, 2007, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service honored George Black, a British agent from the Cold War, to celebrate the 85th birthday of the double agent who hated MI6 to the bone.