George blake biography

George Blake, unified of picture most disgraceful double agents of interpretation Cold Warfare, died shakeup Boxing Apportion , ancient He stands in a long contributions of Hesperian communists who turned quisling. He betrayed the take advantage of hundreds of Country agents put aside the USSR. About 40 of them are thoughtfulness to imitate been executed. Why frank the Brits spy be a factor over count up the Land Union? Submit what does his composition tell lucid about depiction Cold War?

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I talk with acclaimed author and journalist Simon Kuper, has written The Happy Traitor, the story of British spy and Soviet Union double agent George Blake, the last major British traitor of the Cold War.

A deeply human read, wonderfully written, on the foibles of a fascinating, flawed, treacherous and sort of likeable character.&#; Philippe Sands

 

In , Blake was sentenced to forty-two years imprisonment – at the time, the longest sentence in modern British history. He had betrayed all the western spying operations that he knew about to the KGB. This included the names of hundreds of British agents working around the world. About forty of them are believed to have been executed. Blake is reckoned to have done as much damage to British interests as did his Moscow companions Kim Philby and Donald Maclean – perhaps more.

Today, his story is known only to a few experts, and only insofar as anything can be known for certain in the world of deceit that is spying. MI6 has never made its files on him public. Now that the master spy has died, Simon Kuper finally sets the story straight. He unravels who Blake truly was through a combination of personal interviews, research in many languages, and use of almost unseen Stasi archives. His illuminating biography tracks Bla

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My book The Happy Traitor began more than 20 years ago when I chanced upon an article in a Dutch magazine. It was by a radio journalist who had interviewed George Blake, a British Dutchman who had started out spying for the British and wound up a KGB double agent. I’d never heard of Blake before, but was struck by the similarities in our backgrounds: we’re both British, Jewish (half, in his case), cosmopolitan, and we grew up in the Netherlands within 20 miles of each other.

Blake had had a fascinating life: from Dutch Resistance to captivity in North Korea to spying for MI6 in Berlin while secretly working for the Soviets, getting the longest jail sentence in modern British history, then legging it from Wormwood Scrubs to Moscow, where he ended up watching communism collapse. And the amazing thing to me, reading the article in , was that this relic of history was still alive and able to reflect on it all.

I decided I wanted to interview him, too. The story of how I got to him is in the book, but suffice to say that one morning in May I found myself walking into the roomy garden of his dacha outside Moscow. We spent about three hours together, and given that he was a de facto serial killer, who had sent perhaps 40 agents of the UK to their deaths, we got on frighteningly w