In 1922 George Blake was born George Behar in the Netherlands, moved to Egypt when his Egyptian dad died when he was 13, where he met his Marxist cousin, (Blake later said that this encounter shaped his views in later life)

Behar was back in the Netherlands when WWII started, during the German occupation he joined the Dutch resistance as a courier (he was 17 at the time).

In 1942 George Behar escapes the Netherlands, in 1943 arrived to UK via Spain and Gibraltar, changed his last name to Blake.

Joined the Royal Navy, but because he couldn’t serve, but was still useful, was recruited by MI6 and worked under the disguise of a marine.

After WWII ended Blake got sent to Korea, got captured by the communists and became a lifetime communist himself after seeing US bombing of DPRK and reading Marx, deciding to work for USSR’s MGB. Upon returning to the United Kingdom, Blake resumed work with MI6 while secretly passing classified information to the Soviets.

Blake was discovered in 1961 and got 45 years in prison, BUT he was such a gigachad that he and his inmates (Sean Bourke, tried to bomb a costable; Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, anti-war activists) ESCAPED from prison, smuggled Blake across the English Channel in a camper van, then drove across northern Europe and through West Germany to the Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing. Having safely crossed the border without incident, Blake met his handlers in East Germany and completed his escape to Moscow, where he was welcomed as a hero and lived for his entire life. Blake received multiple awards, one from Putin himself on his 85th birthday (Blake was still working for the Russian state security at the time) and wrote two books. He died in 2020, aged 98, virtually blind but still a firm Marxist-Leninist. He was buried as Georgy Ivanovich Bekhter, the name he used from 1965, in Alley of Heroes at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, Moscow.

But what happened to his inmates?

Pat Pottle and Michael Randle were not prosecuted until 1991. Their defence was that they considered Blake’s 42-year sentence to be excessively long and “inhuman”. The jury, despite being directed that they must find the men guilty, acquitted them both. (Ura to Jury Nullification!) Sean Bourke was not prosecuted for his role since Ireland refused to extradite him to the UK to face charges that were political in nature.

  • 2000watts@lemmygrad.mlOP
    11·
    8 days ago

    In an interview, Blake was once asked: “Is there one incident that triggered your decision to effectively change sides?” Blake responded:

    It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American Flying Fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side … that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.

    P.S. I highly recommend you to read the Wikipedia article about him: it is a story of a Great man, and a lot of cool or funny things that happened to him.