George Blake
From The Stasi Files
Please remember that this is a fictional account, based on works of fiction
Contents |
Birth & Family
George Behar was the son of Albert and Catherine Behar.
Second World War
On the 10th of May 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, he was at school and staying at his grandmothers house on the edge of Rotterdam and the following day he was captured by two Gestapo agents who were rounding up aliens and suspects as George held a British passport. He was interned near Alkmar, north of Amsterdam and escaped on his 18th birthday, his 63rd day of internment and made his way to an uncles house at Warnveld in Gelderland.
In 1943, he met the British Captain Holmes, who was conducting immigration interviews, and claimed that he was part of the Dutch Resistance group that operated in Limburg and Gelderland. This resistance group was actually communist run and there he became drawn into a more positive commitment to communism, rather than just only fighting the Nazi invaders. His job in the Resistance, under the cover name of Max de Vries, was a courier and helped receive SOE parachutists before a Commander Child, advised him of the Guerisses "Pat" Escape Line which he subsequently used. Once granted immigration, and proven to be a British subject, he joined his mother and sisters on the farm in High Wycombe and changed his surname to Blake. In November of the same year, he joined Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman, before his superiors realised that his fluency in Dutch, German, French and English enabled them to recommend him for a commission and he became a sub-lieutenant in the RNVR early in 1944. He was subsequently transferred to the Dutch section of the SOE and finally as an interpreter to SHAEF HQ. When the Germans surrender to Field Marshall Montgomery on Lüneburg Heath, he is shown in the official photographs standing next to the Field Marshall. At the end of the war he was honoured by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands with the Order of Nassau, Fourth Class.
Post War Years & Korean War
In 1945, whilst based in Hamburg, George Blake was recruited to help MI6, in a minor role, the counter-intelligence operations against the Russians in the British Zone. He was then sent to to take Russian language course at Downing College, Cambridge where he did outstandingly well before in 1948 he was posted as His Britannic Majesty's Vice Consul to the Legation in Seoul. On Sunday, the 25th of June 1950, whilst George Blake was watching the The Third Man at the cinema, the film came ot an an abrupt end as the North Koreans had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and started the Korean War.Two days after the North Koreans had taken Seoul, now six days into the war, Captain Holt who was the British Minister, George Blake and Consul Owen were captured by the North Koreans and interrogated in the outskirts of Seoul, before moving to Pyongyang, and then Man-po. At the end of October, the three of them with other prisoners were force marched to Chung-Kang-Djan, before moving to the larger camp at the nearby village of Hadjang. There they were subjected to a crude form of indoctrination by their North Korean captors, before in the autumn of 1951, the trio and certain other key prisoners were removed to a farmhouse at Moo-Yong-Nee where the indoctrination team was headed by Gregori Kuzmich, however on the 20th of March 1953, the three diplomats, were taken to Pyongyang, the journey lasted two lasted two days and sights witnessed were used as further proof of the West's criminality and after flying via Antung, Peking, Moscow they were handed over to the British authorities in Berlin. On the 21st of April 1953, they arrived back to a heroes welcome in Berkshire.
Berlin
After recovering from his experiences in Korea, George Blake, joined the SIS and married his secretary Gillian on the 23rd of September 1954 and they were both transferred to Berlin in 1955 and settled in a flat in Platanen Allee. There George Blake worked for both sides, Russians and British, and had minor successes in capturing expendable Russian spies. One spy caught was Paul Kretski, a violin maker and Soviet Radioman, and this success, the British suggested that he should penetrate the Soviet Intelligence by posing as a double agent, thus inadvertently giving him the perfect cover to his current double agent reality.
His controller was KGB Colonel Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov, and Blake revealed the planned workers rising in East Berlin for the 17th of June 1955 in exchange for a low level Soviet agent who would cement George Blake's position within the SIS. George Blake betrayed the safe location of the East German defector General Robert Bialek, Inspector General of the East German Volkspolizie, who was previously in charge of the Stasi, and Bialek was subsequently captured by the Russians and later shot. George Blake's highpoint was the betrayal of the Berlin Tunnel, Operation Gold, to Petrov, and when offered payment, he simply refused saying that "I've never done it for cash and I never will. I do it for Moscow and the Party. And for no other reason". Once the tunnel was made public to the worlds press in a great propaganda victory for the Soviets, Blake was seconded to the British team evaluating the names of the British of who could have betrayed it's existence.
Blake exposed two more expendable Soviet agents to the British and this success gave him the responsibility for almost the the whole MI6 operation in Berlin and the access to all the Allied networks in East Berlin, coupled with all the top secret papers from the Cabinet and Foreign Office which allowed him to betray the Allied plans for the four Foreign ministers meeting in Geneva in May 1959 which was to discuss troops in Berlin. Blake returned a hero, to both sides, to London in April 1959
Suspicion & Capture & Escape
In 1960-1961, Suspicion began to grow on Blake, now a father with two children, through the capture of other Soviet agents, and the surveillance by Special Branch of Blake at his dead letter drops at Bromley South station. Blake was named as a double agent by the Polish defector Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Goleniewski, head of the Polish secret service, Z-2 in East Berlin. George Blake was posted to the Beirut spy-school, MECAS, the Middle East College for Arabic Studies, before he was asked to return to London on the 3rd of April 1961 and was arrested the next day at the SIS offices. George Blake pleaded guilty and was sentenced to forty-two years in Wormwood Scrubs. On Friday, 21st of October 1966, after five years in jail, he escaped with outside help from Sean Adolphus Bourke, ex-IRA and a former prison companion.
Death
In Edenbridge, Kent, two days later as one of the largest and costliest man-hunts raged, Petrov and the Russian mole Dyer, who is a senior member of SIS, assassinated and buried George Blake.
References
ISBN 0583134866 Shadow of Shadows by Ted Allbeury
Locations
37°34′0.5154″ N 126°58′30.6258″ E 39°1′53″ N 125°45′13″ E 41°2′9″ N 126°10′30″ E 41°9′36″ N 126°18′35″ E 51°31′22.764″ N 0°9′5.292″ W 52°30′49.6974″ N 13°16′8.7702″ E 52°31′25.374″ N 13°26′41.658″ E 51°24′0.1764″ N 0°1′6.1602″ E 33°46′58.5402″ N 35°32′49.9524″ E
