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To George Blake's old pals who had shared his ordeal in a North Korean prisoner of war camp, he was a hero. His courageous defiance of his brutal North Korean captors had earned him the admiration of all. Blake, a British Foreign Service official who had been captured when the North Koreans overran Seoul, treated his guards with contempt and had tried to escape on at least two occasions.

One fellow prisoner of war, British journalist Philip Deane, described in his book a beating he and Blake had received: "George Blake, who got the worst of the ordeal, smiled throughout, his eyebrows cocked ironically at his guard, his beard aggressively thrust forward."
"I find it almost impossible to believe that George Blake could have turned into a traitor," said another fellow POW ten years later, upon learning Blake had confessed that for nine and a half years he had fed the communists a steady flow of Britain's most valued secrets.

"I must admit freely," Blake stated in his confession, "that there was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact." It was during his three years as a prisoner of the communists, Blake said in the signed statement, that he decided that Communism was a better system.

Blake, born in the Netherlands to a British diplomat and a Dutch woman, was trapped there by the German advance when the Second World War broke out in 1940. Interred by the Nazis, he escaped, joined the Dutch resistance and was later recruited by the British as an espionage agent. He served with "valor and distinction" until 1943 when he finally escaped to Britain where he joined the Royal Navy. After the war, Blake was posted to Naval Intelligence, again serving with distinction. His reward, after studying languages including Russian, was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) post working under diplomatic cover as vice-consul in Seoul.

On his release, after being held by the North Koreans for three years, SIS gave Blake leave to recuperate, posting him in April 1955 to the SIS station in West Berlin as deputy director of Technical Operations. His special assignment was to study the Red Army in East Germany, looking for potential defectors amongst its officers.

It was during this assignment that Blake committed his main act of betrayal by telling the KGB about the Berlin Tunnel, which had been bored as a joint effort of the SIS and CIA so that Western intelligence could tap land lines linking East Berlin with Moscow.

Blake's tipoff to the KGB allowed the Russians to use the tunnel to plant information which deceived Western intelligence agencies. Later, when it suited them, the KGB turned the Tunnel Operation into a propaganda victory.

Blake served the KGB well when in 1959 he revealed to the KGB each new plan and move of the West in the delicate East-West Geneva negotiations on the Berlin question.

In early 1961, Howard Roman, a CIA case officer who had been handling a communist intelligence officer positioned as vice-chairman of Polish military intelligence, gave SIS a lead which revealed the KGB had in its possession a list of 26 Polish officials which the SIS considered potential targets for recruitment. The list had been compiled by SIS men in Warsaw and investigations showed it could only have come from George Blake's safe.

Blake, 38, a war hero considered by most of his Foreign Service colleagues as a "splendid chap," married to the daughter of a respected British Foreign Office official and father of two, was arrested and charged in April, 1961, under The Official Secrets Act.

Blake at first was able to successfully stonewall all questions of the SIS interrogator, but later broke down and admitted his guilt. He was brought to court and tried at the Old Bailey courtroom. Chief Justice Lord Parker took only 53 minutes to reach his decision. Blake's treason, he commented, "rendered much of this country's efforts completely useless."

Lord Parker then sentenced Blake to 42 years in prison, the longest term ever imposed under English law for espionage during peacetime. The severity of Blake's sentence was explained at the trial as one year for each of the 42 British agents whose torture and death he caused.

Blake served only five and a half years before escaping from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in West London. He vanished, only to surface in Moscow a year later.

Many believe the KGB organized Blake's escape by contracting out some of the worst of the IRA. Sean Bourke, the Irish criminal who organized Blake's escape, detailed the escape in his book, The Springing of George Blake.

According to Bourke, in order to escape, Blake had to break an iron framed window, slide down a roof dropping to the ground, then climb over an 18 foot wall on a rope ladder, made by Bourke, and again dropping the final few feet. This feat was accomplished by Blake, an unathletic man, in a matter of minutes.

Bourke states that after hiding Blake in various flats in London, he was then smuggled to East Berlin by an Anglo-Irish couple who had hidden him in a secret compartment in a camping van. Today, Blake is in Moscow married to a Russian girl named Ida. They have a son, Mischa. Bourke, 47, died mysteriously in Ireland. He was found dead in his bed on 26 January, 1982, apparently from alcohol poisoning.

"How was it possible for a man in a key position to be a top Soviet spy for nine and a half years, without being discovered," the British press demanded at the time of Blake's conviction.

The government replied with the traditional blank stare.