JAMES BOND, he was not!

Have you ever heard of GEORGE BLAKE? Well neither had I, as far back as I can remember, but I heard an announcement the other day on some internet news station that made me hit the “rewind” button and then listen more closely. He was a former MI6 officer, who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union, and he had just died at age 98. “Yes, me, too!” I thought that double agents lived very dangerous lives and died young when they were discovered! At least, that is what I saw in movies and read about in novels.

A while after I had heard the news and semi-forgotten about it, I saw an article by Vladimir Isachenkov, titled “British Double Agent for Soviets” under a photo of Mr. Blake, and a paragraph in the DMN said the following: George Blake, a former British intelligence officer who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union and passed some of the most coveted Western secrets to Moscow, has died in Russia. He was 98.

Yes, I was “hooked” and had to do some more sleuthing on the “net” and found much to digest. Blake was one of the final (We think.) British spies, who secretly also worked for the Soviet Union at the height of the “cold war.”

In the United Kingdom’s MI6, he was able to spy for the Communists. In 1950, he was captured and imprisoned by North Korean soldiers and made the decision to SECRETLY become a worker for the Communists, return to Britain’s Secret Service employ, and to find many ways to pass information back to the Soviet Union’s government.

However, 1961 was not a good year for him, because he was identified by a Polish defector in Britain as a double agent and sentenced to at least 42 years in prison.

But, in 1966, inmates and Communist sympathizers smuggled him out of Western Europe, crossed the “iron curtain” into East Berlin, and set him up as a Russian Intelligence Colonel to spend the rest of his life as a HERO in Russia with the accolades of Vladimir Putin, who gave him a country house outside Moscow and also granted him honors in 2007, stressing his continued strenuous work and invaluable contribution to ensuring strategic parity and maintaining peace on the planet.

Britain considered George Blake to be a traitor, but he denied this charge by saying he had “never felt British, so he could not be a traitor.” However, Brits never forgave the fact that he had exposed several “important Western plans” and “unmasked” scores of British Agents in “Soviet” countries in Eastern Europe; some of them were executed! After he escaped to Russia, his British wife divorced him, and he married and had a son with a Soviet woman. To sum up his philosophy after “becoming a Russian,” take a look at one of his quotes—I am “like a foreign-made car that adapted well to Russian roads.”