Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 16, 1992 TAG: 9201160126
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
TRAITOR PINES FOR U.S.S.R.
The pudgy, balding and bearded man looked like anybody's favorite uncle, but at one time he was one of the most hunted and hated people in the Western world.George Blake, double-agent extraordinaire and traitor to his country but a man with all the dash of an affable bookworm, reluctantly came in from the cold Wednesday to a sometimes hostile reception - his first meeting with the Moscow press corps in a quarter-century.
The former British intelligence operative claims to have betrayed more than 600 agents to the old Soviet Union and halted one of the most successful spying operations in American history. Behind a microphone in the Russian Foreign Ministry press center, he acknowledged with regret that the cause for which he sacrificed both his comrades and country had failed.
"I believed until now that communist society is the most just, the best society that can be on this earth," Blake, 69, told a news conference organized by the Russian government's intelligence service. "But I can't avoid seeing that the experiment has been a failure."
The problem, he said, is not with the philosophy of Marx or Lenin, but with the raw material the Russians and other communist zealots had to work with.
"People at the end of the 20th century haven't attained the necessary moral level," said the man in the green plaid jacket, whose espionage services to the Kremlin won him the Order of Lenin and Order of the Red Banner. He seemed sad at the thought.
"It was a noble experiment, and it deserved to succeed," said Blake, his slightly accented English hinting at his Dutch birth.
Now, even the country in whose service Blake secretly enlisted - the Soviet Union - and in which he has lived since being spirited out of a British prison in 1966, no longer exists. Despite that, Blake holds fast to the creed that persuaded him to switch sides in the Cold War - with devastating consequences for the West. His memoirs, just published here, carry the title "No Other Choice."
For nearly a decade, Blake reportedly passed the Russians microfilms of every secret document he saw. As secretary of a planning committee at MI6, the British intelligence agency, he betrayed the secret of the 450-foot tunnel the Americans and British bored under the Soviet zone of Berlin to tap into Russian communications cables.
As a double agent in Berlin, he identified entire networks of agents for the KGB.
Blake received a 42-year prison term in 1961, the longest sentence in modern British legal history. He spent less than 5 1/2 years in prison before vanishing over the wall one night. He ultimately surfaced in Moscow, where he met his current wife, Ida, an interpreter. They have a son who is a college student.