IT WAS one of those gloriously serendipitous coincidences. In the Morning Star of December 28 late last year Nick Wright gave us an analytical obituary of spy and novelist John Le Carre and the writer’s undoubted deep understanding of the Cold War.

In the same edition, on the paper’s news pages was the report that George Blake, one of Russia’s best known spies in Britain, had died in his Moscow “dacha,” or country cottage at the age of 98.

The news item reported tributes to the former Soviet spy and Russian national hero George Blake and outlined the basics of Blake’s amazing story. 

I remember the case of George Blake well. I was 21, a young communist living just a couple of miles from Wormwood Scrubs prison.

In the mid 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, espionage was often, either in the headlines or being kept out of the headlines. The secret services used a quasi-legal prohibition called a D-notice to gag the press.

In 1967 Wilson went to war with the Daily Express who had defied a D-notice in an article by Chapman Pincher that claimed "thousands of private cables and telegrams sent out of Britain from the Post Office or from commercial cable companies are regularly being made available to the security authorities for scrutiny.”

No wonder then that Blake’s 1966 prison break was a major embarrassment to Harold Wilson’s Labour government. 

What should have been even more of a disgrace to Wilson and his government was the microphone buried in the walls of the Communist Party’s Covent Garden headquarters transmitting every conversation to the offices of the British Secret Service. 

Once a week I would sit under that microphone and exchange deep dialectical argument or perhaps just salacious gossip with other comrades volunteering in the office. I was part of the team editing the Young Communist League magazine Challenge. 

One frequent topic of conversation was, were we being spied on? How little we actually knew. We did know that seemingly endless high-ranking British Secret Service staff had defected and were still defecting to Moscow, presumably taking most of Britain’s secrets with them. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had led the charge in 1951.

In 1963 Kim Philby had been working as a British spy in Beirut under cover of being a journalist. He too defected to the Soviet Union. 

We know now that, in 1964, leading British art historian Anthony Blunt was offered immunity from prosecution if he confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union. He did and went on to work for the Queen.

Now let’s take a look at George Blake himself. We know he was a British agent during World War II, translating captured German documents and helping to interrogate German prisoners. 

Prior to this he had been active in the Dutch resistance. He was captured by the Nazis but escaped and made his way to Britain, disguised as a monk.

Blake was born George Behar on November 11 1922 in Rotterdam. His father was a Spanish Jew who had fought with the British army during World War I and acquired British citizenship.

At the age of 13 young George was sent to Cairo. Here he became close to one of his cousins, a communist who, Blake remembered, had a great influence on him.

He returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1939 and was staying with his grandmother in Rotterdam when his mother and sister were evacuated to England. Blake was interned by the invading Germans.

Blake got hold of forged papers and joined the Dutch resistance as a courier. Eventually he decided to try to reach England and join the armed forces. He travelled down to neutral Spain where, after being imprisoned for three months, he managed to reach England via Gibraltar.

He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve where he was asked, because of his background, if he would like to work in intelligence deciphering coded messages sent to London by the Dutch resistance. 

When the war ended, he was posted to Germany where his British officers set him to spy on the Soviet forces in East Germany. He was so successful it was decided to return him to England where he learned Russian at Cambridge. 

After the war, Britain sent him to South Korea to create a Korean spy network. In 1950 Blake was captured by the North Koreans. He spent three years in a North Korean prison camp.

Much later he explained that he had chosen to work for the KGB because of what he had seen in Korea. He had been horrified and disgusted by the relentless bombing of women, children and old people in small Korean villages by enormous US flying fortress bombers. 

He was also influenced by an old copy of Karl Marx’s book, Das Kapital he found in the camp. Blake commented later: “I felt it better for humanity if the communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.”

When he was released in 1953, he returned to Britain as a hero, and retrained in MI6. He was posted to Berlin to work recruiting Soviet officers to work as double-agents. Instead, he secretly contacted the KGB and offered to work for them. He was soon a fully fledged Soviet agent.

His downfall came when a Polish secret service officer, Michael Goleniewski, defected to the West, bringing both his mistress and details of a Soviet mole in British intelligence. That mole was Blake and he was summoned back from his posting in Lebanon to be arrested and tried in London.

Blake knew spies usually got 14 years – he could live with that. Instead he was sentenced to 14 years on each of three counts; the 42-year term was then the longest ever imposed in a British court. 

“As a result,” Blake later recalled, “I found a lot of people who were willing to help me, thinking 42 years was an inhuman sentence.”

Those other prisoners horrified by the length of his sentence hatched an escape plan masterminded by Irishman Sean Bourke. It has suited British Secret Service to push the lie that Bourke was an uneducated petty criminal. In fact Bourke edited a prison newspaper in the Scrubs and was a dedicated Irish Republican activist.

Bourke enlisted two well known anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. They were both serving sentences for civil disobedience and peace protests.

British left-wing film director Tony Richardson agreed to fund the break-out. Randle, Pottle and Bourke had completed their sentences and had been released. Free themselves, they were still determined to spring Blake, believing his 42 year sentence was simply inhuman.

Bourke was able to smuggle Blake a walkie-talkie. The plan was for Blake to break out through a tiny window in the corridor near his cell while most of the prisoners and guards were watching a film. 

After squeezing out of a 12 by 18 inch window Blake used a light rope ladder ingeniously made with steel knitting needles. The ladder turned out 20 foot short and the jump cost Blake a fractured wrist. 

Bourke had a car waiting to take Blake to a safe house nearby.  Blake would live with Pottl in the safe house, ironically with a fine view of Wormwood Scrubs prison, until he was ready for his next move.

Originally, the trio planned to help Blake escape to Eastern Europe disguised as an Arab. Pottle and Randle acquired medication that would darken his skin but Blake worried the drug might damage his liver. 

They came up with plan “B.” Randle and Pottle built a secret compartment just big enough to conceal Blake into a Volkswagen campervan. Randle then drove his family with Blake hidden in the dummy cupboard to East Germany for a holiday. 

In December 1966, Blake arrived in East Berlin and asked an East German guard to speak to a Soviet officer. The next day, he was met and identified by a Soviet intelligence officer who had known him earlier. 

He was quickly transferred to Moscow where he was given a hero’s welcome. He would eventually settle in a country farmhouse with a new Russian wife. He would work as a translator for the next 30 years.

Feted as a Soviet hero, he was made a KGB colonel and given a pension, a place to live and the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin.

George Blake never had any regrets and remained a Marxist-Leninist staying true to the principles he had first discovered in that battered copy of Das Kapital he had first read in his Korean prison.

Like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Blake came to despise the British social system and worked for its downfall.  He summed it up simply: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.”