Britain’s greatest traitor has warned that the world is facing new nuclear apocalypse in his 95th birthday message.
George Blake, who fed information to the Kremlin while working as an MI6 agent in the 1950s, has lived in Russia since dramatically escaping from London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966.
Today the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service released a statement on his behalf and wished him a happy birthday for tomorrow.
George Blake (pictured in 2015), who fed information to the Kremlin while working as an MI6 agent, has lived in Russia since dramatically escaping from London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966
In the statement Blake said Russian spies must ‘save the world in a situation when the danger of nuclear war and the resulting self-destruction of humankind again have been put on the agenda by irresponsible politicians.’
‘It’s a true battle between good and evil,’ he added.
Blake also said that terrorism has ‘left bloody traces in many corners of the world.’
SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin congratulated Blake on his birthday, saying Blake had been a role model for the agency’s officers.
As a double agent, Blake passed some of the most coveted British secrets to the Soviet Union, including a Western plan to eavesdrop on Soviet communications from an underground tunnel into East Berlin.
A Polish defector exposed Blake as a spy for Russia in 1961. He was convicted on spying charges in Britain and sentenced to 42 years in prison. In October 1966, he made a dashing escape with help from several people he met while in custody.
Left: Blake in Britain as a 38-year-old. Right: Blake in Russia in the 1970s
Blake spent two months hiding at his assistant’s place and was then driven across Europe to East Berlin inside a wooden box attached under a car.
Blake said in a 2012 interview with the Russian government daily newspaper that he adapted well to life in Russia and once joked at a meeting with Russian intelligence officers that he’s like a ‘foreign-made car that adapted well to Russian roads.’
Blake served five years of a 42-year sentence when he fled over the prison wall using a ladder made of knitting needles and rope.
He was smuggled to the East German border by two anti-nuclear campaigners hidden in a secret compartment built into a camper van.
His lives in a spacious dacha in woods and apart from failing eyesight appears largely in good health.
He is accused of sending Western agents to their deaths by betraying them to his Soviet paymasters.
1992: George Blake, a former British spy who doubled as a Soviet agent, gestures during a news conference in Moscow
In 2012 Blake was found in a pine forest 25 miles from Moscow, with his wife, Ida, 77, whom he married in 1969, their son, Misha, and his two children.
Blake who has the rank of Lt Col in the former KGB, remains a Russian hero and to mark his 85th birthday in 2007 was awarded the Order of Friendship medal by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Over the years he has also received the orders of Lenin, the Red Banner, the Patriotic War 1st Class, and the Order for Personal Courage.
In an interview in 2012 to mark his birthday, he told Rossikaya Gazeta: ‘These are the happiest years of my life, and the most peaceful. When I worked in the West, I always had the risk of exposure hanging over me … here I feel free.’
Blake (pictured aged 38 in Britain) spent two months hiding at his assistant’s place and was then driven across Europe to East Berlin inside a wooden box attached under a car
Blake has never displayed any remorse for betraying his country. But unlike some of his fellow spies, who never really settled in the Soviet Union, he adapted easily to life behind the Iron Curtain.
Blake was a member of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War and eventually fled the Nazis, arriving in London in 1943. Soon he was working for MI6.
While posted to the British embassy in Seoul in 1950 he was captured by the North Korean forces, who ‘turned’ him before he was released three years later.
He was later posted to Berlin at the height of the Cold War, where he began to spy for the Soviet Union, betraying agents until his capture.
The Greatest Traitor: Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison
The Greatest Traitor and Britain’s mostly closely guarded criminal very nearly had to serve the longest prison sentence (42 years) ever awarded.
George Blake’s audacious plan to escape to freedom behind the Iron Curtain by scaling the walls of Wormwood Scrubs came within an ace of discovery.
It wasn’t until Blake reached the top of the prison wall that he realised there was no way to secure the ladder, made from rope and size 13 knitting needles, to get him down: he would have to make the 20ft drop.
George Blake’s audacious plan to escape to freedom behind the Iron Curtain by scaling the walls of Wormwood Scrubs came within an ace of discovery
Dazed and bloodied, he had to be dragged into the getaway van, driven by his accomplice Irishman Sean Bourke.
Bourke was living in a half-way house in the prison grounds so had access to the outside world. They communicated using a smuggled two-way radio.
For decades, Blake had run rings round Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Some SIS files from the Cold War era have already been opened up: don’t bet on that happening with Blake’s file any time soon.
Eastern Europe was riddled with spies throughout the 1950s, but no one on either side amassed such a wealth of information to pass on to the KGB as the double agent, Blake.
His most famous coup was to report the building of a secret underground tunnel in Berlin, running from the American Sector into the Soviet Zone, which allowed the SIS and CIA to tap underground cables and listen in to Russian communications.