BLAKE, GEORGE• 57ralized citizen following his war service in World War I. He was
educated in Holland and Egypt and joined his mother and sister in
London after an escape from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
In 1943 Blake anglicized his name by deed poll and the next year
was recruited by theSecret Intelligence Serviceas a conducting of-
ficer in the Dutch Section.
At the end of the war Blake remained in the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS) and, having completed a Russian language course, was
posted to Seoul, where he was interned at the outset of the Korean
War. In captivity Blake volunteered to spy for theKGBand did so
upon his release and until he was finally denounced in 1961. At his
trial, Blake received a record sentence of 42 years’ imprisonment,
but in October 1966 he was to escape to Moscow with help from a
fellow prisoner,Sean Bourke, and a group of British left-wing sym-
pathizers who publicly acknowledged their role and were subse-
quently prosecuted and acquitted of having assisted a fugitive. They
claimed they had received no support from the KGB, but instead had
been financed by film director Tony Richardson.
Following his escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and his suc-
cessful exfiltration to East Berlin, Blake took up permanent residence
in Moscow, where he now lives with his second wife. In recent times
there have been two disclosures from Moscow that shed new light on
his case. The first is the admission that one of his KGB contacts in
London was Vasili A. Dozhdalev, who, by coincidence, happened to
be conveniently on hand in Berlin on the very night Blake turned up,
ostensibly without warning—the implication being that even if the
Soviets did not play a direct role in engineering his escape from the
Scrubs, they must have had foreknowledge of his arrival in Germany.
The second is the claim made by Lieutenant General K. Grigoriev, a
retired KGB officer, that Blake’s recruitment in Korea had not been
an example of ideological conversion, but rather one of manipulation
by a brilliant KGB interrogator. Apparently Colonel Nikolai Loy-
enko befriended Blake by slipping him bread and chocolate and was
quoted subsequently as having concluded that ‘‘the way to an intelli-
gence officer’s heart is through his stomach.’’
Blake wrote an autobiography,No Abiding City, which was read
by a few Western publishers but rejected by all on the grounds that it
was too boring, so Blake prepared a second memoir,No Other