Russia honoured cold war-era Soviet double agent George Blake at a gala marking his 85th birthday in Moscow last night.
Blake, reviled in Britain as a traitor, was a British secret agent from 1944 until 1961, when he was jailed for 42 years after pleading guilty to spying for the Soviet Union. He escaped from prison in London in 1966 and has lived in Moscow since.
George Blake
Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service praised Blake at a special gala at its headquarters last night. SVR director Mikhail Fradkov decorated Blake with the Friendship Order and read out telegrams from Russia's leadership, it was reported.
In 1953 Blake tipped off the Soviet intelligence of plans by British and US secret services to build a tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters.
The Soviets unearthed the tunnel in 1956 after it had been in operation for almost a year. But only after Blake's arrest in 1961 did Western intelligence officials realise Moscow had used its knowledge of the tunnel to misinform them.
Blake had admitted handing the Soviet Union hundreds of names of British agents. He left three children behind in Britain when he escaped from jail more than four decades ago and started a new family in Moscow.
"I feel very lucky to have lived to my age and to be in good health, and to have had a very interesting and very full and, in the end, a happy life," he said.
