Spies, Lies, and Exile
The Extraordinary Story of Russian Double Agent George Blake
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Fascinating, rich, and probing . . . a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait”—The Wall Street Journal
For fans of John le Carré and Ben Macintyre, an exclusive first-person account of one of the Cold War’s most notorious spies
“Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative. If the definition of a psychopath is someone who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions, does George fit the definition? There he sits, admitting it was all for nothing, but has no regrets. Or does he?” —John le Carré
Few Cold War spy stories approach the sheer daring and treachery of George Blake’s.
After fighting in the Dutch resistance during World War II, Blake joined the British spy agency MI6 and was stationed in Seoul. Taken prisoner after the North Korean army overran his post in 1950, Blake later returned to England to a hero’s welcome, carrying a dark secret: while in a communist prison camp in North Korea, he had secretly switched sides to the KGB after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
As a Soviet double agent, Blake betrayed uncounted western spying operations—including the storied Berlin Tunnel, the most expensive covert project ever undertaken by the CIA and MI6. Blake exposed hundreds of western agents, forty of whom were likely executed. After his unmasking and arrest, he received, for that time, the longest sentence in modern British history—only to make a dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1966, five years into his forty-two-year sentence. He left his wife, three children, and a stunned country behind.
Much of Blake’s career existed inside the hall of mirrors that was the Cold War, especially following his sensational escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison. Veteran journalist Simon Kuper tracked Blake to his dacha outside Moscow, where the aging spy agreed to be interviewed for this unprecedented account of Cold War espionage. Following the master spy’s death in Moscow at age ninety-eight on December 26, 2020, Kuper is finally able to set the record straight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kuper (Soccernomics) delivers a colorful yet glancing portrait of British double agent George Blake, who died in Moscow in 2020 at age 98. Drawing on a 2012 interview he conducted with Blake in Russia, Kuper struggles to understand how the former MI6 agent, who was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father who had served in the British Army during WWI, became one of England's most notorious traitors, suspected of having given Moscow the identifies of several hundred spies from 1953 until his arrest in 1961. Kuper offers several theories, including the "deterministic" worldview Blake acquired from his childhood interest in Calvinism, the poverty he witnessed in Egypt while visiting relatives, his Russian studies in Cambridge, and the Marxist literature he read while being held prisoner in North Korea during the Korean War. But Blake's personality and true motivations remain out of reach, and Kuper doesn't shed much light on the thinking behind his exhaustive confession ("Once he had begun spilling the beans, he just kept on spilling"), or his life in Moscow after escaping from a British prison in 1966 ("He stopped striving for paradise, and learned to enjoy the simple things"). Espionage buffs hoping for insight into this enigmatic spy will be disappointed .
