The Soviets had allowed the tunnel to be built, and then had tolerated it until April 1956, when the KGB pretended to discover it for the first time.
Blake required treatment in the prison infirmary to recover from the shock of his record prison sentence – it was reported that his 42 year sentence comprised a year for every agent betrayed – but after the time for his appeal had passed he underwent a lengthy interrogation at which he co-operated fully with MI5 and SIS, although he was to omit this detail from his subsequent memoirs.
In May 1962, as something of a prison celebrity, received the sympathy of a pair of fellow prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs, peace protesters who been arrested for participating in a ban-the-bomb demonstration outside the American airbase at Wethersfield, and regarded the length of his sentence as unjust.
A Bradford University academic, Michael Randle, and an antiques dealer,
Pat Pottle, agreed to help him escape from D Hall, and after their release they remained in touch by a walkie-talkie smuggled into the prison by another inmate, Sean Bourke. The Irishman acted as a link to Blake, and when he too was released, he continued to conspire on Blake’s escape.
On the rainy night of October 25 1966 the trio, financed by the film director Tony Richardson, helped Blake to use a rope ladder to climb over the perimeter wall, to be driven away in a getaway car, and arranged for him to be given sanctuary by a local clergyman,
John Papworth, and his French wife.
As the police combed Hammersmith for the fugitive, Blake nursed the leg he had injured in his jump from the top of the wall to the road below. He was treated by a sympathetic doctor and stayed in Papworth’s home and two other safe houses nearby.
Shortly before Christmas he was concealed in a secret compartment hidden in a Commer camper van driven by Randle and his wife, to Dover and then East Berlin, where he was reunited with Vasili Dozhdalev.
Blake’s escape prompted a political scandal and a major review of prison security headed by Lord Mountbatten who, on the recommendation of a committee which included an experienced SIS officer, introduced a tough new regime for high-risk prisoners.
Although the police discovered the names of those who had aided Blake’s escape in 1970, no attempt was made to pursue the matter until 1989, when Randle and Pottle wrote The Blake Escape, in which they described their role in it. The pair were arrested and tried, but were acquitted in 1991 following the disclosure that the police had waited 23 years before mounting the prosecution. This was described as an abuse of process and both men went free.
Following his arrival in Moscow, where he was found work at he Foreign Affairs Institute, Blake was introduced to Kim Philby, with whom he became a close friend until they fell out over the sale of some family photographs.
Following his divorce from Gillian he remarried and had a third son with Ida, his Russian wife.
In later years, with failing eyesight, Blake occasionally travelled to Switzerland under a Soviet alias to meet his mother, and as a dedicated hard-line Communist was dismayed by Gorbachev’s reforms. His autobiography, No Other Choice, was published in 1990 but his royalties were frozen as a result of a court action brought by the British government.
He later filed a complaint charging the government with a human rights violation for taking nine years to decide on his case, and he was awarded £5,000 in compensation by the European Court of Human Rights.
In his book Blake insisted that his treachery had been ideologically motivated, having witnessed Allied atrocities during the Korean War, and claimed that he had been entrapped into making an admission when accused by SIS of having been coerced into cooperating with the KGB.
His SIS colleagues considered his treachery to have been infinitely more damaging than Kim Philby’s because of the critical period over which he passed secrets to Moscow, and the fact that individual agents had died as a direct consequence of his betrayals.
Blake argued that none of the agents he named perished because he had reached an agreement with the KGB that guaranteed their lives would be saved.
Blake argued that none of the agents he named perished because he had reached an agreement with the KGB that guaranteed their lives would be saved. A senior KGB officer who knew him well commented that he must have known but did not like to acknowledge that this was not the case.
Marcus Wolf, head of East German foreign intelligence, recorded that Blake “suffered terribly under his reputation as a callous agent and wanted to be regarded as an idealist... He refused to accept that he really was the traitor his country considered him to be.”
George Blake, who had been given the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner shortly after his defection, was awarded the Order of Friendship on his 85th birthday by Vladimir Putin in 2007.
George Blake, born November 11 1922, died December 26 2020
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