George Blake — spy with roots in the Russian Empire
George Blake was a British MI6 officer and double agent who secretly worked for the KGB for nine years, betraying dozens of Western agents — some of whom were executed as a result. Sentenced to 42 years in prison (the longest sentence in British legal history at the time), he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and lived in Moscow until his death in 2020.
Tracing the roots — Russia
Born in Rotterdam to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father, Blake became a Soviet intelligence asset during his captivity in Korea. He fled to Moscow after his prison escape and became a Soviet citizen, living there for over 50 years. His Russian roots are adopted rather than ancestral, but his decades of Soviet service and Moscow residency make him one of the most consequential foreign figures in Russian intelligence history.
A career defined by ambition
"I acted against the West not for money but for conviction."