- MOSCOW (AFP) - The last of
the great British KGB agents, George Blake, paid tribute to his Soviet-era
colleagues Thursday, asserting that it was thanks to the information they
passed to Moscow that a third world war had been avoided.
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- "If we managed to avoid a third world war, the merit
is due to Soviet agents such as Gordon Lonsdale and the Krogers,"
he told reporters at a televised press conference to present his book "Letters
from Her Majesty's Prison".
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- The information provided by British spymaster Lonsdale,
or by the American couple known as Peter and Helen Kroger, "enabled
us to achieve a military balance, (and) we owe it to them that we are still
alive," Blake said, speaking in near-faultless Russian.
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- "They became heroes of Russia, but to a larger extent
they are heroes of our time," he said.
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- The book, prepared in collaboration with the Moscow Centre
for Applied Social Studies, contains many of the letters Blake exchanged
with his fellow spies after he was sprung from a British prison in 1966
and escaped to Moscow.
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- Now aged 78, Blake appeared fit and wholly convinced
of the rightness of his actions, which he justified in an earlier volume
of memoirs, published in 1990, entitled "No Other Choice".
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- Often bracketed with Britain's Cambridge-educated spies
such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, Blake was in fact an outsider, born
in the Netherlands to an Egyptian father and Dutch mother, who, far from
attending public school, did not set foot in Britain until he was nearly
20.
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- Between the time of his recruitment by the KGB, probably
in 1951, and his capture in 1960, he passed Moscow a regular stream of
high-grade intelligence, notably revealing the existence of the Berlin
tunnel used by western agencies to tap into landlines between Moscow and
East Berlin.
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- Sentenced to 42 years in prison, he was sensationally
sprung from Wormwood Scrubs prison in London in 1966 by two pacifist militants
and smuggled to East Berlin in a van.
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- Settling in Moscow where fellow-spies such as Lonsdale
and Maclean (since deceased) had preceded him, Blake married a Russian
woman in 1968 and joined a think-tank specialising in Middle Eastern affairs,
living a life of relative privilege.
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- In Britain Blake continues to be regarded as a traitor.
The judge who handed him his prison sentence -- still the longest ever
handed out -- said it represented one year for every British agent Blake
had betrayed.
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- Blake's former controller Sergei Kondrashev -- who received
the Berlin tunnel plans from Blake on the upper deck of a London bus --
revealed at the same press conference that he was preparing to publish
his own memoirs.
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- These would provide further details about Blake's career,
including more information about his escape from prison which was, he said,
"a real epic."
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