British double agent George Blake, who passed secrets to the Soviets
Credit: Hulton Deutsch
When the death of George Blake in Moscow made front-page news a month ago, I wondered how many younger readers had ever heard of him. And the older ones were probably just surprised (as I was) to learn that he had still been alive until then. This was a man who last hit headlines in the 1960s – first when convicted as a Soviet agent in 1961, and then when he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs five years later.
The story of that escape is perhaps the most famous thing about him. Naturally, the authorities assumed that he had been sprung by a fiendishly clever Soviet operation, but the real story was more like something from an Ealing comedy.