John le Carre British spy novelist John le Carre, who died on Dec.14 at the age of 87, and master spy George Blake who died at 98 two weeks later, are forever linked by Cold War intrigue. Blake, a real life British spy who defected to the Soviet Union, was the opposite number of John Le Carre’s fictional character Alec Leamas, who was sent by Britain to Communist East Berlin to pretend to defect. Real-life Blake defected and survived, fictional Leamas died on the Berlin Wall after being betrayed by his own side in le Carre’s novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.”