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By David Burke. George Blake has just died aged 98 at his dacha outside Moscow where Putin’s overseas intelligence service, the SVR, was protecting him from Covid-19. Blake was held in high esteem by the Russians. Putin has said that the “memory of this legendary person will be preserved forever in our hearts”. Putin awarded him a medal in 2007. Blake was arrested in London in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years imprisonment but escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 with the aid of Sean Bourke from Limerick. He then spent two months in London before making his way to East Germany. The story ...

George Blake obituary Richard Norton-Taylor © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Boris Yurchenko/AP George Blake, who has died aged 98, was the most notorious Soviet agent inside Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Interned by the Nazis in the Netherlands, recruited by MI6, then by the KGB after he was captured during the Korean war, unmasked by a defecting Polish intelligence officer and sentenced at the Old Bailey to an unprecedented term in jail, Blake made a spectacular escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in northwest London. Blake was convicted of spying in...

OBITUARY: Having spent 35 years following the trail of George Blake's treachery, interviewing friends, family, colleagues and victims, I understand the scale of his betrayal. And having met him in Moscow in the late 1980s, it amazes me to this day how anyone could have accepted Blake as a legitimate MI6 officer. Born George Behar in Holland, Blake is probably best known as the spy who received one of the longest jail sentences handed out by a British criminal court, a total of 42 years. He is equally notorious for having served less than six years before escaping to the Soviet Union on Octo...

George Blake, a British intelligence official who betrayed closely guarded secrets to the Soviets and was among the most damaging traitors of the Cold War, then made a daring escape from a London prison in 1966 and lived out his days as a national hero in Moscow, has died at 98. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, known as SVR, announced his death yesterday but provided no further details. Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Blake as a "brilliant professional" and a man of "remarkable courage". News accounts from the 1960s described Blake as a "Super Spy" and perhaps one secret to his...