The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake

I was looking forward enormously to this. And have struggled through some of it. The content is as interesting as I had hoped. But the font size is miniscule. So much so that I am contemplating lashing out a further fiver to buy it again on Kindle. If Aurum Press had used a 'normal' sized font it would've run to about 500 pages, instead of the 362pp in this edition. Presumably supply of sufficient paper was an issue for the publisher! ... That this sort of thing was still happening in 2013 (when my copy was first published) beggars belief. No wonder the library who bought it new bunged it on Amazon.

This is a riveting biography of George Blake, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer who spied for the Soviet Union for several years in the 1950s, was discovered, tried and sentenced to the unprecedentedly long prison term of 42 years, sprung from Wormwood Scrubs five years later, and assisted to flee via East Germany to the Soviet Union, where he still lives today at the age of 92. His has been a fascinating life from its earliest days: the son of a British Jewish father and a Dutch mother, he was born and brought up in the Netherlands and never saw himself as British anyway. He helped the Dutch resistance under the Nazis, displaying a necessary predilection for subterfuge. He joined MI6 in the late 1940s and while working in South Korea was taken prisoner by the North Koreans during the war on the peninsula, when Kim Il Sung's forces at the height of their success swept south and captured the South Korean capital. During that time he offered his services to the Soviets, having become genuinely convinced that communism, for all its faults in practice, offered in principle a better and more just future for humankind. He was always clear that he spied on this basis and never for personal gain, so can be said to be, at one level, a man of principle, despite the damage that his actions caused for Western security and the probable (though not entirely proven) deaths of British agents. It was this feature, plus the length of his sentence, compared to the comparatively more lenient treatment of the Cambridge Five and the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, that prompted sympathy from him on the inside and efforts by the peace campaigners Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, and petty criminal Sean Bourke, to spring him from prison and assist in his fleeing to the Soviet Union. Randle and Pottle were eventually tried for the springing much later in 1991, but acquitted by the jury. Blake settled into Soviet life better than Philby or Burgess (Maclean also settled in well) and married a Russian lady and had a son. As recently as 2007 he was awarded an Order of Friendship medal by Putin (an award that has also been bestowed on Prince Michael of Kent and Rowan Williams, among others). A fascinating story of the long, colourful and controversial life.

This well-written biography tells the fascinating and exciting story of George Blake, who worked as an officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), but who was actually for many years a double agent who passed on SIS’s secrets to the Russian KGB, after being converted to “communism”.I say “exciting” because the book often reads like an adventure story or thriller. An idea of this is conveyed by some of the chapter headings: Resistance; Flight to England; Secret Intelligence Service; Captive in Korea; Death March; Secrets of the Tunnel; Berlin; The Unmasking; Prison; Breakout.What makes Blake interesting is that, like Kim Philby, he was motivated by political principles. He never took a penny from the KGB. He genuinely believed that by spying for the USSR he was advancing the cause of a fairer and more peaceful world. He could see that capitalism was a system based on exploitation, a system which kept dragging the world into economic crisis and war, and a system which had given birth to the monstrosity of fascism. (We see similar developments today.)But what Hermiston does not discuss is the unfortunate fact that the Russian state that Blake and Philby decided to serve had moved a long way from genuine Marxism. The 1917 Russian Revolution, led by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, had been a genuine workers’ revolution, with working people exercising power through the “soviets” (elected workers’ councils). But by the late 1920s the gains and democracy of the revolution had been destroyed by Stalin and the bureaucratic ruling class that had usurped power and turned Russia into a state capitalist tyranny.Blake’s tragedy is that he dedicated his life to a totalitarian state which called itself socialist, but which was just as exploitative a system as the one in the West. (Whereas genuine Marxists were advocating the slogan of “Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism”.)Many of us enjoy the escapism of a good spy story, whether fictional or “true”, and there is something strangely fascinating about the world of the secret services. But we also need to remember that the real world of secret services is a nasty one. They do not just spy on each other. They spy on (and often persecute) dissenting voices within their own countries, and they conduct dirty tricks such as the toppling of elected governments (as the CIA did in Chile).The secret services on both sides of Blake’s secret war were (and are) are villains. But these spooks are not all-powerful: the Tsar’s secret police could not stop the 1917 Revolution; the KGB could not stop the fall of the state capitalist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe; and MI6 did not even see the collapse of these so-called “communist” regimes coming.Phil Webster.

This was one of those Kindle daily deals that languished forgotten on my device until I stumbled across it while looking for something to read whilst I was on holiday. I began casually reading the introduction and found myself hooked by the story of George Blake, someone I had casually dismissed as one of a gang of well-heeled traitors who betrayed their country out of a misplaced sense of bourgeois affectation to a political conscience. Blake was that most rare of traitors, a man who genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. What this book accomplished for me was to clearly show how Blake came to make the decision to act as he did, the price he paid for acting as he did, and his undiminished belief that, although the system was flawed, the ideology was correct.

What a life Blake led! From mind-numbing horror(Korea) to the good life (Moscow).Very well written.Another nonfiction book you can't put down.

If you want to know about George Blake, this is the book!

Outstanding work about one of the more fascinating traitors to the Western cause. Remarkable and ironic that Blake turned while in North Korean captivity - although the idea had been brewing for some time, apparently. Very well written - I will be using this book as source material in lectures on the Russian Intelligence Services. Highly Recommended!

Excellent book.I had never heard of George Blake until recently and this book details his life as well as his espionage.

An incredible true story that reads like a novel. Thorough in detail The Greatest Traitor wends it’s way through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century and the life of one man

Familiar story with great writing style. Worth the time as an historical read. Book arrived in perfect condition

A very interesting and well written book

I found this book a very interesting read .It was a clear account of an era that I knew little about.