Today by chance I happened to learn about someone I had never heard of before, George Blake, most heroic person in British history.
Born George Behar, the son of an Egyptian Jew and a Dutch woman (the widowed mother later changed their family name to Blake to avoid antisemitism) in 1922, he studied Russian literature as a schoolboy and was unfortunately trapped in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded. Interrogated and then released due to his age, George joined the Dutch resistance before eventually escaping to England, where he was recruited into the Royal Navy, and subsequently MI6. It was in his latter role that the legend would begin.
While working as a spy master under the alias of a diplomat (nice) at the Seoul British embassy in 1950, George was captured by advancing communist Korean forces and taken North. The Koreans did not torture or harm him in any way, ironically, the biggest threat to George’s physical safety was from his own side. NATO aircraft ruthlessly bombed the Korean villages George was held in; the West’s gratuitous slaughter of women and children horrified him. In George’s own words,
It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side… that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.
He requested to change sides, and his wish was granted. In 1953, the Koreans repatriated George back to Britain, where he began his new career in the forces of good against the darkness of fascism. In 1955, MI6 sent him to Berlin to recruit spies to harm the Soviet Union. George did his task as instructed, but also reported this assortment of nazis, mercenaries and traitors to the KGB, who dealt with them accordingly.
He continued this work until 1961, when he was caught and imprisoned with the absurd sentence of 46 years. Literally, George was punished more harshly than serial pedophile rapists and Pakistani grooming gangs. This was a case of the “British values” we keep hearing about. Luckily for George, a conspiracy of Irish and political prisoners helped him escape to the Soviet Union in 1966, where he received a hero’s welcome and quiet retirement.
George died at the age of 98 in 2020, but his heroic courage for good against evil will never be forgotten. Truly, the greatest, bravest and most noble British person to ever live in all of recorded history!
Ian Kummer
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