KGB Spies Prevented WWIII
Geschrieben von Mr. Burns am 30. Juni 2001 23:48:39:
KGB Spies Prevented WWIII
Says Master Russian Spy
George Blake
MOSCOW (AFP) - The last of the great British KGB agents,
George Blake, paid tribute to his Soviet-era colleagues
Thursday, asserting that it was thanks to the information they
passed to Moscow that a third world war had been avoided.
"If we managed to avoid a third world war, the merit is due to
Soviet agents such as Gordon Lonsdale and the Krogers," he
told reporters at a televised press conference to present his book
"Letters from Her Majesty's Prison".
The information provided by British spymaster Lonsdale, or by
the American couple known as Peter and Helen Kroger,
"enabled us to achieve a military balance, (and) we owe it to
them that we are still alive," Blake said, speaking in
near-faultless Russian.
"They became heroes of Russia, but to a larger extent they are
heroes of our time," he said.
The book, prepared in collaboration with the Moscow Centre
for Applied Social Studies, contains many of the letters Blake
exchanged with his fellow spies after he was sprung from a
British prison in 1966 and escaped to Moscow.
Now aged 78, Blake appeared fit and wholly convinced of the
rightness of his actions, which he justified in an earlier volume
of memoirs, published in 1990, entitled "No Other Choice".Often bracketed with Britain's Cambridge-educated spies such
as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, Blake was in fact an outsider,
born in the Netherlands to an Egyptian father and Dutch
mother, who, far from attending public school, did not set foot
in Britain until he was nearly 20.
Between the time of his recruitment by the KGB, probably in
1951, and his capture in 1960, he passed Moscow a regular
stream of high-grade intelligence, notably revealing the existence
of the Berlin tunnel used by western agencies to tap into
landlines between Moscow and East Berlin.
Sentenced to 42 years in prison, he was sensationally sprung
from Wormwood Scrubs prison in London in 1966 by two
pacifist militants and smuggled to East Berlin in a van.
Settling in Moscow where fellow-spies such as Lonsdale and
Maclean (since deceased) had preceded him, Blake married a
Russian woman in 1968 and joined a think-tank specialising in
Middle Eastern affairs, living a life of relative privilege.In Britain Blake continues to be regarded as a traitor. The judge
who handed him his prison sentence -- still the longest ever
handed out -- said it represented one year for every British
agent Blake had betrayed.
Blake's former controller Sergei Kondrashev -- who received
the Berlin tunnel plans from Blake on the upper deck of a
London bus -- revealed at the same press conference that he
was preparing to publish his own memoirs.
These would provide further details about Blake's career,
including more information about his escape from prison which
was, he said, "a real epic."