Spies, Lies, and Exile: The Extraordinary Story of Russian Double Agent George Blake

by Simon Kuper

Overview

“Fascinating, rich, and probing . . . a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait”—The Wall Street Journal

For fans of John le Carré and Ben Macintyre, an exclusive first-person account of one of the Cold War’s most notorious spies

“Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative. If the definition of a psychopath is someone who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions, does George fit the definition? There he sits, admitting it was all for nothing, but has no regrets. Or does he?” —John le Carré

Few Cold War spy stories approach the sheer daring and treachery of George Blake’s.

After fighting in the Dutch resistance during World War II, Blake joined the British spy agency MI6 and was stationed in Seoul. Taken prisoner after the North Korean army overran his post in 1950, Blake later returned to England to a hero’s welcome, carrying a dark secret: while in a communist prison camp in North Korea, he had secretly switched sides to the KGB after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

As a Soviet double agent, Blake betrayed uncounted western spying operations—including the storied Berlin Tunnel, the most expensive covert project ever undertaken by the CIA and MI6. Blake exposed hundreds of western agents, forty of whom were likely executed. After his unmasking and arrest, he received, for that time, the longest sentence in modern British history—only to make a dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1966, five years into his forty-two-year sentence. He left his wife, three children, and a stunned country behind.

Much of Blake’s career existed inside the hall of mirrors that was the Cold War, especially following his sensational escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison. Veteran journalist Simon Kuper tracked Blake to his dacha outside Moscow, where the aging spy agreed to be interviewed for this unprecedented account of Cold War espionage. Following the master spy’s death in Moscow at age ninety-eight on December 26, 2020, Kuper is finally able to set the record straight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620973752
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	636,018
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Simon Kuper is a British author and journalist for the Financial Times. Kuper was born in Uganda to South African parents in 1969, and moved to the Netherlands as a child. He studied history and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard Universityas a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for The Observer, The Times, and The Guardian and also writes regularly for Dutch newspapers. He lives in Paris with his family.

Table of Contents

Preface to the US Edition vii

1 Finding Blake 1

2 An Ordinary Dutch Boy 12

3 A Jewish Mansion in an Arab City 17

4 Deception Becomes Daily Habit 22

5 A Legendary Centre of Hidden Power 32

6 The Prisoner Converts 42

7 Lunchtime Spy 56

8 A Mole in Berlin 67

9 The Game Is Up 80

10 The Human Cost 100

11 Espionage, Balls and Rackets 114

12 Foreign Traitor 122

13 Headstands in Jail 130

14 Straight Out of Hitchcock 140

15 Someone Who Adjusts Easily 158

16 Henri Curiel, A Parallel Life 185

17 Cynicism and Christmas Pudding 196

18 'Tragic I Am Not' 210

Afterword 219

Acknowledgements 221

Notes 222

Select Bibliography 260

Books and Articles 262

List of Illustrations 267

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Journalist Kuper (Soccernomics) delivers a colorful yet glancing portrait of British double agent George Blake, who died in Moscow in 2020 at age 98. Drawing on a 2012 interview he conducted with Blake in Russia, Kuper struggles to understand how the former MI6 agent, who was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father who had served in the British Army during WWI, became one of England's most notorious traitors, suspected of having given Moscow the identifies of several hundred spies from 1953 until his arrest in 1961. Kuper offers several theories, including the "deterministic" worldview Blake acquired from his childhood interest in Calvinism, the poverty he witnessed in Egypt while visiting relatives, his Russian studies in Cambridge, and the Marxist literature he read while being held prisoner in North Korea during the Korean War. But Blake's personality and true motivations remain out of reach, and Kuper doesn't shed much light on the thinking behind his exhaustive confession ("Once he had begun spilling the beans, he just kept on spilling"), or his life in Moscow after escaping from a British prison in 1966 ("He stopped striving for paradise, and learned to enjoy the simple things"). Espionage buffs hoping for insight into this enigmatic spy will be disappointed . (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Spies, Lies, and Exile:
“Kuper probes subtly into Blake’s psyche, covers his life expertly, and asks all the right questions.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Fascinating, rich, and probing . . . a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait of one man’s rigid, Panglossian desire to see the best in everything. . . . In many ways, the beauty of Spies, Lies, and Exile is the manner in which Blake’s wide-eyed credulity is matched, blow for blow, by Mr. Kuper’s considered skepticism and his ability, at the end, to see through the veneer of self-deception.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Simon Kuper tells this extraordinary tale with wit and vim in his entertaining account of the spy’s life.”
—The Economist

“[A] wise, engaging biography.”
—The Spectator (London)

“This well-written and solidly researched biography of a complicated man will resonate with readers who enjoyed Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends or the novels of John le Carré.”
—Library Journal

“The most comprehensive and insightful biography to date.”
—Ben Macintyre, The Times

“A good account of a good story . . . a sceptical wit in judging his man and the secret world he inhabited.”
—Max Hastings, Sunday Times

“Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative. If the definition of a psychopath is someone who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions, does George fit the definition? There he sits, admitting it was all for nothing, but has no regrets. Or does he?”
—John le Carré

“Truly enthralling, gets under the skin, gives us a more nuanced sense of who Mr. Blake—or is it Comrade Blake?—really was, and what, if anything, actually motivated him. It’s a deeply human read, wonderfully written, on the foibles of a fascinating, flawed, treacherous and sort of likeable character.”
—Philippe Sands

 

From the Publisher

06/18/2021

Journalist Kuper (Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe's Darkest Hour) explores the world of Soviet double agents with this posthumous biography of George Blake, an officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) who in 1961 confessed to spying for the USSR. Blake (born George Behar in the Netherlands) turned double agent while in a North Korean prison camp in the 1950s and was responsible for the deaths and disappearances of countless British agents during the Cold War. When he was discovered, Blake was sentenced to 42 years of imprisonment in Britain; his 1966 escape from London's Wormwood Scrubs jail and subsequent exile in Russia are the stuff of action thrillers, yet his story is less known to modern audiences than those of other double agents like Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. Kuper draws material from his 2012 interview with Blake in Russia (one of few interviews Blake granted), as well as from earlier interview transcripts, a memoir, and recordings of Blake's lectures to groups of Stasi officers in East Berlin in the early 1980s. Kuper makes clear that Blake's words were often untrustworthy, though he clearly is somewhat sympathetic to a man whose life did not go as planned. VERDICT This well-written and solidly researched biography of a complicated man will resonate with readers who enjoyed Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends or the novels of John le Carré.—Amelia Osterud, Milwaukee P.L.

Library Journal