makes ya wonder what i'd be like over there now if the goreon was president...
Posted on 11/14/2007 4:48:17 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
November 14, 2007
Vladimir Putin honours traitor George Blake with tit-for-tat birthday medal
Tony Halpin Moscow
Vladimir Putin has honoured a notorious British traitor as one of Russia’s greatest spies. George Blake received the Order of Friendship during a gala celebration of his 85th birthday, in what appears to be the latest twist in deteriorating relations between Moscow and London.
Mikhail Fradkov, director of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, read out telegrams from officials praising Blake’s contribution to Soviet espionage as a double agent in the British Secret Service, MI6.
“It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake,” Sergei Ivanov, an SVR spokesman, said. “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Great Britain could have inflicted on it.”
The SVR is the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations. Russia’s award to Blake comes a month after Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB defector to the West, was honoured by the Queen for services to Britain. Mr Gordievsky, who was a British double agent in the KGB for 17 years until 1985, was named a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Birthday Honours.
Blake betrayed the identities of hundreds of British agents at the height of the Cold War until he was exposed as a Soviet mole in 1961. One of the Kremlin’s greatest coups came in 1953 when he tipped off his handlers about plans by Britain and the United States to tunnel into Soviet-occupied East Berlin.
The aim was to tap into the Red Army’s communications network, but the KGB found the tunnel after a year. British intelligence learnt later that Moscow had used its knowledge of the plan to plant disinformation in the West.
Blake was jailed for 42 years, then Britain’s longest prison term, after the trial judge described his case as “one of the worst that can be envisaged in times of peace”. But sympathisers sprang him from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and he fled to Moscow, where he became a colonel in the KGB and trained Soviet spies.
After receiving the honour on Monday he said that he had led a “very full and, in the end, a happy life”. Mr Ivanov said that Blake still delivered occasional lectures at the Russian intelligence academy.
Mr Putin’s decision to honour Blake comes as Anglo-Russian relations have hit a post-Cold War low over the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident former spy poisoned in London last November with radioactive polonium-210. Mr Putin has dismissed as stupid Britain’s demand to hand over Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB officer, to face trial for murdering Mr Litvinenko, citing a constitutional ban on extradition.
Mr Putin, a former KGB official, has appointed fellow veterans to key government posts and heaped praise upon the work of Russia’s intelligence service. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, complained last week that Russian spying operations in Britain remained at Cold War levels.
Blake, in an interview screened on Russia Today television, said that he had been right to spy for the Soviets. He said: “I could have left the service, and I could have joined the Communist Party, and I could have sold the Daily Worker at street corners . . . But I felt I could do more for the cause.”
He said that he switched sides after seeing US bombers attacking “completely defenceless Korean villages” in the Korean War. Blake, who was captured by North Korean forces, said: “One didn’t feel too proud of being on the Western side.”
Betrayal and lies
— John Vassall, a British naval attach鬠admitted being recruited by the KGB in 1955 after agents plied him with alcohol and photographed him in a compromising position with “two or three men”. He was arrested in 1962 and jailed for 18 years
— “Superspy” Oleg Lyalin defected to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1971. He revealed 105 Russian spies
— Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer, passed information to British Intelligence for at least a decade before defecting in 1985
Sources: www.crimelibrary.com; Times archives
Putin is really working hard at being a stalinist POS commie dictator.
Putin is a megalomaniac, but who can stop him? He’s due to lose power by next May, and he’s doing all he can to prevent that from happening.
makes ya wonder what i'd be like over there now if the goreon was president...
This treasonous Brit should be ashamed and embarrassed. At least we can see his treason. I’ve been wondering recently where dissent ends and treason begins in our country. Or if treason is a punishable offense here anymore.
There is no other ‘external’ (t)reason to do this but to spit in the face of Britian. They have shown that they do not want to be allies with the west. Britian, as the US, will, however, continue to act as if everything is status quo.
How con-veeeeeen-ient that it was the big bad evil Americans turned innocent little Georgie into a Commie spy. Problem is, he's (ahem) lying, a thing that seems to come quite naturally to him...and to all Communists. His turn to Communism actually occurred about ten years earlier, when his uncle recruited him into the KGB during WWII.
In Blake's defense, he did, after all, apologise in the early 90's for the deaths of the hundreds of agents he betrayed. How nice! Drop him a postcard and tell him how warm and fuzzy you feel about that...he's still living in Moscow, and in his mid-80's he's still a fervant Stalinist. Great guy! I'd love to meet him...with a .45 in my hand.
It’s right there were we left it.
It’s under the banner:
“Under The Same Management, Just A New Name!”
They never took a breather. They’ve just used this “warming period” as a time to infiltrate more of their agents into the West.
If Bill Clinton was in office, he’d give Putin’s wife a medal, for “best performance”.
Blake was jailed for 42 years, then Britain’s longest prison term, after the trial judge described his case as “one of the worst that can be envisaged in times of peace”. But sympathisers sprang him from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and he fled to Moscow, where he became a colonel in the KGB and trained Soviet spies.
He should have been hanged for treason as Lord Haw Haw was after WWII AND those who busted him out of prison should've gotten capital punishment too.
Even nations that ended the death penalty kept it for crimes against the State.
Ping.
Thanks for posting...I’d never heard of George Blake before.
George Blake: RIH (Rot in Hell)
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