At the intelligence school, the future officer of the British secret service MI6 and agent of the Soviet secret service KGB, George Blake, was characterized as someone who "does not inspire confidence" and who is "completely unprepared for the responsible task, on which he might be sent".
How is it that such an assessment of the head of training did not discourage the young man from passing the selection of the British Secret Intelligence Service?
The BBC has been exposed to new declassified archive data about one of the most famous double agents in British history.
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The most important part of the disclosed documents is the report of Lord Radcliffe, who after the arrest of George Blake was given the task of conducting a complete check of the personal affairs and all connections of the Soviet agent.
Radcliffe turned his attention to a feature written for Blake by the head of MI6's training for future officers.
"He does not inspire confidence and is not goal-oriented, but there is no evidence to the contrary.
"He is temperamental, receptive, imperceptible, he does not behave like a Brit," the assessment reads.
"It needs to be strictly directed. One gets the impression that he is completely unprepared for the responsible duty to which they are about to send him.
"He doesn't show the qualities usually possessed by representatives of the Secret Intelligence Service," summarized the head of the course.
Despite this assessment by his direct superior, Blake was recruited by MI6 and soon sent to Korea.
"There is no evidence whatsoever that the report prompted an urgent reconsideration of Blake's enrollment in MI6," said Lord Radcliffe, who analyzed Blake's personal file.
MI6 made a mistake in recruiting Blake, he added in the report.
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"Where did we get the right to come and destroy?"
A good acquaintance of Blake's, MI6 officer Kim Philby, who also worked undercover for the KGB, once said in an interview: “To be a traitor, you first need to belong somewhere. I never belonged."
Philby may have been disingenuous when he suggested that he had never belonged to British culture and the establishment.
But Blake could be completely honest when he said the same thing.
Judging by the biography of the spy, his heart never belonged to any party.
George (born Behar) was born in Rotterdam in the family of an Egyptian Jew and a Dutch woman, an active parishioner of the Protestant Church.
Blake's father, Albert, acquired a British passport after serving in the British Army during World War I and named his only son after the British king.
George started covert operations early.
When the boy was 17 years old, he started riding his bike around the Netherlands delivering secret messages to members of the resistance movement to fight the Nazis.
The situation became too dangerous in 1943 and George organized the first (but not the last) escape of his life.
Through the occupied territories of France and Spain, the young man reached England, where he changed his surname Behar to Blake and joined the Royal Navy as a volunteer.
Soon MI6 took an interest in Blake, as he spoke several languages and already had experience working underground.
After the training, Blake, regardless of the occasionally negative characteristics of the head of the training, was registered in the intelligence service and in 1948 was sent to Korea.
Soon, a war began in the country between the South, which was supported by the countries of the West, and the North, which relied on the help of the USSR.
Finally, this year, the details of the interview with Blake, which he gave to the Dutch journalist Simon Cooper in Moscow back in 2012, became known.
In the last years of his life, the former double agent very rarely spoke to Western journalists.
He spoke with Cooper on the condition that the text of that interview be published only in English after Blake's death.
"As a representative of the West, I felt guilty, and I asked myself: what are we doing here, where did we get the right to come here and destroy everything?
"These are people who live so far away from us, they have to decide for themselves how they are going to arrange their lives," is how Blake described Cooper's thoughts at the beginning of the war in Korea.
The task of the intelligence officer was to create a network of agents for espionage against the North.
When Northern troops temporarily occupied Seoul, Blake was captured in 1950.
The American bombing of Pyongyang, according to Blake, reminded him of when the Luftwaffe destroyed his native Rotterdam just a few years before.
The bombing of small Korean villages by Western aviation left a strong impression on him.
"I realized how fragile human life is and I thought a lot about what I had done until this moment.
"I decided to devote the rest of my life to what I considered a worthy cause," Blake recounted, denying, as always, that he had agreed under pressure to be a secret agent for the USSR.
British intelligence veterans are skeptical of this claim.
Some retired KGB officers, according to the information of the publication "Kommersant", they transparently hinted that Blake's homosexuality was the reason for cooperation with Soviet intelligence services: at the time, the publication of such information could cause a man a lot of trouble, especially if he was in a prisoner of war camp.
Whatever Blake's motives were, he returned from Korea to Britain as a secret agent of Soviet intelligence.
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Victims of war?
It is usually considered that the most important (most famous) piece of information that Blake passed on to the USSR is the information about the "Berlin tunnel".
It was a joint project of MI6 and the CIA to build an underground tunnel half a kilometer long under the lines of communication that connected the headquarters of Soviet troops in East Germany (GDR) to Moscow.
The USSR received information about this project during its development phase.
But in the end, the KGB not only allowed the construction of the tunnel, but also allowed the wiretapping of the communication lines for nine months and only then publicly exposed the MI6 and CIA special operation.
Based on recently released documents, the author of a new book on Blake, Simon Cooper, has come to the conclusion that it appears that the KGB used the information that they knew the tunnel existed to misinform Western intelligence services.
There is some reason to believe that the Chekists did not actually inform the leadership of the Soviet Army that military communications had been intercepted.
There could have been two reasons: the desire of the intelligence services to protect their source in MI6 and the long-standing rivalry between the two security structures.
Based on declassified MI6 documents, the voluminous transcripts intercepted by the British and Americans did not yield any particularly important new information.
The essence of the acquired knowledge was reduced to one thing: the USSR did not plan an attack on West Berlin.
However, Western intelligence services already knew this from other sources.
In Great Britain, it is believed that Blake gave Soviet intelligence the names of about 600 agents who were cooperating with Western intelligence services in Eastern Europe.
As it has now become known, they included at least 42 British agents who were arrested, tortured and then shot by the KGB.
Blake always denied that the deaths of those people were the result of his actions.
But this painful question is still debated by the British press.
In his conversation with Cooper, Blake called the shot agents victims of war.
One of Blake's tasks at MI6 was to find people of interest to MI6 in East Germany and convince them to secretly work against their own country.
"I've been in that business my whole life, and it's bound to affect how one views betrayal," Blake explained.
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"And I, a sinner, continue to live"
Blake was exposed in 1961 after the CIA intelligence officer "Sniper" (under that nickname the Polish intelligence officer Mihail Golenevsky hid) told about the existence of a Soviet agent in MI6.
After counterintelligence gathered all the information about the "mole", the leads led to Blake.
At the same time, MI5 managed to "capture" the Soviet intelligence officer Conan the Younger and his "Portland intelligence network".
When Blake was arrested he did not deny the charges.
He was sentenced to 42 years in prison, one of the longest prison terms in recent British judicial history.
It is interesting that the other KGB agents who were exposed, such as the British Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, were not arrested.
The British establishment took care of their offspring, but they sentenced the immigrant to life imprisonment, which is exactly how Blake himself experienced that situation.
At Wormwood Scrubs Prison, Blake became something of a hero to his cellmates: he showed unusual civility for such places and even taught foreign language classes for the inmates.
With the help of his former roommate, a member of the paramilitary Irish IRA, Sean Burke and two other anti-war activists, Blake organized a daring escape.
Blake spent the rest of his life in Moscow, where the KGB gave him an apartment, a cottage, the rank of colonel and the Order of Lenin (the highest award in the award system).
Just before leaving for Berlin in 1954, Blake married an Englishwoman, Gillian Elan, who worked as a secretary in MI6.
She agreed to this marriage, not suspecting that her beloved was secretly transmitting classified information to the USSR.
Later, Gillian recalled how George tried to dissuade her: “He knew he should never have gotten married. I think he felt that very strongly.
"Only now, when I look back on those events, I can sort everything out.
"However, when you're 21 and in love, every difficulty only makes you more motivated."
Blake, he said, was troubled by Jillian's unwitting involvement in his life as a double agent.
The last time they saw each other was in the visiting room of Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
Through bars, the couple discussed the terms of their divorce and custody of their three sons.
At the time, Jillian was pregnant with their youngest son, Patrick.
After Blake's escape, Gillian married Michael Butler, who gave the boys his last name and raised them as if they were his own.
"He was a very good father to my boys, and they speak of him with great affection.
"Unfortunately, Michael passed away quite early, and I, the sinner, live on," Blake said.
Blake's children only learned in their teenage years that he was their biological father.
His sons visited him several times in Moscow, but of course, that can hardly be called real communication.
In Moscow, the new wife of his friend Kim Philby introduced him to Ida Karaeva, and he married again.
The couple had a son, Mihailo.
But he, of course, couldn't replace Blake's inability to really communicate with his other children.
After the collapse of the USSR, Blake asked then Prime Minister Tony Blair for permission to come to Great Britain and meet his own grandchildren.
The answer the double agent received can be summed up as follows: "Come and we'll arrest you on the spot."
George Blake died in Moscow on December 26, 2020 at the age of 98.
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