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George Blake: The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold

Agence France-Presse

   MOSCOW - George Blake, who died Saturday in Moscow aged 98, was a
   British Cold War spy and Soviet double agent who spent half his life in
   Russia after dramatically escaping jail in London.

   The last surviving member of a notorious generation of British
   defectors, Blake was seen as one of the West's most damaging traitors
   and claimed to have betrayed hundreds of agents to the KGB.

   The bearded spy, however, trod a very different path to becoming a
   Soviet agent than that taken by the establishment insiders of the
   infamous Cambridge spy ring: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony
   Burgess, all recruited while at the British city's prestigious
   university.

   Born George Behar in the Netherlands in 1922 to a Dutch mother and
   Egyptian Jewish father, who was a British subject, he led a peripatetic
   youth that took him through Cairo and into the Dutch World War II
   resistance before joining Britain's MI6.

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