George Blake
The SIS traitor who betrayed the Berlin Tunnel and hundreds of agents
Overview
George Blake was recruited by the KGB while a prisoner in North Korea and betrayed Western operations for years, most famously revealing the Berlin Tunnel before it was built, and he is credited with exposing hundreds of agents by some counts. Convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a record 42 years, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 with help from peace activists and settled in Moscow, where he lived until his death in 2020. The scale of his damage shaped British counterintelligence for a generation.
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