George Blake, the Happy Traitor, with Simon Kuper, author of a new biography of Blake

George Blake, one of the most notorious double agents of the Cold War, died on Boxing Day 2020, aged 98. He stands in a long tradition of Western communists who turned traitor. He betrayed the names of hundreds of British agents to the USSR. About 40 of them are thought to have been executed. Why did the British spy go over to the Soviet Union? And what does his story tell us about the Cold War?

In 2012, Simon spent hours with Blake in his dacha outside Moscow. It turned out to be the last long interview of the spy’s life. And what a life! The son of a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father, Blake was a teenaged courier in the Dutch wartime Resistance, joined the British secret services in London, was held captive in North Korea, converted to communism, handed over thousands of British documents to the KGB, betrayed the famous “Berlin spy tunnel” to the Russians, was finally caught by the British, received the longest jail sentence in British history, and then escaped from his London prison in a jailbreak so successful that Alfred Hitchcock spent his last decade trying to make it into a film. In 1966 Blake made it out of England to Moscow, where he married a Russian woman and spent the rest of his life.

Simon Kuper is co-provost of Pandemonium U and a columnist for the Financial Times. He grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, with South African parents. He is the author of several books; The Happy Traitor is his first on espionage..

Pamela Druckerman is the author of five books, including the forthcoming rhyming picture book for children Paris by Phone.