Spy George Blake escapes from Wormwood Scrubs: 22 October 1966 Posted on: 21 October 2016 The sentence was such that it almost became a question of honour to challenge it . . . like a POW, I had a duty to escape.1
‘Double Agent breaks out of jail’ On 11 November 2016, George Blake, the great survivor of those who spied for the Soviet Union against Britain in the early Cold War years, will celebrate his 94th birthday in Russia, where he is hailed as a hero. Fifty years ago, on 22 October 1966, after serving 5 years of a 42-year sentence, he scaled the wall of Wormwood Scrubs prison on a ladder made from knitting needles. Blake was helped over the wall and hidden by Irishman Sean Bourke, who was sentenced to 7 years in 1961 for sending a bomb in a biscuit tin to a policeman. Then Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, anti-nuclear campaigners who had spent a short time in Wormwood Scrubs with Blake and saw him as a fellow political prisoner, organized his onward journey. Just before Christmas 1966 Randle, with his wife and children, concealed Blake under the seats in the back of their campervan and drove him across the Channel to an East German border checkpoint. His KGB controller, Sergei Kondrashev, then arranged Blake’s onward journey to Moscow. Codenamed DIOMID An officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) who had been captured by North Korean soldiers in 1950, Blake returned from captivity to work for Soviet as well as British intelligence, betraying many agents who were later executed, including a network in East Germany, as well as informing the Soviet authorities of the existence of the Anglo-American listening tunnel under Berlin. Arrested following intelligence received from a Polish defector, Blake’s sentencing in May 1961 led to the appointment of the Radcliffe Committee on Security Procedures in the Public Service.2 According to the official history of MI5, Moscow Centre considered Blake—codenamed DIOMID—so important that only his controller had been permitted to know his real identity or that he was an SIS officer.3 As the existence of SIS was not avowed officially in 1966, on his escape Blake could not be identified in this way in Parliament or the British press, though the foreign media were
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