Gillian Blake was home with her young sons when a British Foreign Office official dropped by, poured himself a whiskey, and explained that her husband was a traitor who’d slipped secrets to Moscow while working for MI6. It was 1961 during the Cold War and Gillian felt the missing pieces of the puzzle falling into place.

“When they told me he had betrayed the secrets of my country, it never crossed my mind that they had made a mistake,” Gillian later wrote. “As I thought back to George's background and to the six-and-a-half years of our very happy married life, it all fitted in somehow. He must have always been simulating - living, so to speak, a lie and living it rather ruthlessly.”

George’s decade-long betrayal was a humiliation to MI6, coming after the high-profile defections of Cambridge Five double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Britain blamed Blake for leaking intelligence about the Berlin Tunnel, one of the most expensive clandestine projects ever undertaken by the CIA and MI6. He’d also exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents, some of whom were executed as a result.

Blake’s court sentencing reflected the establishment's bitter mood: 42 years - the longest prison term recorded in Britain at the time. George was trained in the dark arts, however. He would soon be plotting a spectacular escape.

George Blake: the spy who got away‍

By 1966, George was 44 years old and had nothing left to lose. Although Gillian visited him in prison every month, she wanted a divorce. She’d met another man, Michael Butler, and she wanted Blake’s three boys to adopt his surname.

With the help of his cellmates, George hatched a plan to break out of Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. He was hoping that two peace activists - Michael Randle and Pat Pottle - would be his accomplices on the inside and slipped Pottle a note in the urinals one day.

“If you feel you can help me on your release, go to the Russian Embassy, introduce yourself and say, ‘I bring you greetings from Louise.’ Between 10 and 11 o’clock we exercise in the yard outside D Hall. If a rope ladder is thrown over the wall at the spot I have marked X [a sketch was enclosed] as near to 10.30 as possible, I will be ready.”

If the Soviets agreed, Blake wanted them to place an ad in the personal column of The Sunday Times saying: ‘Louise Longing to See You', author Simon Kuper writes in Spies, Lies & Exile. Although Pottle backed out - not willing to be in the midst of a clash between MI6 and the KGB - Blake had a Plan B. Sean Bourke, an Irishman convicted of sending an explosive device through the post to a policeman, met Blake while editing the prison magazine. Bourke would be released soon and offered to smuggle a walkie-talkie into Wormwood Scrubs to assist during the prison break.

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George Blake’s prison break‍

While other prisoners fixated on a movie, Blake escaped through a cell window - one of the bars having been previously removed by a convicted burglar. Bourke was waiting outside the maximum security prison with a walkie-talkie hidden in a pot of pink chrysanthemums and a rope-ladder with steps made of knitting needles.

There was only five minutes to spare before the prisoners returned to their cells at 7pm and the guards sounded the alarm. Blake hauled himself up, hurled himself over the wall and jumped the last 20 feet, spraining his ankle. Bourke bundled him into the car and sped off to a nearby bedsit.

The prisoners erupted when told of Blake's escape, bursting into a round of ‘For he's a jolly good fellow.’ “I have never known a reaction like this," reported ‘Zeno’, the pseudonym of a war hero serving time for murdering his ex-girlfriend. Left-leaning newspaper The Guardian described Blake’s escape as ‘almost in a manner of James Bond’.

The final leg involved Bourke and Pottle smuggling Blake across the English Channel in a van and driving him to the West Germany's Helmstedt/Marienborn border crossing where Blake rendezvoused with his East German handlers. The border was a favorite of Cold War spies as it was the shortest land route between East and West Germany. From there, the KGB asset escaped to the Soviet Union.

George Blake: a spy’s life in Moscow‍

Blake’s dramatic escape was only one vivid moment in a life filled with intrigue. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1922, Blake lived with his aunt in Egypt as a teenager and studied Russian at Cambridge University in England. He joined the Royal Navy and was recruited by MI6 during WWII and later posted to the British legation in Seoul, South Korea where he gathered intelligence on North Korea.

When the Korean War erupted in 1950, Seoul was captured by the Korean People's Army of the North. Blake was among the British diplomats taken prisoner for three years. After seeing the bombing of North Korea and reading the works of Karl Marx during his detention, Blake became a communist and volunteered to work for the Soviet Union and KGB spy service.

Blake said he came to his decision after witnessing the bombing of small Korean villages: “Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the Army… It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenseless people. I felt I was on the wrong side.”

George Blake: the spy who stole MI6’s secrets‍

The ideologically motivated spy was made a KGB colonel, celebrated with the Order of Lenin, and rewarded with a government pension. Blake lived in a spacious, rent-free apartment until his 2020 death in Moscow at the age of 98.

Years earlier, as Blake turned 90, his ex-wife Gillian Butler visited Moscow with their three sons and made peace with the unrepentant Colonel.

The extent of Blake’s espionage remains a secret although MI6 author and officer John le Carré called Blake’s treachery ‘monumental’. Writing in The Pigeon Tunnel, he said Blake betrayed hundreds of British agents and gave away MI6’s crown jewels - “the entire breakdown of MI6’s personnel, safe houses, order of battle, and outstations across the globe”.