Vladimir Putin has honoured a notorious British traitor as one of Russia’s greatest spies. George Blake received the Order of Friendship during a gala celebration of his 85th birthday, in what appears to be the latest twist in deteriorating relations between Moscow and London.

Mikhail Fradkov, director of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, read out telegrams from officials praising Blake’s contribution to Soviet espionage as a double agent in the British Secret Service, MI6.

“It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake,” Sergei Ivanov, an SVR spokesman, said. “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Great Britain could have inflicted on it.”

The SVR is the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations. Russia’s award to Blake comes a month after Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB defector to the West, was honoured by the Queen for services to Britain. Mr Gordievsky, who was a British double agent in the KGB for 17 years until 1985, was named a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Birthday Honours.

Blake betrayed the identities of hundreds of British agents at the height of the Cold War until he was exposed as a Soviet mole in 1961. One of the Kremlin’s greatest coups came in 1953 when he tipped off his handlers about plans by Britain and the United States to tunnel into Soviet-occupied East Berlin.

The aim was to tap into the Red Army’s communications network, but the KGB found the tunnel after a year. British intelligence learnt later that Moscow had used its knowledge of the plan to plant disinformation in the West.

Blake was jailed for 42 years, then Britain’s longest prison term, after the trial judge described his case as “one of the worst that can be envisaged in times of peace”. But sympathisers sprang him from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and he fled to Moscow, where he became a colonel in the KGB and trained Soviet spies.

After receiving the honour on Monday he said that he had led a “very full and, in the end, a happy life”. Mr Ivanov said that Blake still delivered occasional lectures at the Russian intelligence academy.

Mr Putin’s decision to honour Blake comes as Anglo-Russian relations have hit a post-Cold War low over the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident former spy poisoned in London last November with radioactive polonium-210. Mr Putin has dismissed as stupid Britain’s demand to hand over Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB officer, to face trial for murdering Mr Litvinenko, citing a constitutional ban on extradition.

Mr Putin, a former KGB official, has appointed fellow veterans to key government posts and heaped praise upon the work of Russia’s intelligence service. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, complained last week that Russian spying operations in Britain remained at Cold War levels.

Blake, in an interview screened on Russia Today television, said that he had been right to spy for the Soviets. He said: “I could have left the service, and I could have joined the Communist Party, and I could have sold the Daily Worker at street corners . . . But I felt I could do more for the cause.”

He said that he switched sides after seeing US bombers attacking “completely defenceless Korean villages” in the Korean War. Blake, who was captured by North Korean forces, said: “One didn’t feel too proud of being on the Western side.”

Betrayal and lies

— John Vassall, a British naval attaché, admitted being recruited by the KGB in 1955 after agents plied him with alcohol and photographed him in a compromising position with “two or three men”. He was arrested in 1962 and jailed for 18 years

— “Superspy” Oleg Lyalin defected to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1971. He revealed 105 Russian spies

— Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer, passed information to British Intelligence for at least a decade before defecting in 1985

Sources: www.crimelibrary.com; Times archives

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