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British Spy George Blake Dies, Book Recommendation
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 British Spy George Blake Dies, Book ...
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Some of you may have noted that the British traitor and Soviet spy George Blake died a couple of days ago in Moscow at the age of 98. He was involved in one of the biggest episodes of spying against the West during the Cold War. I mention this because there is a relatively new book out entitled “Betrayal in Berlin,” by the author Steve Vogel, that recounts the story of the Berlin Tunnel.
In the early 1950s, the CIA and MI6 devised a plan to tunnel under the border of East Berlin and tap into the massive Soviet military, classified phone system. It was audacious, and they did it without being caught, except for one thing: The MI6 officer George Blake gave the plan away to the Soviets. The Soviets, however, couldn’t stop it or expose it because to do so would expose their chief asset, George Blake in MI6.
The tunnel was built and taps put on the wiring. The Soviets fed disinformation through the classified lines, but they couldn’t make it all disinformation or we would catch on quickly that someone had tipped them off, thus, again, endangering their asset Blake. So we actually obtained some useful intelligence, but nowhere near the kind we would have obtained had Blake not tipped off the Soviets.
I read Vogel’s book a couple of months ago, which is a bit ironic in that Blake just died. He, like Philby and others, went to Moscow, although he did so by escaping from a British prison after a trial found him guilty of espionage. He was set up with an apartment, a dacha, and a Zil limousine.
I have a personal interest in this story, as I have known for decades about the Berlin Tunnel episode, and in the early 1980s I was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR). The Assistant Secretary for INR at the time was a gentleman named Hugh Montgomery who was seconded to INR by the CIA. Montgomery holds a prominent role in the Berlin Tunnel episode, as he was a young CIA officer working on the issue at the time.
I highly recommend "Betrayal in Berlin" if you have any interest in the Cold War and one of its most interesting and audacious episodes.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Dec. 28 2020 22:14:19
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: British Spy George Blake Dies, B... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Hi Bill--
I just came across this post, and ordered the book. Thanks for the recommendation.
I hadn't realized you worked for INR. About a third of my time was spent on intel for about 20 years, though it was almost all collected by technical means: signal intelligence, satellite imagery, monitoring of Soviet ICBM and ICMB interceptor flight tests, and the like.
I did meet a few very interesting people. During the Carter administration it was decided it would be more polite to call them "emigrants" rather than "defectors."
One of my good friends led the analysis of data we collected observing French nuclear weapons tests in the Marquesas. We learned a lot about nuclear weapons effects on radar, communications, and so on, which were important in my non-intel work.
However it was our own Starfish series of exo-atmospheric nuclear tests launched from Johnston Island which managed to knock out the power grid in Hawaii. "EMP" (electromagnetic pulse) effects became public knowledge kind of suddenly.
RobF I was saddened to hear of LeCarre's demise. I agree with the critics who said he was not only a great spy novelist, but was simply one of the great novelists of the twentieth century.
His last opus, written in his eighties, showed no weakening of his powers whatsoever. It is one of his cheekiest critiques of the murky ethics of the spook business. Each successive work explored a new instance, often even a new form of betrayal.
RNJ
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Date Dec. 30 2020 12:08:33
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