The end of the legendary era of Cold War double agents

British and Soviet double agent George Blake with his mother after returning from captivity in North Korea in 1953. Illustrated Service (Automatic) / Europa Press

And George Blake was buried in the Alley of Heroes of the famous Troekurovski cemetery in Moscow.

To the sound of the national anthem of Russia and with the salutes of the national guard of honor, the legendary British double agent, who spied for the Soviet Union at a height of the Cold War before being discovered, convicted and starring in a movie escape In 1966, he received a remarkable farewell on Wednesday.

Along with his tombstone, bearing the name of Georgy Ivanovich Bechter, under which he lived since his arrival in the USSR, where he received the rank of KGB colonel, numerous wreaths;

also one from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

With the death on December 26 of Blake, one of the key double agents in the history of the 20th century, celebrated as an unshakable patriot also by the Kremlin, one of the last vestiges of espionage measured in the Cold War is extinguished.

A time that forever changed the concept of foreign intelligence, faithfully portrayed in many of his works by John Le Carré, master of the spy novel and former agent, who also died last December.

Another ending.

"With the departure of Blake, the largest infiltration operation in the history of espionage was historically concluded –operatively, as far as we know, in the sixties–", summarizes the writer Enrique Bocanegra, who has thoroughly studied the period and also the exploits of intelligence.

Until the start-up of the Soviet secret services in the 1920s, espionage consisted mainly of buying information from second-rank agents on the opposite side, motivated by spite, unsatisfied ambitions or the need for money, Bocanegra explains.

What the intelligence leadership of the USSR proposed from the 1930s on is something much more ambitious: to prepare and infiltrate its own agents and allow them to develop a career over decades.

A trajectory that will lead them to positions of power in enemy organizations and destroy them from the inside.

And they were successful.

Разведчик Джордж Блейк похоронен с воинскими почестями на Троекуровском кладбище в Москве pic.twitter.com/784T

- Первый канал (@channelone_rus) December 30, 2020

The KGB managed to capture colossal assets, highlights documentary filmmaker Lana Parshina, who has written about the Soviet intelligence agency.

Not only by Blake himself, who uncovered dozens of agents or whose valuable information allowed the USSR to disrupt, for example, the famous Berlin tunnel, which Anglo-American espionage used, among other things, to intercept Soviet telephone conversations.

Or for the various double agents who helped the KGB obtain secrets about the US nuclear weapons program and allowed them to advance in the development of their own bomb.

The powerful Soviet intelligence service recruited five young British men of high birth, Cambridge students, and called to prominent positions in the 1930s.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Guy Burgess, Antony Blunt, Donald MacLean, John Cairncross and Kim Philby, known as the Cambridge Circle, were already occupying important positions in the British Administration from which they spied for the Russians.

Burgess became a confidant of Winston Churchill.

Maclean, an important foreign office.

Blunt, the person in charge of the royal art gallery for decades.

Philby, considered by many to be the greatest traitor of the Cold War but also the greatest double agent of all time, rose to become head of the Soviet counterintelligence service and liaison between British intelligence and the CIA.

The jackpot.

So brutal that his betrayal completely dismantled British intelligence in the 1960s to such an extent that it had to reinvent itself, highlights Bocanegra, author of a prominent biography of Philby (

A spy in the trench. Kim Philby in the Spanish war)

, Tusquets), the person who precisely uncovered David Cornwell (who wrote his novels under the name of John Le Carré).

To the strength of its secret services, which grew even stronger in a system accustomed to opacity and secrecy since the Bolshevik revolution, was added another element that played a nuclear role in the recruitment of double agents: ideology.

"In the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, Soviet intelligence greatly benefited from the sympathy of left youth towards the USSR as an embodiment of the idea of ​​the left and later as a bastion of antifascism", emphasizes Leonid Mlechin, historian of the Soviet secret services.

The Cambridge circle, first, and Blake and some others later, claimed that they joined the KGB for the ideals of socialism, the fight against inequality, and injustice.

"Blake's disappearance means that the age of 'ideological' double agents is really over," says Lana Parshina, co-author

of Hitler's Death

.

Although, Leonid Mlechin remarks, there were also elements of hard recruitment work,

kompromats

or “pure luck”;

almost always linked to economic interest.

Such as the case of the former CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who volunteered for the KGB and spied for the USSR between 1985 and 1991. Or the former FBI agent Robert Hansen, who also went on

his own accord

to the Soviets for whom he worked since 1979, passing then to collaborate with the Russians until he was discovered in 2011. The two double agents, who are serving life sentences in maximum security prisons in the United States, did so for money.

The heart of the Soviet secret services also suffered great blows, as in the case of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who went to work for MI6 and managed to escape to the United Kingdom, where he lives in protection.

Others were captured and executed.

Like almost nowhere else, the USSR honored its double agents as true heroes.

George Blake received the Lenin medal upon his arrival in Moscow in 1966, after a legendary escape.

And before him several members of the Cambridge circle.

Although these honors were mostly done in secret.

At that time, espionage was taboo in the USSR.

It was not discussed in public life, not even in fiction novels or movies.

Until the arrival at the headquarters of the KGB of Yuri Andropov, a hard-core communist who realizes that the USSR no longer has the attractiveness it had in the 1930s and that there are no longer a multitude of young people open to collaborating, Bocanegra highlights.

A gigantic propaganda campaign then erupts in which Blake and MacLean and Kim Philby, who had been living in Moscow totally forgotten for years, are rescued for public life.

"Andropov was of the idea of ​​making visible at all costs that whoever collaborated with the services would live well," says Leonid Mlechin.

KGB analysts and scholars have said that, despite everything, their Soviet superiors did not quite trust the double agents hosted in Moscow.

Philby, for example, who in a note addressed to his Soviet colleagues on the centenary of the birth of Felix Dzerzhinsky in 1977, wished that everyone could "live to see the red flag fly at Buckhingham Palace and the White House," it took more than a decade to set foot in the legendary headquarters of the USSR intelligence agency.

The counterintelligence officer always sees the defector on the other side as a probable agent.

Today, Philby rests a few kilometers from Blake's new tombstone, in the Kuntsevo cemetery, along with other Soviet heroes such as the Spanish Ramón Mercader, the secret agent who assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Philby, who served the USSR more than 50 years driven primarily by an ideological commitment to Marxism, has been renamed and celebrated as a Russian patriot.

He has had his own postage stamp, an outstanding historical exhibition has been dedicated to him and a square in a Moscow neighborhood bears his name.

Now, after several very serious setbacks for its intelligence services, such as the failed poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal in 2018 or more recently the case of the opposition Alexei Nalvalni, but also due to small economic scandals or nepotism, the Kremlin embarks on a similar path with George Blake.

Another chapter to polish the image of the KGB, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin belonged (and went so far as to lead his successor service, the FSB) and to try to return to society the idea that its secret agents are the elite, as were his Cold War double agents, rather than clumsy thugs like the detected military intelligence agents (GRU) targeted by the British secret services in the

Skripal case

.

"Blake chose the path of a decisive and uncompromising fight for the highest humanist values, for a just and free world," Serguei Naryshkin, the all-powerful head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR, the successor of the arm), said at his funeral on Wednesday. KGB Foreign Intelligence Agency).

"He had severe tests, spent many years on the edge of the invisible front, worked to the limit of human strength and capabilities and kept faith in his ideals, in his convictions and high values," insisted Naryshkin before the coffin of the double agent, carried on a snowy morning by six Russian soldiers in dress uniform.

That golden age of a certain type of espionage in which the human factor was everything, in which it took nerves of steel and prodigious memory to lead a double life, is over.

Now the cold war of the 21st century is technology.

And if there is an elite in the Russian intelligence services, it would be within their cyber spy brigades.