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My book The Happy Traitor began more than 20 years ago when I chanced upon an article in a Dutch magazine. It was by a radio journalist who had interviewed George Blake, a British Dutchman who had started out spying for the British and wound up a KGB double agent. I’d never heard of Blake before, but was struck by the similarities in our backgrounds: we’re both British, Jewish (half, in his case), cosmopolitan, and we grew up in the Netherlands within 20 miles of each other.

Blake had had a fascinating life: from Dutch Resistance to captivity in North Korea to spying for MI6 in Berlin while secretly working for the Soviets, getting the longest jail sentence in modern British history, then legging it from Wormwood Scrubs to Moscow, where he ended up watching communism collapse. And the amazing thing to me, reading the article in 1999, was that this relic of history was still alive and able to reflect on it all.

I decided I wanted to interview him, too. The story of how I got to him is in the book, but suffice to say that one morning in May 2012 I found myself walking into the r

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George Blake, the Happy Traitor, with Simon Kuper, author of a new biography of Blake

George Blake, one of the most notorious double agents of the Cold War, died on Boxing Day 2020, aged 98. He stands in a long tradition of Western communists who turned traitor. He betrayed the names of hundreds of British agents to the USSR. About 40 of them are thought to have been executed. Why did the British spy go over to the Soviet Union? And what does his story tell us about the Cold War?

In 2012, Simon spent hours with Blake in his dacha outside Moscow. It turned out to be the last long interview of the spy’s life. And what a life! The son of a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father, Blake was a teenaged courier in the Dutch wartime Resistance, joined the British secret services in London, was held captive in North Korea, converted to communism, handed over thousands of British documents to the KGB, betrayed the famous “Berlin spy tunnel” to the Russians, was finally caught by the British, received the longest jail sentence in British history, and then escaped from his London priso

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I talk with acclaimed author and journalist Simon Kuper, has written The Happy Traitor, the story of British spy and Soviet Union double agent George Blake, the last major British traitor of the Cold War.

A deeply human read, wonderfully written, on the foibles of a fascinating, flawed, treacherous and sort of likeable character.’ Philippe Sands

In 1961, Blake was sentenced to forty-two years imprisonment – at the time, the longest sentence in modern British history. He had betrayed all the western spying operations that he knew about to the KGB. This included the names of hundreds of British agents working around the world. About forty of them are believed to have been executed. Blake is reckoned to have done as much damage to British interests as did his Moscow companions Kim Philby and Donald Maclean – perhaps more.

Today, his story is known only to a few experts, and only insofar as anything can be known for certain in the world of deceit that is spying. MI6 has never made its files on him public. Now that the master spy has died, Simon Kuper finally s