Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Russia honours British double agent

Russia honours British double agent
By our foreign staff
Last Updated: 1:14pm GMT 14/11/2007
Russia has honoured a British double agent reviled in Britain as a traitor
in a special ceremony on the former spy’s 85th birthday. 
Russia may deploy nuclear missiles in Belarus
George Blake, who turned 85 on Sunday, was a British secret agent from
1944 until 1961, when he was jailed for 42 years after pleading guilty to
spying for the Soviet Union. 
 
Blake escaped from prison in London in 1966 and went to Moscow 
He escaped from prison in London in 1966 and has lived in Moscow since. 
He told Reuters he had lived a ‘full and happy life’.
Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, successor to the mighty First
Chief Directorate of the Soviet KGB secret police, feted Blake at a
special gala at its headquarters on Monday evening, the SVR said. 
SVR director Mikhail Fradkov decorated Blake with the Friendship Order and
read out telegrams from Russia’s leadership, Interfax news agency quoted
SVR spokesman Sergei Ivanov as saying. 
“The importance of the information supplied by Blake can hardly be
overestimated,” Ivanov said.
The ceremony is the latest indication of deteriorating relations between
Britain and Russia after Moscow refused a request to extradite the chief
suspect in the killing of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in
London a year ago. 
advertisement
Russia has refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, to
face trial for Mr Litvinenko’s murder.
In 1953 Blake tipped off the Soviet intelligence of plans by British and
US secret services to build a tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone of
Berlin to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters. 
The Soviets unearthed the tunnel in 1956 after it had been in operation
for almost a year. 
But only after Blake’s arrest in 1961 did Western intelligence officials
realise Moscow had used its knowledge of the tunnel to misinform them. 
“It is namely 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, should they have succeeded in such a
large-scale operation now widely known as ‘The Berlin Tunnel’,” SVR’s
Ivanov said. 
“I never realised that,” Blake told Reuters by telephone, commenting on
the SVR’s praise.
“But it’s very difficult to see things like that (the Berlin tunnel) in
the general picture.” 
Asked whether attitude to him in present-day capitalist Russia run by
former KGB spy Vladimir Putin was any different than in Soviet times, he
said: “Oh no, no, not in the least.” 
Blake had admitted handing the Soviet Union hundreds of names of British
agents. 
He left three children behind in Britain when he escaped from jail more
than four decades ago and started a new family in Moscow. 
“I feel very lucky to have lived to my age and to be in good health, and
to have had a very interesting and very full and, in the end, a happy
life,” he told Reuters. Ends 
 
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
 
http://www.larinascita.org
http://www.italia-cuba.it/associazione/associazione.htm
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 > agents. 
Un eroe questo Blake. Ha contribuito a salvare la Pace mondiale dalle mire
guerrafondaie e imperialistiche angloamericane.
-- 


 e antisemita.
disse il nazipidocchio nazionalista brit e antisemita.


 disse il nazipidocchio nazionalista brit e antisemita.
Non sei credibile.
Se fosse così gli staresti leccando il culo, come a Naccarella.
Tb
-- 

 Se fosse così gli staresti leccando il culo,
lo fai tu in compagnia della vecchia carcassa che tirava molotov ai
sovietici ma non ai nazisti

 spying for the Soviet Union.
Macche'. Era Bill Haydon. Lo ha smascherato George Smiley con l' aiuto di 
Peter Guillam.