![]() Kuper hoped their similar peripatetic and cosmopolitan experiences would lull the canny Blake into a more relaxed and expansive rapport with his interviewer. Though Kuper offers few new revelations, he probes subtly into Blake’s psyche, covers his life expertly, and asks all the right questions-particularly in a three-hour dialogue with Blake in 2012, which he promised not to release until after the spy’s death. According to Simon Kuper, Blake considered himself to have been “a happy man.” Yet his motives for switching sides are still an enigma, which Spies, Lies, and Exile seeks to crack. He was also one of the least fathomable and least well known of Soviet spies, especially compared with the Cambridge Five, who still fascinate a wider audience of espionage aficionados. Sentenced to forty-two years behind bars after his exposure in 1961, he escaped from a London prison five years later and spent the rest of his life in Moscow, dying there only last year, on Boxing Day, aged ninety-eight. ![]() Of all the many British and American spies who served the Soviet Union, George Blake was arguably the most intriguing and certainly one of the most effective: he betrayed hundreds of agents in the 1950s, including many working for the West in East Germany. George Blake and his dog, Lyusha, outside his dacha near Moscow, which was provided by the KGB in recognition of his services, 2012 ![]()
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