Russia honors its Cold War spies

updated 7:25 p.m. ET Nov. 12, 2007

MOSCOW - Russian intelligence on Monday honored one of Moscow’s most important Soviet-era spies, stirring Cold War memories at a time when relations between Russia and the West are again going sour.

The accolade for British double agent George Blake, and the award of the nation’s highest medal to another prominent Soviet spy, came five months after Queen Elizabeth II honored Oleg Gordievsky, a high-level KGB man who defected to Britain in 1985.

It’s not known whether the Russian honors are a riposte to Britain, but they come as Russia is expanding its spying to Cold War levels or higher, according to U.S. and British officials.

Britain’s ties with Russia have been badly strained over the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer fatally poisoned last year in London by a radioactive isotope. Russia has refused to hand over Britain’s sole suspect, another ex-KGB man.

President Vladimir Putin, himself a KGB veteran, speaks proudly of his record, and the tributes to Blake and George Koval appear aimed at boosting patriotism as Russia heads into parliamentary elections Dec. 2.

Double humiliation for U.K.
On Monday, Blake was praised by the Foreign Intelligence Service, a KGB successor agency, in comments carried by Russian media, and by the service’s spokesman.

Blake delivered a double humiliation to Britain at the height of the Cold War, first by reportedly betraying dozens — hundreds, some say — of Western agents while working for MI6, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, and then by staging a daring escape in 1966 from his London prison.

Blake still believes he did the right thing.

“I could have left the service, and I could have joined the Communist Party, and I could have sold the Daily Worker (communist newspaper) at a street corner, and many people would say that would have been a more honorable cause,” Blake told Russia Today, an English-language cable TV network, in an interview broadcast Sunday, his 85th birthday.

“But I felt that I could do more for the cause, make a far greater contribution, if I set aside my scruples.”

His greatest coup was to tip off the Soviets in the 1950s to a tunnel the British and Americans had dug into communist East Berlin to tap into Soviet military communications. The Soviets used it to feed phony information to the West for nearly a year.

“The information provided by Blake was always acute, precise and extremely important,” Sergei Ivanov, the Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman, told The Associated Press. He refused to say how many Western spies Blake exposed.

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