Soviet spy "George Blake" was a Dutch-born Jewish communist

 

In his PBS interview he gives us these antecedents:

 

George Blake: I come from rather an international, or in other words, a cosmopolitan background. My father was a Spanish Jew who came from the Middle East or the Near East. He fought in the British Army during the First World War and was very seriously wounded.

He received high decorations, the Military Cross and the French. Immediately after the war he was in Holland, where he met my mother. Now my mother came from a Dutch middle-class, Protestant background.

My father had a business in Holland which wasn't very successful, and he died in 1934, when I was twelve, from the results of his wounds during the war, and I got a Dutch Protestant upbringing. Dutch is my native tongue. After the death of my father, my mother was left in rather strange circumstances.

My father had a sister in Cairo, who was a wife of a very rich banker. They said they would take me and look after my education, give me a good education, and that would relieve my mother as I also had two sisters.

At the age of thirteen I went to Cairo, and lived with my uncle and aunt, in a very large house, and there I met my two cousins, who were ten years older than I was. Both of them had very decided left wing views; they didn't want to succeed their father in a banking business.

Especially the younger of my two cousins who had a great influence on me. He was, by that time, a Communist and he talked a lot with me. Of course his views had a great influence on me, but I resisted them, because I was a very religious boy.

It was my intention to become a minister in the Dutch Reform Church, but later on, in life, things changed. Many of his views acted as a time bomb, and the results under the affect of events shaped my further views.

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