From The Happy Traitor: George Blake at home in Moscow in around 1997. Photo: Will Stewart/Shutterstock

• I AM sure that you have no wish to see this correspondence prolonged unnecessarily, so I will confine my response to Wilson John Haire’s letter (George Blake and his times, April 8) to three brief points.

First, he is right that Syngman Rhee’s regime was no model of liberal democracy. But, as Max Hastings pointed out in his history of the Korean War what was so striking about the endless streams of refugees fleeing the violence was that they were all heading south, not north. They knew which side was inflicting the greater atrocities.

Secondly, his litany of colonial crimes in Malaya, Vietnam and Kenya is familiar stuff but utterly irrelevant to whether or not George Blake had any principles. Almost all these events took place long after he volunteered to work for the KGB.

What is relevant is that in the same year that he took his decision to betray his country there were over 2,6 million KGB prisoners in the Gulags and Stalin had just embarked on his latest purge against the Jewish doctors. To equate the two is a total distortion.

Thirdly, the American POWs did not die like flies because they were young conscripts. They died as a direct result if the brutality of their communist captors.

A full account of the neglect, arbitrary executions and torture inflicted on them is provided in chapter 18 of the Official History, The British Part in the Korean War.

George Blake saw all this and opted to side with the perpetrators rather than the victims. Fortunately the other British prisoners who did have principles chose not to follow his example.

SIR THOMAS HARRIS, N6