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

• WHEN George Blake fed information to his KGB handlers, he asked one thing: don’t cause anyone any harm, use this information to protect the USSR but do not hurt anyone in doing so.

“Such a request was, author Simon Kuper states, a preposterous wish and that the KGB were going to do whatever they liked,” writes Dan Carrier, on Kuper’s The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia (Review, March 18).

Quite recently a court of law legalised MI5 to carry out illegal actions, bordering on the criminal, to advance their investigations.

Most of us knew that was already happening if we had read the book Spycatcher, published in 1987 and co-authored by Paul Greengrass and the disgruntled ex-MI5 officer, Peter Wright (disgruntled by his meagre pension).

I would have thought the security services in most countries of the world are up to things we’ll never know about.

Blake was someone of conscience, and most countries of the world have such people of varying political opinions.

Under the cover of being the vice-consul at the British embassy, in Seoul, in 1948, he was an MI6 officer. In 1950, during the Korean War, he was captured by North Korean forces and imprisoned.

His Guardian obituary (December 2020), had this to say: “This was a period Blake recalled when 10,000 were dying on my right and 10;000 were dying on my left. It was a period of violent conflict and I was in the middle of it all.

“I saw the Korean war with my own eyes, young American POWs dying and enormous Flying Fortresses bombing small defenceless villages. And when you saw that, you didn’t feel particularly proud to be on the Western side.”

WILSON JOHN HAIRE
Address supplied