An autobiography “No other choice “ inscribed  and signed by George Blake-Cold War Soviet intelligence officer and spy MI6.

An Autobiography “No Other Choice” Published by International Relations, 1991. Moscow.

Soft cover, 319 pp, size 8” x 5”.

Originally  the book of George  Blake No Other Choice: An Autobiography was published in London by Jonathan Cape in 1990.

The book inscribed  and signed in English to Sorokin Stanislav Ivanovich:

“ Stanislav Ivanovich with my best wishes” George Blake

The book came from family of Sorokin (his son Sergej).  Stanislav Sorokin is a Soviet KGB spy under diplomatic cover, who worked in Asia, Europe and Africa. He was among first who enter office of US ambassador in Saigon when United States left Vietnam. He personally knew Blake. 

George Blake biography facts:

George Blake (George Behar; 11 November 1922 – 26 December 2020) was a spy with Britain's Secret Intelligent Office  (MI6) and worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union. He became a communist and decided to work for the MGB while a prisoner during the Korean War. Discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union. 

George Blake, who has died aged 98, was the most notorious Soviet agent inside Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Interned by the Nazis in the Netherlands, recruited by MI6, then by the KGB after he was captured during the Korean war, unmasked by a defecting Polish intelligence officer and sentenced at the Old Bailey to an unprecedented term in jail, Blake made a spectacular escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in northwest London.

Blake was convicted of spying in 1961 after a trial conducted mainly behind closed doors. In defiance of convention, Lord Parker, the lord chief justice, handed down maximum consecutive, rather than concurrent, sentences, sending Blake down for 42 years. An astonishing exchange that only came to light only in 2016 may help to explain the severity of the sentence. Parker phoned Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, to consult him before passing sentence. Yet even Macmillan expressed surprise, noting in his diary the next day: “The LCJ has passed a savage sentence – 42 years!”

The length of Blake’s sentence and his apparent stoicism earned him considerable sympathy from fellow prisoners. Five years after his conviction, in 1966, Blake escaped, not as a result of a well-planned KGB stratagem, as was widely assumed at the time, but with the help of two radical anti-nuclear campaigners,Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, who were jailed for entering a US nuclear bomber base, and an Irish petty criminal, Sean Bourke.

Blake was sent by MI6 to Berlin, charged with recruiting Soviet and East German officers as double agents. What he was actually doing was passing his Soviet contacts details of the west’s operations against them and their East German allies. One operation he told them about was the tunnel MI6 and CIA engineers built under the Berlin wall. Operation Gold, as it was called, was designed to intercept Soviet and East German military communications.

In a classic espionage ploy, Blake and the KGB agreed that the bugged system should continue to be used to transmit at least some genuine material to avoid the CIA and MI6 suspecting it was being intercepted.

Blake wrote in No Other Choice that the number of MI6 agents he betrayed was “nearer 400” than 42: it was widely reported at the time of his trial, on the basis of suggestions from MI6, that his sentence represented a year for every agent betrayed. No figure was mentioned at his trial and he said later he did not know the number of agents whose identities he passed to the Russians. He bragged that he had “never added them up ... These people were not innocent, they were agents working willingly and knowingly against their own governments.”