Former British spy and Soviet secret agent George Blake has died at the age of 98 in Moscow, CNN quoted Russian news agency RIA Novosti as reporting. 

“Books have been written about him, films have been made. In intelligence, he was highly respected and appreciate,” RIA Novosty quoted a spokesperson for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR as saying on Saturday.  

“In intelligence, he was highly respected and appreciated. He himself jokingly said: ‘I am a foreign car that has adapted to Russian roads’. Now this foreign car has completed its almost century-long run,” he said in a statement. 

Blake operated as a double agent, spying for Russia using his position and influence in the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6.

He was one of the last of a number of British spies who worked undercover for the Soviet Union, a damning discovery for the UK once it came to light during the Cold War era. One of his most prominent acts was the escape from London’s Wormwood prison in 1966. 

Born in the Dutch city of Rotterdam in 1922, Blake moved to England in 1943 and was deployed in the Dutch section of the SIS in August 1944. 

He was interned for three years after being captured by North Korea in the year 1950, during which he secretly became a communist, CNN quoted Encyclopedia Britannica as saying. 

According to an entry on Blake’s life on the British government website, Blake, “returned from captivity to work for Soviet as well as British intelligence, betraying many agents who were later executed, including a network in East Germany.”

He was arrested by British authorities in 1961 after admitting to being a double agent for the Soviet Union. He was handed a 42-year prison term but escaped in 1966 with the aid of other inmates and two peace activists. 

He then escaped to Berlin and spend the rest of his life in the Soviet Union and Russia, where he was hailed as a hero. 

In an interview with Reuters in 1991, Blake said the world was on the brink of communism. “It was an ideal which, if it could have been achieved, would have been well worth it,” he said.