A British Turncoat Superspy Would Still Rather Be Red : Espionage: George Blake meets the press in Moscow. He was one of the most hunted and hated people.

The pudgy, balding and bearded man looked like anybody’s favorite uncle, but at one time he was one of the most hunted and hated people in the Western world.

George Blake, double-agent extraordinaire and traitor to his country, but a man with all the dash of an affable bookworm, reluctantly came in from the cold Wednesday to a sometimes hostile reception--his first meeting with the Moscow press corps in a quarter-century.

The former British intelligence operative claims to have betrayed more than 600 agents to the old Soviet Union and halted one of the most successful spying operations in American history. Behind a microphone in the Russian Foreign Ministry press center, he acknowledged with regret that the cause for which he sacrificed both his comrades and country had failed.

“I believed until now that Communist society is the most just, the best society that can be on this earth,” Blake, 69, told a press conference organized by the Russian government’s intelligence service. “But I can’t avoid seeing that the experiment has been a failure.”

The problem, he insisted, lies not with the philosophy of Marx or Lenin but with the raw material the Russians and other Communist zealots had to work with.

“People at the end of the 20th Century haven’t attained the necessary moral level,” said the man in the green plaid jacket, whose espionage services to the Kremlin won him the Order of Lenin and Order of the Red Banner. He seemed sad at the thought.

“It was a noble experiment, and it deserved to succeed,” said Blake, his slightly accented English hinting at his Dutch birth.

Now, even the country in whose service Blake covertly enlisted--the Soviet Union--and in which he has lived since being spirited out of a British prison in 1966, no longer exists. Despite that, Blake holds fast to the creed that persuaded him to switch sides in the Cold War--with devastating consequences for the West. His memoirs, just published here, carry the revealing title, “No Other Choice.”

“I believe that the time will come, maybe in many, many generations and not in this country, when humanity will return to this experiment,” Blake said. He said he hopes mankind will have learned by then from the failure of Soviet-style socialism that utopia cannot be built by “force and terror.”

For nearly a decade, Blake reportedly passed the Russians microfilms of every secret document he saw. As secretary of a planning committee at MI-6, the British intelligence agency, he betrayed the secret of the 450-foot tunnel that the Americans and British bored under the Soviet zone of Berlin to tap into Russian communications cables.

As a double agent in Berlin, he identified entire networks of agents for the KGB.

Blake received a 42-year prison term, the longest sentence in modern British legal history, after a speedy trial at London’s Old Bailey court on May 3, 1961. He spent less than 5 1/2 years in prison at Wormwood Scrubs before vanishing over the wall one night, helped by accomplices inside and outside. He ultimately surfaced in Moscow, where he met his current wife, Ida, an interpreter. They have a son who is now a student at an institute.

Pressed hard by one British reporter to admit that he had erred for a flawed philosophy, Blake demurred, saying that he had fought for a noble cause. “The guilt or morality of an action doesn’t lie in whether you lose or win but in the morality of the act itself,” said the former British agent, who is now so Russified that he is called “Georgy Ivanovich” by his Moscow acquaintances.

Many agents unmasked by Blake were reportedly executed. He vigorously denied that on Wednesday, claiming that no names of purported victims had come to light. He came close to sounding a note of remorse when he said he would not be willing to spy for Russia or any other former Soviet republic against Britain, since they are “no longer building communism.”

“I am a great admirer of everything British and the way things are done in England,” one of the most celebrated traitors in Britain’s history said. He said he would like to go back someday to take a holiday in the country where he is still a fugitive. He scoffed at the likelihood that the collapse of the Soviet state may lead Russian authorities to agree to a request from London for his extradition.

Blake has been working at the Institute of International Relations and World Economics, a prominent Moscow think tank, as a researcher into Middle Eastern affairs. On occasion, he said, Soviet, and now Russian, intelligence operatives have sought out his opinion.

He has spoken before to a few reporters, as well as to state-run TV, but Wednesday afternoon’s public appearance was unprecedented.

“He was not very anxious to meet with the press. We had to spend some time convincing him,” said Tatyana Samolis, spokeswoman for the Russian intelligence agency. The publication of Blake’s autobiography, also printed in Britain by Jonathan Cape, has increased interest in the man, she said.

Blake was arrested after U.S. intelligence tipped off their British counterparts to the possibility of a Soviet spy at his level.