John Quine - Telegraph In his very full confession, extracted in prison by the SIS officer Tony Brooks, Blake identified all three of his Soviet contacts - Nikolai Korovin, Vasili Dozhdalev and Sergei Kondrashev - from MI5 surveillance photos. Apparently anxious to cooperate, Blake assisted Quine in revealing which SIS officers, and their sources, he had compromised. As a result, Quine introduced a "traffic-light" indicator (a colour code of red, amber and green) on SIS personnel files to indicate when a particular officer should not be posted under light diplomatic cover to a station where the Soviets were likely to know their true role. Quine was one of several MI6 officers who visited Blake in Wormwood Scrubs to question him further about the British agents he had betrayed, causing many of them to be killed. In October 1966 Blake was sprung from the Scrubs by a group of fellow prisoners, all Left-wing activists and anti-nuclear protesters financed by the film director Tony Richardson. While recovering from injuries sustained when he jumped down from the prison wall, Blake reached East Berlin in a camper van, much to the surprise of his last KGB handler, Vasili Dozhdalev. From there he went to Moscow, where he remains to this day, almost blind and in failing health. The son of a country doctor, John Quine was born at Gretna on September 13 1920 and educated at Faversham Grammar School in Kent and King's College, London, before being commissioned into the RNVR in February 1942. He volunteered for service in coastal forces, and on September 13/14 1943 was in Motor Torpedo Boat 355 when the 11th MTB Flotilla was involved in a sharp action off the Dutch coast. In excellent visibility under a nearly full moon they sighted a convoy of enemy ships about four miles away and attacked in a pincer movement, three MTBs from seaward and two from inshore, but without success. On December 9/10 Quine took part in a night-time attack, off Ijmuiden, on an enemy convoy. They fired their torpedoes from different angles, and were rewarded by two loud explosions on the largest ship; they also enjoyed the sight of the trigger-happy enemy firing on one another in the dark. In 1944 Quine was sent to the University of Colorado to learn Japanese after the government had appealed for volunteers who would be able to debrief Japanese prisoners-of-war. The next year he joined SIS, and was posted to Tokyo, where he operated against the Soviet embassy. He returned to the headquarters in Broadway Buildings in November 1952 and was sent to the SIS station in Warsaw. He was then appointed head of R-5, the counter-intelligence section, and it was in that role that he was involved in Blake's interrogation. The latter years of Quine's SIS career included postings to Pretoria and Mauritius. He retired at the mandatory age of 55. An admirer of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, in the late Sixties Quine bought a house near Canterbury which had been briefly owned by Fleming. He married, in 1946, Heather Martin, with whom he had three sons. She died in 2005, and he is survived by his second wife, Pat. John Quine, born September 13 1920, died April 29 2013