Oleg Gordievsky: the spy who helped avert a nuclear war

Independent

22-03-2025

On a July afternoon in 1985 two cars pulled up in a remote Russian lay-by in a cloud of dust as a dishevelled figure emerged from the bushes.
After a cursory exchange the man clambered into the boot of one the vehicles and they quickly drove off.
The man, sweating with fear in the boot of the Ford Sierra, was Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who had for more than a decade been passing the most closely-guarded secrets of Soviet intelligence to Britain's MI6.
But now he was on the run after falling under suspicion as a traitor and the pick-up in the lay-by, close to the border with Finland, marked the final stage of an audacious operation to spirit him out of the country to safety.
It began four days earlier when, in a prearranged signal, Mr Gordievsky appeared outside a bakery in Moscow's Kutuzovsky Prospekt clutching a distinctive carrier bag from Safeway supermarket.
A man walking past him in the street eating a Mars bar and carrying a Harrods bag was the sign that his message had been received.
Operation Pimlico was under way.
Under the elaborate escape plan, he had to give the KGB surveillance officers monitoring his flat the slip and head for the rendezvous point some 500 miles away, taking trains and finally hitchhiking.
Meanwhile MI6's Moscow station chief, Raymond Asquith, and his deputy, Andrew Gibbs, were preparing to drive in the same direction, taking their wives and Mr Asquith's 15-month-old daughter on the pretext that Mr Gibbs' wife needed medical treatment in Finland.
The two intelligence officers were operating under diplomatic cover and the plan was predicated on the assumption that, under the Vienna Convention, their embassy cars would not be subjected to search.
It almost came to grief however when, as they left Leningrad, they found they were being ostentatiously tailed by the KGB. Only at the last minute were they able to briefly lose them and pull off into the lay-by undetected.
But they still had to negotiate the border crossing.
After a nerve-shredding wait in which the two wives sought to distract the guards' sniffer dogs by discreetly scattering crisps and changing the baby's dirty nappy, they were finally waved through.
A blast of Sibelius's Finlandia on the car stereo told Mr Gordievsky, still in the boot, that he was finally safe.
Had he remained in Russia he would almost certainly have been executed.
That MI6 was prepared to go to such lengths to get him out was a testament to the importance officials attached to the man widely regarded as the most significant spy of the later Cold War years.
In the early 1980s he was able to warn the West that fears among the paranoid Soviet leadership of a surprise Nato nuclear attack had brought the two sides perilously close to war, prompting US President Ronald Reagan to dial down his anti-Russian rhetoric.
His intelligence was subsequently crucial in guiding Margaret Thatcher in her early contacts with the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, whose ascent to power helped bring the Cold War to a close.
Born on October 10 1938 in Moscow, the son of a committed communist and officer in the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky had always appeared destined for a career in Soviet intelligence.
After studying at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he showed an aptitude for languages, in 1961 he was recruited into the KGB following in the footsteps of his older brother, Vasili.
In 1966, he was given his first foreign posting, operating under diplomatic cover out of the Soviet embassy in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
The young spy found his first taste of Western freedom intoxicating, while the crushing of the Prague Spring by Russian tanks in 1968 intensified a growing disillusion with the Soviet system.
Danish intelligence, sensing a potential defector, attempted to recruit him but the approach failed. Nevertheless, when he returned to Copenhagen for a second posting, the Danes alerted MI6 in case it could be more successful.
A series of apparently chance meetings, including one at a badminton court, followed, in which the KGB man was tentatively sounded out.
In 1974, he finally agreed to work for MI6, going on to pass a stream of invaluable intelligence about the KGB's organisation and operations to his MI6 handler in monthly meetings held in a safe flat.
That came to an abrupt end in 1978 when he was recalled to Moscow following his divorce from his first wife, a fellow KGB officer, and subsequent remarriage.
At that point the case went cold, it being considered too dangerous to maintain contact in the Russian capital.
So there was delight in MI6 headquarters when it emerged three years later that he was being posted to London.
When Mr Gordievsky slipped out of the Russian embassy and found a phone box to call the secret number he had been given in Copenhagen he was answered by recorded message from a familiar voice welcoming him to London. Contact had been resumed.
Meetings with his new handler, future MI6 chief John Scarlett, took place in an anonymous safe flat in Bayswater, not far from the embassy where he was now based.
Among the intelligence he passed on was a clumsy attempt by a disaffected MI5 officer, Michael Bettany, to pass information to the Soviets, which could potentially have led to his own unmasking if it had not been foiled.
More alarmingly he revealed details of an elaborate KGB plan, codenamed Operation Ryan, to monitor Western nations for any signs of preparations for the surprise nuclear attack the ageing Soviet leadership was convinced they were plotting.
They ranged from counting the lights on at the Ministry of Defence for evidence that staff were working late into the night to indications that blood supplies were being stockpiled.
It came to a climax in November 1983 when the Russians put their nuclear forces on stand-by amid fears that an annual Nato wargaming exercise codenamed Able Archer 83 was cover for an actual attack.
Mr Gordievsky's reporting convinced alarmed British ministers they had come dangerously close to catastrophe, a warning passed on to Mr Reagan, whose denunciation of the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire' had done much to stoke the Kremlin's paranoia.
MI6 meanwhile was quietly promoting Mr Gordievsky's career, passing him 'chickenfeed', genuine but ultimately insignificant intelligence with which to impress his KGB superiors.
The Bettany case also provided an excuse to expel the KGB rezident, head of station, enabling Mr Gordievsky to move up to deputy, giving him more access to secret material.
It paid off the following year when Mrs Thatcher invited Mr Gorbachev, seen as the up-and-coming man in Moscow, to visit London.
Mr Gordievsky was charged with preparing briefings for the Russian, which he did, guided by MI6, effectively enabling them to set the agenda for the talks.
The result was seen as a huge success by both sides, with Mrs Thatcher famously telling Mr Reagan that Mr Gorbachev was a man they could 'do business with', and winning Mr Gordievsky promotion to rezident.
It was an astonishing coup.
In the embassy, however, his success sparked jealousy among his KGB colleagues while, unbeknown to him, in Washington a disaffected CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, began selling the agency's secrets to the Russians, threatening him with discovery.
In May 1985, the day after Ames's first meeting with the Russians, Mr Gordievsky was unexpectedly summoned back to Moscow.
Rather than choosing that moment to defect, he agreed to go in the hope that he could carry on spying for MI6.
It was a decision that very nearly cost him his life.
In the Russian capital, his mistake quickly became clear and that he was under suspicion.
He was taken out of the city to a safe house where he was drugged and questioned but apparently did not confess.
Nevertheless, he realised time was running and the moment to activate his escape plan had finally come.
In MI6, where many, Mr Asquith included, doubted it could succeed, there was huge relief when the news came through that he had made it safely across the border.
For Mr Gordievsky, however, there was the anguish of leaving his wife, Leila, and their two young daughters in Moscow.
When the government sought to secure permission for them to join him in London, the Russians, stung by the humiliation of his successful escape, refused.
Mrs Thatcher, who had taken a close interest in his case, retaliated by expelling every KGB officer in the UK.
It was only in 1991, with the Soviet Union on the point of collapse, that the family was finally reunited, but by then the years of separation had taken their toll and the marriage soon ended.
In his absence, Mr Gordievsky was sentenced to death in Russia for treason.
Meanwhile, he established a new life, living in a safe house in London, writing a number of books and being received by Mrs Thatcher in Chequers and Mr Reagan in the Oval Office.
In 2007, the former KGB officer was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II, being made a Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and St George (CMG) in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
It was, the press noted, the same honour held by the fictional superspy James Bond.