Oleg Gordievsky, KGB colonel whose brave spying for Britain changed the course of the Cold War

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21-03-2025

Oleg Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, was a colonel in the KGB who served as an agent for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, from 1974 to 1985, when he defected to Britain; his reporting was important not only in intelligence terms, but also as a significant political influence on East-West relations during the later stages of the Cold War.
The fact that he was a good KGB officer made him a good MI6 spy – being gifted with a retentive memory, adept at sifting fact from opinion and always clear about what he did not know.
The son of Anton, an officer in the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, and his wife Olga, a trained statistician, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was born in Moscow on October 10 1938. He grew up with his parents, an older brother and a younger sister in a tiny flat sharing a kitchen with two other families. His father had joined the Communist Party soon after the Revolution and was an ardent believer, but his mother was more sceptical.
Gordievsky would credit her with his later decision to collaborate with the West, in 1995 telling Professor Anthony Clare on Radio 4's In the Psychiatrist's Chair: 'It was the influence of my mother, with her common sense, with her peasant attitude, with her normality, who taught me or helped me to take the reality of the Soviet life in its proper light and dimension.' She was also, he said, 'possessive' and 'jealous' and, like many Russian matriarchs, she wielded all the power in the Gordievsky home.
Oleg attended School No 130, where he was marked out as a bright boy with a flair for languages. From there he went in 1956 to the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he joined the track and field club, learnt German and started reading western newspapers. In 1962 he was recruited to the KGB, assigned (like his brother, Vasilko) to the foreign intelligence department, whose officers operated abroad posing as diplomats or journalists to recruit western informers. 'Life was exciting,' he remembered. He was thrilled by the rituals of undercover work – the dead-letter boxes, disguises, and outwitting surveillance.
He was posted first to East Germany, where, as he later explained it, attending a performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio helped to draw him to the European world and to realise that Communist Russia was a 'spiritual desert'. He then served two tours as part of the KGB rezidentura in Copenhagen, during the second forming a badminton-playing relationship with the local MI6 head of station which led, with help from the Danish security service, to his recruitment in 1974.
In common with many of the best secret agents, Gordievsky was more a volunteer, ideologically motivated, than a target who was cultivated, and he attributed the beginnings of his political disaffection with the Soviet Union to disgust at the Red Army's 'outrageous' crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. (The KGB rezident for whom he worked alleged instead that it was his warning Gordievsky about the possible career consequences of an affair with an embassy secretary that prompted him to work for the British.)
While in Copenhagen, Gordievsky identified a number of Russian spies, including Arne Treholt, a senior official in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once back in Moscow – by now briefed on a possible exfiltration plan, in case of discovery – he was appointed to the KGB's British desk in preparation for a London posting, giving him the opportunity to review past and present British cases.
This yielded valuable information for MI5's counter-espionage arm, particularly with regard to historic cases. Gordievsky confirmed that John Cairncross was the so-called Fifth Man of the notorious Cambridge spies (although Cairncross had secretly confessed to MI5 in 1964, his importance was not fully recognised until later). He also convincingly refuted wholly inaccurate press conspiracy theories – originated by the disaffected MI5 officer, Peter Wright, and the journalist Chapman Pincher – to the effect that Roger Hollis, former head of MI5, was a Soviet spy.
Gordievsky's most intense reporting period began in June 1982, when he arrived in London as an undercover KGB officer. Apart from identifying many Russian intelligence officers in Britain and other Western countries, leading to their removal or frustration, he also identified active cases and various KGB plans and operations. Among the latter was a putative scheme for 'neutralising' Pope John Paul II.
Agent cases on which he reported included some on the Left wing of the Labour Party and trade unions, such as Jack Jones, the former union leader who had been a paid agent from 1964 to 1968 and who in the 1980s was still providing political gossip on colleagues. Gordievsky also summarised the KGB's file on their relations with Michael Foot, another (albeit possibly unwitting) source of personal and political gossip whom they code-named BOOT. The Guardian's then literary editor, Richard Gott, was identified as an agent of influence funded by the KGB.
Among Gordievsky's more important identifications was Michael Bettaney, an MI5 officer who tried to spy for the KGB by making clandestine contact with Arkady Guk, the rezident in London. Bettaney posted through Guk's letter-box details of MI5's counter-measures against the KGB in London and suggested contact arrangements. Luckily, Guk suspected British provocation, and confided his misgivings to his deputy, Gordievsky. Bettaney was subsequently arrested and imprisoned.
Gordievsky's value as an agent, however, extended well beyond his counter-espionage reporting, important though that was. His curiosity, charm and natural political acumen enabled him to report on contemporary issues ranging from covert Russian funding of the National Union of Mineworkers to Libyan terrorism (including the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher) and to Russian views on exploiting the British anti-nuclear campaign.
Most importantly, he reported on Operation RYAN, the KGB's largest-ever peacetime operation, launched by the Soviet leadership to gather intelligence on what it believed to be US and Nato plans for a surprise nuclear first strike against Russia. No such plans existed, but sceptical KGB officers in Western countries dared not challenge the assumptions of Moscow Centre, which took President Reagan's anti-Communist rhetoric as evidence of aggressive intent.
Soviet leaders increasingly became victims of their own propaganda, dangerously interpreting a Nato command-post exercise, ABLE ARCHER, in November 1983, as preparations for a real attack. Gordievsky's reporting of this rising paranoia persuaded the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and President Reagan discreetly to reassure the Russians.
Mrs Thatcher took a detailed personal interest in Gordievsky's welfare as an agent, keen to ensure that he was not regarded simply as an 'intelligence egg-layer'. When he identified the as yet little-known Mikhail Gorbachev as the likely next leader, she took good care to court Gorbachev, giving him status and credit. His visit to Britain in December 1984 proved a turning point in Anglo-Soviet relations, aided not a little by the fact that MI6 had effectively written – via Gordievsky – part of his brief. When Mrs Thatcher announced to the press that Gorbachev was 'someone we can do business with', she spoke with well-founded confidence.
In April 1985 Gordievsky was confirmed as Guk's successor as rezident and in May he was suddenly recalled to Moscow for briefing and formal confirmation. He was suspicious about this, and considered defecting, but bravely decided to return.
Once there, he was suspended and his London posting cancelled. He was interrogated with the help of drugs and accused of spying for the British. He held out – the KGB did not have conclusive proof, and he was probably not the only one under suspicion – and was allowed to go on leave, presumably while the KGB searched for firm evidence of treachery.
This gave him the chance to send an SOS to the MI6 Moscow station, and a well-rehearsed exfiltration plan was put into operation; the instructions for it were concealed on Cellophane embedded in the hard covers of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which Gordievsky released by soaking it in soapy water in his kitchen sink.
To warn the British that his cover had been blown, he appeared, according to agreed protocol, at 7pm on a particular street corner holding a Safeway bag. Twenty-four minutes later a man walked past him carrying a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar. The man stared directly into Gordievsky's eyes before walking on. Contact had been made.
Gordievsky made his way to a remote layby on the road between Leningrad and Vyborg, north-west of Leningrad, where he was met by British intelligence officers who spirited him across the Finnish border in the boot of a Ford Sierra. He was given water and sedatives, and an aluminium space blanket to conceal his presence from infra-red heat detectors used by the guards at checkpoints.
When the driver played a tape of Sibelius's Finlandia, Gordievsky recognised the signal that they had arrived safely. It was later surmised that he might have been betrayed by Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who spied for the Russians (the SIS had decided to share Gordievsky's political intelligence with the Americans).
Most agents who defect have no subsequent career, but Gordievsky's abilities, personal charm and passion for democratic freedom ensured many years of productive usefulness, during which he personally briefed not only Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan but many other influential figures.
He continued to advise the British intelligence services and, despite the death sentence passed on him, gave interviews, broadcast and participated in public events. Aided by a former SIS officer, he triumphed in an Oxford Union debate on whether democracies should have intelligence services.
He wrote several books with the historian Christopher Andrew and published his own memoir, Next Stop Execution, which would later be a source for Ben Macintyre's non-fiction bestseller The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.
Uniquely among former agents, Gordievsky was appointed CMG, in 2007.
Gordievsky's marriage became a casualty of his defection. After years of lobbying by the British government and personal interventions by Mrs Thatcher ('Having children of my own,' she wrote to him, 'I know the kind of thoughts and feelings which are going through your mind each and every day'), the Russians permitted his wife and two daughters to join him in 1991. His daughters were educated in Britain but he and his wife, Leila, divorced. His more recent relationship, with a British woman, endured, and she survives him with his daughters.
Oleg Gordievsky, born October 10 1938, death announced March 21 2025
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