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Boston Globe
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Oleg Gordievsky, a key double agent in the Cold War, dies at 86
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'If a man realizes this,' he wrote, 'he must show the courage of his convictions and do something himself to prevent slavery from encroaching further upon the realms of freedom.' Advertisement Until the end of his life, Mr. Gordievsky lived in exile in England, where he was watched over by British security and appointed a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, a royal honor awarded by Queen Elizabeth II. He was found dead on March 4, at 86, at his home in Godalming, Surrey, about 30 miles southwest of London. Police said in a statement Saturday that an investigation into the death was being led by counterterrorism officers, but added that it was 'not currently being treated as suspicious.' Mr. Gordievsky was among the most consequential spies of the Cold War, rising to become the KGB 'rezident,' or station chief, in London, where he shared information with MI6 during a period of strident American rhetoric and Kremlin paranoia about a potential first-strike attack by the West. In the early 1980s, as President Ronald Reagan adopted a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union — what he called an 'evil empire' that would be left on 'the ash heap of history' — Mr. Gordievsky offered reassurances to his Russian superiors that a NATO military exercise, Able Archer 83, was only an exercise, rather than a ruse intended as cover for war. Through his clandestine communications with British intelligence, he was able to relay concerns that Soviet officials really did believe a US-led strike might be imminent. Advertisement The Kremlin was so worried, Mr. Gordievsky reported, that it had launched an intelligence program known as Operation RYAN, intended to detect signs that an attack was about to begin — including by tracking the stockpiling of blood supplies and noting whether military brass were keeping the lights on late at night, attempting to finalize their war plans. Through the information he passed along, Mr. Gordievsky was also credited with encouraging British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to take Russian politician Mikhail Gorbachev seriously as a reformer in the years before Gorbachev took power as the Soviet Union's last leader. His reports were passed from MI6 to the CIA, offering Washington a new window on Moscow. 'He was giving us information about the thinking of the leadership, and that kind of information was, for us, scarce as hen's teeth,' Robert Gates, then the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, later said. According to Ben Macintyre's 2018 book 'The Spy and the Traitor,' British intelligence officers first approached Mr. Gordievsky in the early 1970s, getting his name from a Czechoslovak spy, Stanislaw 'Standa' Kaplan, who had defected to Canada. Mr. Gordievsky was by then running and recruiting agents out of Copenhagen. Dismayed by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he had come to view Russia as a 'vast, sterile concentration camp' and a 'totalitarian cacophony.' After meeting an MI6 officer on the badminton court and developing a relationship with the British operative, Mr. Gordievsky started sharing clandestine documents and details, including the names of Soviet spies operating in Scandinavia. Advertisement The flow of information continued after Mr. Gordievsky, known by the MI6 code names 'Sunbeam' and 'Nocton,' was transferred to the KGB's London station in 1982. Among other revelations, he helped expose the treachery of Michael Bettaney, a British intelligence officer who shared sensitive documents with the KGB and was later sentenced to 23 years in prison. The case gave British officials an excuse to expel the KGB station chief in London, who had gained public exposure during the Bettaney trial, and paved the way for Mr. Gordievsky's promotion to the job. Although British intelligence sought to protect Mr. Gordievsky, limiting access to his reports and feeding him low-level intelligence that he could provide to his superiors, he came under Soviet suspicion in 1985, when he was abruptly recalled to Moscow. The circumstances of his unmasking remain the subject of debate, although Mr. Gordievsky — along with his biographer Macintyre and others — came to believe that the KGB had been tipped off to his betrayal by Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who had started working with the Soviets in an exchange of secrets for money. Mr. Gordievsky was brought to a KGB dacha outside Moscow, where he was drugged, interrogated, and accused of being a mole. When he denied spying for the West, he was set free but kept under surveillance. 'They expected I would do something stupid,' he later told American journalist David Wise. 'Sooner or later they would arrest me.' Advertisement An escape plan was already in place, developed years earlier by his handlers at MI6 and detailed on a plastic-wrapped sheet hidden inside a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. Only by soaking the book in water could Mr. Gordievsky extract the plan and remind himself of the details: How he was supposed to visit a Moscow bakery at a certain time on a Tuesday evening, standing outside with a plastic bag from Safeway, the British grocery chain, to indicate that he needed to leave the country. An MI6 operative would be monitoring the shop, and would signal that he had received the message by eating a chocolate bar as he walked past. Mr. Gordievsky went to the shop, bag in hand, and soon spotted a man carrying a green Harrods department store bag — an unusual sight in Moscow — and munching on a Mars bar. The escape was on. Three days later, Mr. Gordievsky managed to shed his KGB surveillance team and board a train to Leningrad, now known as St. Petersburg. Traveling by bus, he reached a rendezvous point outside the Russian town of Vyborg, near the Finnish border, where he waited in the mosquito-filled brush until a two-car MI6 convoy arrived. He was hustled into the trunk of one of the cars and given a thermal blanket, according to Macintyre's book, to stymie heat-detecting sensors at the border. After arriving at the border checkpoint, a British operative pulled out a bag of chips, attempting to distract Soviet sniffer dogs looking for fugitives and contraband. Then the wife of the MI6 station chief, traveling in the convoy with their baby, began changing her child's dirty diaper on top of the trunk containing Mr. Gordievsky. The smell was enough to keep away the dogs, who moved on to other cars, enabling the convoy to cross safely into Finland. Advertisement Mr. Gordievsky was exhausted but relieved. Let out of the trunk after hearing a recording of Sibelius's 'Finlandia,' an audio signal that they had made it through the checkpoint, he was greeted by a British diplomat who, Mr. Gordievsky recalled, called MI6 to announce the good news: 'The luggage has arrived. It's all in order.' Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was born in Moscow on Oct. 10, 1938. His father, a member of the Soviet secret police, was a communist true-believer who helped enforce the Stalinist bloodletting known as the Great Purge. His mother was a statistician who quietly questioned the party's infallibility, never joining as a member. Mr. Gordievsky studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations before joining the KGB around 1961. His older brother, Vasili, was working for the agency's 'illegals' program, operating under a false identity, and recommended Mr. Gordievsky to recruiters. For his first posting as a trainee, he was sent to East Berlin, arriving in the city just as the Berlin Wall was going up. His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Leila Aliyeva, who worked in Copenhagen for the World Health Organization. He never told his wife he was a double agent — 'it was too dangerous,' he said — but in 1991 she and their two daughters, Maria and Anna, were allowed to join him in Britain. He and his wife later separated, and the Guardian reported in 2013 that he had 'little contact' with his children. Information on survivors was not immediately available. Although he spent most of his life trying to avoid public recognition, Mr. Gordievsky was eager to tell his story in retirement. He wrote essays for British newspapers; published a memoir, 'Next Stop Execution' (1995); and partnered with historian Christopher Andrew for several books, including 'KGB: The Inside Story' (1990), which identified British civil servant John Cairncross as the mysterious 'fifth man' in a ring of spies that gave secrets to the Soviets during World War II. Mr. Gordievsky made headlines in 2008, when he claimed that he had been the target of an attempted assassination that left him unconscious for 34 hours the previous year. He said he had been given tainted sleeping pills by a Russian business associate, which he asserted were poisoned with thallium, a toxic metal once used in rat poison and pesticides. No evidence emerged to support his claims, but he would not have been the first Russian defector to be killed in England: His friend Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer, had been murdered in London in 2006, poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 that had been slipped into his tea. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Russia was responsible for the killing. After another Russian defector, Sergei Skripal, survived an attempted poisoning in England in 2018, Mr. Gordievsky's 'security was tightened and he seldom left the safe-house,' his biographer Macintyre wrote in a tribute. 'He became, in some ways, a prisoner of history.' Yet by all accounts, Mr. Gordievsky had no regrets about betraying the KGB and coming to Britain. 'Everything here is divine,' he told the Guardian in 2013, 'compared to Russia.'
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Oleg Gordievsky obituary
For more than a decade the senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, spied for MI6 before escaping execution by being dramatically smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car. He was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain, and his most important contribution as a spy was to warn Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan of the Soviet leadership's paranoia at a time when the world was moving dangerously close to nuclear war. Gordievsky first came to the notice of MI6 after a tip-off from a Czechoslovakian spy, Standa Kaplan, who had defected to Canada. Kaplan mentioned Gordievsky as an old friend from the KGB academy, where they would together question the direction the Kremlin was taking. By then Gordievsky was a KGB officer attached to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen; in 1972 he responded favourably to delicate approaches made by MI6 officers in the Danish capital, after phone taps revealed that in calls to his wife in Moscow he expressed growing dissatisfaction with Soviet policies. He began spying for Britain when he returned to Moscow in 1974. He continued to do so when – to the delight of British intelligence – he was moved in 1982 to London, where he was eventually appointed the KGB rezident, its head of station. However, in 1985 Soviet suspicions about him surfaced following a tip-off from Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who was spying for the KGB. Gordievsky was summoned back to Moscow for questioning and, after four months of being closely watched, escaped in an episode that might have come straight out of the pages of spy fiction. Over his many years of spying, Gordievsky's most valuable achievement was reassuring the Kremlin that a major annual Nato exercise in Germany, code-named Able Archer 83, was not the precursor to a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. It was a period of heightened cold war tension between the two superpowers, which was made worse by Reagan's rhetoric and the paranoia of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who came to power in 1982. In 1981, when he was head of the KGB, Andropov had launched Operation Ryan, which dispatched KGB officers around the world to gather evidence of US plans for a first strike. Gordievsky later described how KGB officers in London were ordered to find out whether NHS hospitals were stocking up supplies of blood and to watch the windows of the Ministry of Defence and other Whitehall departments to see if their lights were burning through the night. Through his MI6 handlers, Gordievsky warned Thatcher, who in turn warned Reagan, that the Kremlin's concern about what the US and Nato were up to was genuine. With the KGB hierarchy in Moscow reluctant to dismiss Andropov's paranoia, it was left to Gordievsky to reassure the Kremlin that Nato had no intention of launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Later, Gordievsky's other valuable role was assuring western leaders, notably Thatcher, that the new Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a genuine reformer who should be taken seriously. Gordievsky was born in Moscow. His father, Anton, was a highly committed officer of the NKVD, the KGB's precursor, and an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin's purges, but his mother, Olga, a statistician, hinted privately to Oleg that she held Soviet communism in contempt. While his elder brother, Vasily, was establishing a career in the KGB, Oleg studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He subsequently joined the Russian foreign service and was posted to East Berlin in 1961 just as the wall was being constructed. He accepted an invitation to join the KGB in 1963 and was posted to Copenhagen. After his second tour there, when he was recruited by MI6, he returned in 1978 to Moscow, where he threw himself into brushing up his English and learning about British politics. Helped by a shortage of KGB British experts, he was rewarded in 1982 with a posting to London. In London Gordievsky regularly met his MI6 handlers at a safe house in Bayswater. Thatcher was told about him, but she knew his identity only as 'Mr Collins'. MI6 officers passed him chickenfeed – snippets of low-grade intelligence – to keep Moscow Centre happy with his work. Among information he fed MI6 was material about Britain he saw in the KGB's vast archives. It included, he said, reports that the KGB regarded Michael Foot as an 'actual agent' and made regular payments to the future Labour leader, whom they codenamed 'Agent Boot'. However, Gordievsky's claims about Foot, which he said MI6 believed, were inconsistent, and sit oddly with Foot's longstanding record of opposing the Soviet Union and its policies. After the Sunday Times published allegations in 1995 that he was a Soviet 'agent of influence', Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages. Gordievsky did, however, identify one individual with the potential to inflict real damage to British interests. He was Michael Bettaney, an unstable MI5 officer who had been sent to trouble-torn Northern Ireland, where various traumatic incidents led him into heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown. Confused and embittered, in June 1983 Bettaney had stuffed a batch of highly sensitive internal MI5 documents, including the names of senior MI5 staff, into the letter box of the London house of the KGB rezident, Arkady Guk. Suspecting a trap, Guk consulted Gordievsky, who at the time was his deputy. Gordievsky told Guk he was clearly the victim of a set-up, before informing, as quickly as he could, his MI6 controllers. Bettaney became the first MI5 officer to face trial under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 23 years in jail, while the exposure of Guk during the trial enabled the UK government to expel him, conveniently paving the way for Gordievsky to take over as the KGB's head of station in London. Shortly afterwards the KGB got wind, through Ames, that one of their senior officers was a mole working for British intelligence. Various checks, allied to the way the Bettaney affair had panned out, soon pointed to Gordievsky as being that mole. In May 1985 he was summoned back to Moscow and taken to a KGB safe house, where he was drugged and interrogated. Although he was released, he knew it would only be a matter of time before he would be interrogated again. Under a plan worked out in advance by MI6, at 7.30pm every Tuesday its officers would keep a watch on a certain bread shop in Moscow. In case of emergency, Gordievsky was told to turn up there wearing a grey cap and holding a plastic bag with the bright logo of Safeway supermarket. An MI6 officer would then walk past him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat – a signal that would confirm the triggering of an operation, codenamed Pimlico, to smuggle him out of Russia. In July 1985 he activated the plan by visiting the bakers with his Safeway bag, and the next day caught a train to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), where he took another train to a Russian town close to the Finnish border. In the course of an extraordinary day in which KGB teams tried to track down two cars driven by MI6 officers and their families, he was eventually shoved into the boot of one of them. After the tensest of moments, Soviet border guards, whose dogs were distracted by the smell of soiled nappies in Gordievsky's car, let through the two vehicles, which had diplomatic plates. Gordievsky emerged in Finland and was flown to Britain via Norway. In Moscow he was sentenced to death, in absentia, for treason. MI6 quickly found him a house near Godalming in Surrey, where his identity was protected. But he was without his family and lonely, and suffered the withdrawal symptoms that spies so often experience once the excitement of their secret life and defection has died down. Aware of the dangers, MI6 encouraged Gordievsky to write a history of the KGB with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. The KGB: The Inside Story was published in 1990, and the following year Gordievsky produced Instructions From the Centre, a book that described how he and fellow KGB officers conned Moscow headquarters into believing their intelligence reports were the result of expensive lunches with valuable British contacts. His autobiography, Next Stop Execution, was published in 1995, accompanied by the claims about Foot. In 2007, Gordievsky was appointed CMG, for 'services to the security of the UK'. Later that year he was rushed to hospital where he spent 34 hours unconscious. He claimed he was poisoned with thallium by 'rogue elements in Moscow', a contention that was never proved but led him to criticise MI6 for not looking after him properly. His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, a KGB officer, ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Leila Aliyeva, whom he met in Copenhagen, where she worked for the World Health Organization. They had two daughters, Maria and Anna. Gordiesvky told neither of his wives that he was a double agent, to protect them if they were subjected to interrogation if he was caught or fled. Leila and his daughters were on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape. Under pressure from the KGB, Leila divorced him. In 1991, she and their daughters were allowed to join him in Britain. But forced separation and the knowledge that Gordievsky had led a double life meant their relationship could not be restored. She soon returned to Russia. Their daughters, who do not use their father's name, are believed to still live in Britain. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, intelligence officer, born 10 October 1938; death announced 21 March 2025
