Latest news with #FordSierra
The Sun
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- The Sun
Iconic Ford Sierra Cosworth set to sell for £90,000 – over five times what it was worth back in 1980s
AN ICONC Ford Sierra Cosworth is set to sell for £90,000 - over five times its value when it first hit the road in the 80s. The red RS edition - which hit speeds of 149mph - cost £16,000 brand new 39 years ago. 8 8 The car was dubbed a bargain supercar when it debuted thanks to its relatively low cost and high performance. Ford deployed a modest family saloon shape boosted by n a souped-up two-litre, 204-bhp engine. This specimen is believed to be the only RS Cosworth factory-finished in rosso red. It was custom made for Robin Russell, the 14th Duke of Bedford, and owned for many years by touring car racer Vince Woodman. When Russell ordered the motor there were just three colour options - diamond white, black and moonstone blue. How he persuaded Ford's special vehicle engineering department to finish one in rosso red remains a mystery. But the distinctive car was given to the Duke on long-term loan. When that arrangement came to an end, the car remained registered to the Ford Motor Company until 1988 when it was sold to Vince Woodman. The touring car racer enjoyed most of his successes at the wheel of various Ford Escorts and Capris. This red Cosworth could regularly be spotted in the club car park at Silverstone race track. Ford urgently recalls 273,000 cars over dangerous brake issue that could 'cause total failure' – two models are affected The car - which would be worth £47,000 brand new accounting got inflation - was bought by its current owner five years ago. In 2022, it was treated to a refresh and a repaint in its original rosso at a cost of over £4,000. It is being sold by Iconic Auctioneers in Northampton on Saturday (17 May). Robin Russell was a British peer, stockbroker and animal conservationist. 8 8 8 He became well known to the public by appearing in three series of the BBC reality television programme Country House. He died in 2003 aged 63. Meanwhile, an iconic Ferrari with a 201mph top speed looks set to sell for a record £2.3 million at auction next week. The red F40 is known as the fastest road car of its era thanks to its twin-turbocharged 3L, V8 engine. Brand new in 1989 the 478bhp supercar - famed for its angular shape - was as worth about £163,000. In today's money, when taking into account inflation, it would be priced at a hefty £424,000. But the six-figure sum is nothing compared to its expected auction sale price, where its tipped to go for over 14 times its original cost. If it goes for the guide price, the stunning car will smash the £1.7m recouped at auction for an F40 two years ago. 8 8
Scottish Sun
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
I loved feisty new Netflix role.. she won't put up with any bulls**t, says Kelly Macdonald
'I read a couple of self-help books and had the odd session myself. I also picked up bits and pieces from talking to others who've had lots of therapy' PLENTY OF ATTITUDE I loved feisty new Netflix role.. she won't put up with any bulls**t, says Kelly Macdonald Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) KELLY Macdonald has revealed she studied self-help books to become a 'f***ing feisty' therapist for her latest TV role. The Trainspotting legend plays Dr Rachel Irving in the big-budget Netflix cop drama Dept. Q that was filmed almost entirely in Edinburgh. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 6 Kelly Macdonald has revealed why she loves her latest Netflix character 6 Actors Matthew Goode and Jamie Sives are two of the main stars in new Netflix show. 6 Guilt star Mark Bonnar as the Lord Advocate in Dept. Q. 6 Scots actress Chloe Pirrie also has a major role in the cop drama. But Kelly delved into self-improvement manuals to prepare herself for the series which also stars fellow Scots including Jamie Sives, Kate Dickie and Mark Bonnar. She says: 'Playing a therapist appealed to me. I liked Rachel's attitude - she's certainly got one. 'I read a couple of self-help books and had the odd session myself. I also picked up bits and pieces from talking to others who've had lots of therapy – so you get an idea of these things and how they work.' Kelly, 49, also relished her on screen clashes with Matthew Goode who plays DCI Carl Morck - the cop tasked with setting up the new cold case unit staffed by a bunch of police misfits. But after his colleague DI James Hardy (Sives) is shot Morck is sent to Kelly's in-house therapist character for counselling. She says: 'I liked that Rachel was just as f***ing feisty as he is and she doesn't take any of Morck's bulls**t. 'I remember that first scene they have together, where he's basically trying to escape (from the therapy session). 'She calls him on it, she can immediately see what's happening and says, 'I don't care, come into my room or not. It's up to you.' 'I think that's quite enticing for a character like Morck. She's not afraid of him, and instead is sort of intrigued. He's like a 4D puzzle that needs to be worked out. For Rachel, he's an interesting case.' She adds: 'So I found her chippy-ness quite interesting. She's quite unusual for a therapist. She's pretty smart and she can read people well.' However Matthew admits he feared other clashes on set - like the dodgy car director Scott Frank gave him to drive. He says: 'They got me this old Ford Sierra in a lovely colour. 'That car had serious problems with its brakes though, so whenever he (Scott Frank) told me to drive fast and really hit the curb I'd be thinking, 'okay but I really hope it stops and I don't plough into anyone.' 'Occasionally I would turn the car off and walk away, and I'd hear it start up again, ha! I'd have to go over and give it a kick.' 6 Kelly Macdonald has revealed the techniques she used to get into character Credit: Getty The series is based on the books Department Q (corr) by bestselling Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, with their Copenhagen setting swapped for the cobbled streets of Edinburgh. But taking on the lead role was daunting for Matthew, who played aristo Henry Talbot in Downton Abbey, as he was one of the few non-Scots on set. It was also the first time he had ever visited Scotland. Matthew, 47, from Exeter, Devon, explains: 'When I was in university all my friends would head off to Edinburgh for the festival, but I always had to go back home to Devon and work on the farm. 'So embarrassingly, I only visited the city last year. When I got there I just thought, 'this place is staggeringly beautiful'. 'It's also really bloody windy. They have these huge communal bins for everyone to put their rubbish in and I was in my flat at night and I thought a bomb had gone off. 'It was just one of these bins that had been blown over and was heading down the street as we filmed between January and June and had several storms.' He adds: 'I stayed in New Town, a couple of floors above a fishing tackle shop, which I made the most of a few months in when I took myself off salmon fishing for a couple of days. 'I'm really glad it was set there, which is the genius of Scott for transposing this Nordic drama to Edinburgh.' However Edinburgh-born Jamie - who played Jake McCall opposite Mark Bonnar as his brother Max in the hit BBC crime caper Guilt - admits he had to give some local lingo lessons to US director Scott. He says: 'I just felt sometimes it needed a bit of 'Scottish-ing up'. 'Scott had Hardy saying, 'oh boy' at one point and I told him I was going to change it as he was more likely to say, 'oh f***' or 'away and boil yer heed'.' But Jamie had to spends much of the series lying down after he's shot - although maintains that was tougher than his usual roles. He explains: 'To be honest, the fact he was paralysed was the most challenging aspect of the part. 'Any time we did a scene where I was in the hospital bed I had to really concentrate to ensure I didn't move – you can't ruin a take by twitching a toe. 'So just keeping absolutely still was a discipline in and of itself.' But the Scot, who also appeared as chief nuclear operational engineer in Chernobyl, discovered there was something very familiar about his co-star Alexej Manvelov, who plays police station civilian worker Akram Salim in the series. Jamie says: 'We were chatting one day, and he said to me, 'Have you seen Chernobyl?' 'To which I replied, 'I have, and have you seen Chernobyl?' And he said, 'Yeah, I was in it' and I said; 'Yeah so was I!' So we bonded over that.' Meanwhile Mark Bonnar, 56, also from Edinburgh, enjoyed his lofty part as Lord Advocate Stephen Burns. And he got up to speed for the role by watching BBC Scotland's Murder Trials documentaries which charted real-life court cases including Bill McDowell being found guilty for murder of lover Renee MacRae and her three-year-old son Andrew who disappeared in the 1970s. He says: 'Stephen was great fun to play, especially as he enjoys his high status and doesn't want to give any of it away to anybody, making him a great foil for a complete maverick like Carl Morck. 'But I watched the BBC Murder Trials documentaries and soaked up as much as I could about how these people hold themselves.' However there was another reason why Kelly enjoyed taking on her therapist role - as it meant she was only an hour away from her Glasgow home that she shares with her two sons. She says: 'It was nice being a sort-of local, because a lot of my work is out in Los Angeles and you have to drive everywhere and it's so stressful. 'So yes it was very nice to be able to work so close to home on Dept. Q and I loved my little therapy scenes - they were like doing short plays.' *Dept. Q starts streaming on Netflix from May 29.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
These Cars Have The Best Wings Ever
Cars are meant to be fun, and one of the most fun things a car can have is a massive spoiler or wing slapped on its rear end. I know they're sort of silly, but our world — as it is — is such a bleak and depressing place. Don't you think adding a bit of silly whimsy to it would be beneficial for everyone? I do, and that's what led me to my question from last week. I wanted to know what car you thought had the best rear wing of all time, and boy, did you folks deliver. We've got cars that run the entire automotive spectrum on here, and more importantly, we've got wings that run the usefulness spectrum. That's what it's all about, baby. On one end, we've got front-wheel-drive cars with rear wings that do nothing. On the other, we've got super advanced deployable spoilers that provide meaningful downforce to serious supercars. Of course, we've even got the most useless wing of all, but you'll have to scroll through to see what I'm talking about. Anyway, that's enough out of me. Head on down below and check out what your fellow Jalops think the best rear wings of all time are. Read more: These Are The Dumbest Looking Cars Of All Time, According To You Merkur XR4Ti. A factory double decker wing in the late '80's was kinda crazy. From a styling perspective, the wing made the car stand out and drove sales of this relatively obscure re-badged Ford Sierra, (which was ironically only sold at Lincoln Mercury dealers here in the U.S.) I'm sure the LM dealers weren't exactly sure what to make of it, but Bob Lutz wanted a cool import for Mercury and he made it happen, well, at least for 3 years. I remember wanting one. Submitted by: Factoryhack Porsche Panamera! I mean that's a wing that could release 20 years from now and still be seen as modern. Submitted by: Ismail The Veyron. It looks great and it's not only functional, it's dual-purpose functional. Provides downforce at high speeds and works as an air brake to help slow the car down from the aforementioned high speeds. Submitted by: Bossrday '97-'99 Mitsubishi Eclipse GST/GSX Submitted by: smricha2 Mitsubishi Evo VIII. It came with a FULL carbon wing. The wing element was unpainted, but if you sanded down the sides, it showed a beautiful weave underneath as well. In Japan, their MR version came with it unpainted showing it's full 1x1 glory. Submitted by: RenFoto The version on the 95-97 Lotus Esprit. So swoopy. Submitted by: Ed F40 and it isn't close Submitted by: ThatDon I'm personally in camp that either no wing or if it's actual supercar then it's all the wings. Also as nordic person I kinda shy away from showing weath, especially if it's not earned. If I ever would get really really really rich from some own enterprice (don't have any), I would get Murchielago SV in orange. That's top lambo and wing right there. Othervise it's no wing for me. Submitted by: Matti Sillanpää Volvo 850 T5R wagon roof spoiler. Proportionate, fits well, and come on, its on one of the coolest car ever! Submitted by: towman Porsche 911 whale tail, of course! Now the worst is undoubtedly the wing on the 3rd gen Taurus SHO that Car and Driver described as looking like a skateboard clinging embarrassedly to the trunk lid. Submitted by: Stillnotatony I'll say it... the first generation Audi TT. Is it the biggest, baddest wing? No, but it was an after-thought that stopped the entire car from going airborne at speed. When you build a car that's shaped like an airplane wing, it will lift off the ground just like an airplane. Apparently Audi learned the hard way after the car was released to the general public. Viper ACR has to be somewhere on this list. Doubles as a bed, a picnic table, and whatever else you need to use it for. At 1776mm wide, it's also a fun nod to the US. Submitted by: MoparMap E30 M3. Since it was a homologation car, the rules for the racing series would only allow the spoiler to be a certain height from the trunk. They wanted it higher, so they raised the trunk lid on the production car. Submitted by: Ian Best wing of all time? Easily the 1969 Dodge Daytona/1970 Plymouth Superbird. Submitted by: HemiWagon Countach, and I don't care if it was useless! Submitted by: BunkyTheMelon Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
The Independent
22-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Oleg Gordievsky: the spy who helped avert a nuclear war
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.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Oleg Gordievsky: the spy who helped avert a nuclear war
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.
