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BBC News
28-04-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
How Aldrich Ames became the US's most damaging double agent
Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations, and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On 28 April 1994, the double agent was jailed for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames, but who lived to tell the tale. In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated and, very often, executed. Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. As the KGB's station chief in London, he had been secretly working for the UK's foreign intelligence service, MI6, for years. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of questioning, and facing the very real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky narrowly escaped with his life after MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car. Afterwards, Gordievsky tried to work out who had given him up. "For nearly nine years I have been guessing who was the man, who was the source who betrayed me, and I didn't know any answer," he told the BBC's Tom Mangold in an interview with Newsnight on 28 February 1994. Two months later, Gordievsky would get his answer when veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames stood up in a US courtroom, and confessed to compromising "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me". On 28 April 1994, Ames admitted that he had divulged the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West, and compromised more than 100 clandestine operations. Known to the KGB by his code name, Kolokol (The Bell), Ames's betrayal had resulted in the execution of at least 10 CIA intelligence assets including General Dmitri Polyakov, a senior official in Soviet army intelligence, who had supplied information to the West for more than 20 years. Ames, the most damaging KGB mole in US history, was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Just as British spy Kim Philby's exposure as a Soviet agent in the 1960s had rocked the UK establishment, it was "now Washington's turn to stare in disbelief at the extent of Ames's damage", said Mangold in 1994. It was Ames's role as head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence department that had allowed him to cause such damage. It gave him almost unfettered access to classified information about the US's covert operations against the USSR and, crucially, the identities of its agents in the field. Ames's position had also meant that he could sit in on debriefings from other Western spy agencies. This is how the UK's most valuable spy, Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who was passing vital intelligence to two British services, MI6 and MI5, came into contact with him. These meetings would create the outlandish situation wherein "the top KGB defector was debriefed by the top KGB mole", said Mangold. "The Americans were very thorough and really very good at debriefings," said Gordievsky. "I was enthusiastic. I liked the Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them, and now I realise [Ames] was sitting there. Which means that everything, all the new answers of my information, he must have passed to the KGB." Alcohol and divorce Ames had been exposed to the spy world at an early age. His father was a CIA analyst who helped his son get a job at the Agency after he had dropped out of college. But Ames's later decision to betray the intelligence service would be driven less by ideological misgivings as by his need for money. Initially, Ames showed promise as a counterintelligence officer. He was first posted with his wife Nancy Segebarth, a fellow CIA agent, to Turkey in the late 1960s, where he was tasked with recruiting foreign agents. But by 1972 his superiors had called Ames back to CIA headquarters, feeling that he wasn't cut out for field work. Back in the US, he studied Russian, and was assigned to planning field operations against Soviet officials. His father's struggles with alcohol had stalled his CIA career, and, similarly, Ames's own heavy drinking began to derail his progress. In 1972, he was discovered by another agent, intoxicated and in a compromising position with a female CIA employee. The situation was not helped by Ames's lackadaisical attitude to work, which saw him leave a briefcase full of classified information on a subway in 1976. In an effort to get his career back on track, Ames accepted a second overseas posting to Mexico City in 1981, while his wife stayed at home in New York. But his behaviour and continued excessive drinking meant that he failed to distinguish himself as a CIA officer. In 1981, he was involved in a traffic accident in Mexico City, and was so inebriated that he was unable to answer the police's questions or even recognise a US embassy officer sent to help him. After a particular drunken profanity-laden argument with a Cuban official at a diplomatic reception at the embassy, his superior recommended the CIA assess him for alcohol addiction on his return to the US. Ames also continued to engage in extramarital affairs, one of which would prove to be a turning point for him. Toward the end of 1982, he began a relationship with a Colombian cultural attaché recruited to work for the CIA, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. Their romance grew increasingly serious until Ames decided to divorce his first wife, marry Rosario and bring her back to the US with him. Despite his less than stellar performance at the CIA, Ames continued to fail upwards. On his return to the Agency's headquarters in 1983, he was made counterintelligence branch chief for Soviet operations, giving him widespread access to information about clandestine CIA activities. Ames had agreed as part of his divorce settlement to Nancy to pay the debts they had accrued as a couple, as well as paying monthly support. Compounded by his new wife Rosario's expensive tastes, her love of shopping sprees and her frequent phone calls to her family in Colombia, Ames's money problems spiralled out of control. He would later tell Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini that it was his escalating debts that led him to contemplate selling the secrets he had access to. "I felt a great deal of financial pressure, which, in retrospect, I was clearly overreacting to," Ames said. Betraying his country "It was about the money, and I don't think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that," FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames's arrest, told the BBC's Witness History in 2015. On 16 April 1985, having had a few drinks to build up his courage, Ames walked straight into the Russian embassy in Washington DC. Once inside, he passed the receptionist an envelope containing the names of some double agents, documents showing his credentials as a CIA insider, and a note demanding $50,000. He would claim in a Senate report that he had initially believed this to be a one-time deal to get him out of his financial black hole, but he soon realised that he had "crossed a line, [and] I could never step back". More like this:• How Vladimir Putin rose to power in Russia• How Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jewish people in WW2• How the US dropped nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966 For the next nine years, Ames was paid to pass over a wealth of top secret information to the KGB. He would take classified documents – detailing everything from listening devices connected to Moscow's space facility to new state-of-the-art technology that was able to count Soviet missiles' nuclear warheads – wrap them in plastic bags, and simply carry them out of the CIA. Since his role involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, he was often able to meet his handlers face-to-face without arousing suspicion. He would also leave packets of classified documents in secret pre-arranged sites called dead drops. "If he was going to make a dead drop, earlier he would place a chalk mark on a mailbox, for instance, and the Russians would see that chalk mark, and then they would know that the drop had been loaded with the documents," said Wiser. "Later, when they retrieved the documents, they would go and erase the chalk mark. He would then know that the transfer of documents was done safely and securely." It was through Ames's leaking of secret intelligence information that the KGB would identify virtually all of the CIA's spies in the Soviet Union, effectively shutting down its US covert operations there. "I'm not aware of any other spy or mole in the US that has caused such a loss of human life in terms of human assets," said Wiser. The sudden disappearance of so many CIA assets did raise alarms and trigger the search for the mole within the Agency in 1986, but Ames would continue to slip under the radar for the best part of a decade. And he was paid handsomely for his treachery, receiving a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union. Ames made little attempt to hide his newfound wealth. Despite never having a salary of more than $70,000 a year, he bought a new $540,000 house in cash, spent tens of thousands of dollars on home improvements and purchased a Jaguar car. It would be his lavish lifestyle and spending that would place him in the spotlight, and lead to his eventual arrest by Wiser's FBI team in 1994. After he was picked up by the FBI, Ames cooperated with the authorities. He detailed the extent of his spying activities in exchange for a plea deal that secured a lenient sentence for Rosario, who admitted that she had known about the cash and his meetings with the Soviets. She was released after five years. Ames, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever to be exposed as a double agent, continues to serve out his life sentence at a US federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. To this day, Ames has shown very little remorse for his actions or for the deaths that they led to. "He had a very high opinion of himself," said Wiser about Ames. "He regrets getting caught. He doesn't regret being a spy." -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Oleg Gordievsky, K.G.B. Officer Turned Double Agent, Dies at 86
Oleg Gordievsky, who was the top K.G.B. agent in London until he defected to the West in 1985 and revealed himself as a longtime double agent for British intelligence — making him one of the most highly placed Western spies during the Cold War — was found dead at his home in Godalming, southwest of London, on March 4. He was 86. The local police, who discovered his body, said that they did not believe foul play was involved but that an investigation was ongoing. The British foreign intelligence agency, MI6, first recruited Mr. Gordievsky in 1974, when he was based in Copenhagen. In 1982 he moved to London, where the K.G.B. tasked him with seeding disinformation about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher before the next year's general election. In practice he helped the British root out secret operatives and informants working for the Soviet Union. He kept up enough of a front to please his K.G.B. bosses in Moscow, who soon promoted him to rezident, or head agent, in Britain. He also played a crucial role in preventing what could have become World War III. By the early 1980s, the Soviets were convinced that the United States was planning a first-strike nuclear attack under the guise of a major NATO exercise, a suspicion underlined by President Ronald Reagan's bellicose rhetoric. As NATO carried out the exercise, known as Able Archer 83, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies moved onto a war footing. Historians consider this to have been the closest moment to world war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Mr. Gordievsky was in a unique position to work both sides. He was able to persuade Moscow that an attack was not in fact imminent while also communicating Soviet fears to the British and the Americans. As a result, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan pared back their language, and future military exercises were more limited. All of this remained secret for years afterward, and in the meantime Mr. Gordievsky had to watch his own back. In 1985 he was recalled to Moscow, given drugs and interrogated. Someone, it seemed, had tipped off the K.G.B. to the presence of a high-ranking mole in London. Lacking solid evidence, the Soviets placed him on leave. A few days later he appeared at 7 p.m. on a Moscow street corner, holding a shopping bag. A man soon passed, eating a candy bar. They locked eyes. That was the signal to activate Operation Pimlico, an emergency extraction. Mr. Gordievsky shook his K.G.B. tail and then hurried to the Finnish border. Two British agents, a man and a woman, along with their baby, awaited him there in their Ford Sierra. They placed him in the trunk, wrapped in a foil sheet to confuse heat detectors. When dogs at the border grew suspicious, the agents began to change the child's diaper, filling the car with odors that threw the canines off Mr. Gordievsky's scent. When they were finally across, they played Jean Sibelius's 'Finlandia' symphony on the car's sound system, a signal to Mr. Gordievsky that he was safe. Back in Moscow, he was sentenced to death in absentia. That sentence has never been rescinded. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was born on Oct. 10, 1938, in Moscow. His father, Anton, was an agent with the N.K.V.D., the forerunner of the K.G.B., and his mother, Olga, was a statistician. His father was a committed Communist, but his mother quietly reviled the party, an attitude that greatly influenced her son. Still, there was no question where his future lay. He graduated from the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1961, and he joined the K.G.B. two years later. After an initial posting in East Berlin, he did two tours at the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen, with time in between to improve his spycraft. But as he rose in the K.G.B. ranks, he also grew disillusioned with Communism. In Germany he had seen the newly erected Berlin Wall split families, and from afar he had watched the Soviet Union crush the Prague Spring movement of 1968. Working on a suggestion from a double agent who was a former colleague of Mr. Gordievsky's, British intelligence agents began to feel him out in Copenhagen. Once he turned, he was considered among the West's prize assets — so prized that the Americans and even Mrs. Thatcher did not know his identity. While continuing to provide intelligence to Moscow — bits of low-value information fed to him by his MI6 handlers — he helped Western governments uncover spies within their ranks. Among them were Arne Treholt, a Norwegian diplomat, and Michael Bettaney, a British counterintelligence officer who in 1983 tried to pass classified documents to Arkady Guk, the rezident at the time. The ensuing scandal led the Soviets to recall Mr. Guk, opening the door for Mr. Gordievsky to replace him. Both sides in the Cold War used moles like Mr. Gordievsky to hunt for spies. It was later revealed that his cover was blown by Aldrich Ames, a C.I.A. officer who began working for the Soviets in 1985. Mr. Gordievsky was one of the first double agents Mr. Ames exposed and one of the few who escaped; nearly a dozen others were executed. After defecting, Mr. Gordievsky lived under an assumed name in Godalming but continued to advise British intelligence. As the Cold War wound down, he began writing under his own name, including articles for The Daily Telegraph and the books 'KGB: The Inside Story' (1990), a collaboration with the historian Christopher Andrew, and 'Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky' (1995). His story was also the subject of 'The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War' (2018), by Ben Macintyre. Mr. Gordievsky's first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, a fellow K.G.B. agent, ended in divorce. He married Leila Aliyeva in 1979. After defecting, Mr. Gordievsky spent years trying to get the Soviet Union to allow his wife and their two daughters, Mariya and Anna, to join him. They arrived in Britain in 1991, but the couple soon divorced. Mr. Gordievsky's survivors include his daughters. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Mr. Gordievsky raised alarms about the increasing authoritarian rule of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including his deployment of a robust network of spies and subversives. When his friend and fellow defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned by Russian agents in London in 2006, Mr. Gordievsky began to fear for his life. When he fell ill and went into a temporary coma in 2008, he maintained that he, too, had been poisoned by Russian agents. Mr. Gordievsky continued to warn about renewed Russian espionage, saying that Britain had naïvely lowered its defenses. 'It is easier than ever to work and recruit here,' he wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 2010. 'If anything, the overall Russian espionage presence in Britain is now bigger and more active than in my time.'
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.'
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Oleg Gordievsky, famed Cold War spy and KGB defector, dead at 86
Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who spied for the West during the height of the Cold War, has died at the age of 86. Gordievsky died on March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting from the Soviet Union in 1985. Police said on Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious. The BBC reported on Friday that Gordievsky "died peacefully" at his home in Surrey. The world learned his name four decades ago, when the British Foreign Office announced on Sept. 12, 1985, that Gordievsky — initially described as being a senior official of the KGB — had sought and been granted asylum in the United Kingdom. After his defection, then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher sought to cut a deal with Moscow: If Gordievsky's wife and daughters were allowed to join him in London, Britain would not expel all of the KGB agents he had exposed. Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher, pointing to information Gordievsky provided, ordered the expulsion of more than two dozen people — diplomats, journalists and trade officials among them — over allegations they were involved in spying. Gordievsky, a once high-ranking KGB officer who defected to the West, is shown during an interview with CBC's The Journal in August 1991. (The Journal/CBC Archives) The move was announced despite objections from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who feared it could scuttle relations just as reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West. Soviet officials rejected the spying allegations, with a spokesperson telling reporters that "all accusations, or insinuations, as to the alleged illegal activities of the Soviet representatives have nothing to do with reality." Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons. But despite Howe's fears, diplomatic relations were never severed. Reassuring a jittery Moscow Two years before his defection, in 1983, Gordievsky had warned Britain and the United States that the Soviet leadership was so worried about a nuclear attack by the West that it was considering a first strike. As tensions spiked during a NATO military exercise in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not a precursor to a nuclear attack. Soon after, Ronald Reagan, U.S. president at the time, began moves to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union. With time, the public would learn more about the dramatic circumstances that brought Gordievsky to a new life in the West. He'd been posted to the KGB's London office in 1982, but his tenure there abruptly ended a few years later, when Gordievsky was recalled to the Soviet Union on suspicion of being a Western mole — which he was, as he'd been sharing secrets with British intelligence for years. Daring escape, first heading to Finland In May 1985, Gordievsky returned to Moscow, as directed, and he endured interrogation but was not charged. In July of that year, he made a dramatic escape from the Soviet Union, via a British exfiltration effort that saw him spirited across the border to Finland while he hid in the trunk of a car. Agents involved in his rescue are said to have played a cassette recording of Jean Sibelius's Finlandia as a signal to Gordievsky that they had made it across the border. He was then flown to Britain through Norway. Gordievsky's family remained under KGB surveillance for six years before being allowed to join him in England in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved. "Many times, I was saying to myself: 'It's like a movie, it's like a movie,'" Gordievsky told the BBC's Witness Historypodcast in 2015, recounting the story of his escape. "It was incredible." British authorities credit Gordievsky with having made "an outstanding contribution" to the country's national security and to helping tamp down tensions between Russia and the West during "a critical time of the Cold War."
Euronews
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB spy who defected to the UK in the Cold War, dies at 86
ADVERTISEMENT Gordievsky died on March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting in 1985. Police said on Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious. Historians consider Gordievsky one of the era's most important spies. In the 1980s, his intelligence helped avoid a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West. Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became KGB station chief. He was one of several Soviet agents who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow's tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by Britain's MI6 in the early 1970s. The 1990 book 'KGB: The Inside Story,' co-authored by Gordievsky and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, says Gordievsky came to believe that 'the Communist one-party state leads inexorably to intolerance, inhumanity and the destruction of liberties.' He decided that the best way to fight for democracy 'was to work for the West.' He worked for British intelligence for more than a decade during the chilliest years of the Cold War. In 1983, Gordievsky warned the U.K. and U.S. that the Soviet leadership was so worried about a nuclear attack by the West that it was considering a first strike. As tensions spiked during a NATO military exercise in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not a precursor to a nuclear attack. Soon after, U.S. President Ronal Reagan began moves to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union. In 1984, Gordievsky briefed soon-to-be Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ahead of his first visit to the U.K. — and also briefed the British on how to approach the reformist Gorbachev. Gorbachev's meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a huge success. Most senior Soviet spy to defect Ben Macintyre, author of a book about the double agent, 'The Spy and the Traitor,' told the BBC that Gordievsky managed 'in a secret way to launch the beginning of the end of the Cold War.' Gordievsky was called back to Moscow for consultations in 1985, and decided to go despite fearing — correctly — that his role as a double agent had been exposed. He was drugged and interrogated but not charged, and Britain arranged an undercover operation to spirit him out of the Soviet Union — smuggled across the border to Finland in the trunk of a car. He was the most senior Soviet spy to defect during the Cold War. Documents declassified in 2014 showed that Britain considered Gordievsky so valuable that Thatcher sought to cut a deal with Moscow: If Gordievsky's wife and daughters were allowed to join him in London, Britain would not expel all the KGB agents he had exposed. Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher ordered the expulsion of 25 Russians, despite objections from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who fared it could scuttle relations just as Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West. Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons, sparking a second round in which each side kicked out six more officials. But, despite Howe's fears, diplomatic relations were never severed. Gordievsky's family was kept under 24-hour KGB surveillance for six years before being allowed to join him in England in 1991. He lived the rest of his life under U.K. protection in the quiet town of Godalming, 64 kilometres from London. ADVERTISEMENT Death not being treated as suspicious In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to death for treason. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 2007 for 'services to the security of the United Kingdom.' It is the same accolade held by the fictional British spy James Bond. In 2008, Gordievsky claimed he had been poisoned and spent 34 hours in a coma after taking tainted sleeping pills given to him by a Russian business associate. The risks he faced were underscored in 2018 when former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned and seriously sickened with a Soviet-made nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury, where he had been living quietly for years. The Surrey Police force said officers were called to an address in Godalming on March 4, where 'an 86-year-old man was found dead at the property.' ADVERTISEMENT It said counter-terrorism officers are leading the investigation, but 'the death is not currently being treated as suspicious' and 'there is nothing to suggest any increased risk to members of the public.'
