Latest news with #OlegGordievsky
NDTV
25-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Betrayal At Langley: A CIA Man Who Became US' Most Infamous Double Agent
It began with silence. One by one, CIA assets deep inside the Soviet Union vanished. Some disappeared without a trace. Others turned up dead. Behind closed doors in Washington, panic quietly took hold. For years, no one could understand why America's closest secrets were unravelling like a spool of thread yanked in the dark. Thousands of kilometres away, Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian colonel secretly working for Britain's MI6, sat alone in a safehouse, still trying to make sense of how the KGB had nearly caught him. "For nearly nine years I have been guessing," he would later say, "who was the man who betrayed me?" The answer came on April 28, 1994, when a bespectacled CIA veteran named Aldrich Ames stood in a US courtroom and confessed to being the mole. The man who, for nine years, sold secrets to the Soviets, not for ideology, but for cash, and left a trail of betrayal behind him. Ames's fall from grace began not with a whisper of discontent against the US, but with a chalk mark on a mailbox. That signal, a dead drop, was another handoff of top-secret intelligence to the KGB. For years, Ames passed plastic-wrapped CIA documents detailing everything from surveillance tech to names of American assets within the USSR. These actions systematically dismantled nearly every US spy network operating in the Soviet Union. "I felt a great deal of financial pressure," Ames would later admit. "In retrospect, I was clearly overreacting." But overreaction doesn't begin to cover the scale of his betrayal. A Career That Should Have Ended Sooner Ames wasn't a rising star. He bumbled through early assignments, struggled with alcohol like his father (also a CIA man) before him, and was known for poor work habits. Once, he even left a briefcase full of classified documents on a subway. Still, somehow, he kept climbing the ranks. By 1983, despite a questionable track record, Ames was appointed head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence branch - a post that gave him nearly unrestricted access to the Agency's deepest secrets. That same year, his financial woes deepened. Amid a costly divorce from his first wife and mounting expenses from his second, Rosario, Ames began to drown in debt. So, in April 1985, with a few drinks for courage, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington and offered up names of agents working secretly for the CIA within the USSR for $50,000. The Price Of Betrayal Ames didn't stop there. Over the next nine years, he pocketed more than $2.5 million, the highest known sum ever paid to a Soviet spy, and handed over the identities of more than 30 agents and compromised over 100 CIA operations. "It was about the money," said FBI agent Leslie Wiser, who later led the investigation. "And I don't think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that." The consequences were swift and brutal. In 1985, Soviet agents working with the CIA began to disappear. One by one, they were arrested, tortured, and in many cases, executed. Among them was General Dmitri Polyakov, a high-ranking Soviet army officer and long-time CIA asset. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who had been secretly spying for MI6 from London, narrowly avoided that fate. "I was enthusiastic. I liked the Americans," Gordievsky told the BBC. "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." Tom Mangold, reporting for Newsnight, described the tragic irony best. "The top KGB defector was debriefed by the top KGB mole," he said. Cracks In The Armour For nearly a decade, America's worst intelligence disaster was walking its hallways in plain sight. While the CIA searched high and low for the mole within, Aldrich Ames bought a Jaguar, paid for his wife's liposuction in cash, and moved into a $540,000 house in Arlington. All on a $60,000 government salary. His position meant he could meet Russian handlers without raising suspicion. His downfall came not from a brilliant counterintelligence breakthrough, but from old-fashioned scrutiny of his spending habits. By the early 1990s, the CIA and FBI grew suspicious. A joint task force finally zeroed in on Ames. On February 21, 1994, after a lengthy surveillance operation, Aldrich and Rosario Ames were arrested outside their Arlington, Virginia, home. Ames cooperated, offering a full confession in exchange for a lighter sentence for Rosario, who served five years. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A sentence he is currently serving in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. His case shook the CIA to its core, much like the exposure of Kim Philby rocked British intelligence decades earlier. "He regrets getting caught. He doesn't regret being a spy," said FBI's Leslie Wiser of Aldrich Ames.
NDTV
23-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Russian Spy Agency Might Have Planted Brazilian Birth Records 30 Years Ago
They came to Brazil not to spy, but to become Brazilian, using birth certificates that may have been quietly planted by Russians 30 years ago. What began as a probe into forged IDs unveiled what may be one of the most audacious espionage strategies in recent memory. As authorities dismantled a KGB spy ring operating in Brazil, they uncovered an even more baffling layer. The Russian agents held what appeared to be legitimate Brazilian birth certificates, not counterfeits, not recently inserted, but real entries in decades-old civil registries. A forensic analysis conducted in April shocked investigators. The documents, tied to supposed births in the 1980s and 1990s, showed no signs of tampering. "The ink is normal, the page is OK," a senior Brazilian investigator told The New York Times. "There is no tampering of the books at all." Investigators believe these identities weren't stolen or forged. They may have been planted by Soviet operatives during the Cold War, decades before the agents arrived. The goal was to prepare a new generation of Russian "illegals" with bulletproof cover identities, ready to move globally as Brazilians. "It's just the sort of thing that they would do," said Edward Lucas, a British author and authority on Russian spycraft. "It fits with the meticulous and generational attention that they devote to creating these identities." Unlike Western spies who adopt aliases for missions, Russian deep-cover agents live full lives under false names. They marry, work, and even raise families. Brazil was their launchpad. But their ultimate targets were Europe, the US, and beyond. The documents looked real, but the people never existed. Parents listed on the forms had no records of having children. One father's name even matched a Brazilian alias used by another Russian agent decades ago. It was probably a possible subtle signature linking generations of spies. It is a playbook once hinted at by former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who described efforts to access birth ledgers in Denmark in the '70s. The Brazil case may be a modern version of that same strategy, just seeded long in advance. "This kind of generational planting would be rewarded," said Andrei Soldatov, a prominent Russian intelligence analyst. "If you can contribute to the illegal programme, you put yourself in a really good spot in the eyes of your superiors. It would be really good for your career." For now, the mystery remains partially resolved.
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.'
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."
CBC
22-03-2025
- Politics
- CBC
How famed Cold War spy Oleg Gordievsky defected in 1985
Oleg Gordievsky was the head of Russia's KGB office in London, but turns out he was a valuable double agent. His defection was called an extraordinary development in the world of espionage that led to the expulsion of several Russian diplomats, journalists and trade officials from Britain.
