Oleg Gordievsky


Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG is a former colonel of the KGB and KGB resident-designate and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985.

Early career

The son of an NKVD officer, he was born in 1938. He proved an excellent student at school, where he learned to speak German. He studied at a premium Moscow University, and later undertook NKVD training, where in addition to espionage skills, he mastered his expertise in German, and he also learned to speak Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. On completion of his studies, he joined the foreign service where he was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just prior to completion of the Berlin Wall. The building of the wall appalled him, and he became disillusioned with the Soviet system. After spending a year in Berlin, he returned to Moscow. He joined the KGB in 1963 and was posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen.

British secret agent

During his Danish posting, Gordievsky became disenchanted with his work in the KGB, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That had been noticed by the Danish Security Intelligence Service, which resulted in extensive efforts to see if Gordievsky could be recruited. Convinced an approach could be made, the DSIS contacted MI6. Because of their relatively small size, the DSIS felt that they needed a partner among the big intelligence agencies to make the operation successful. MI6, via DSIS, subsequently made contact with Gordievsky.
The value of MI6's recruitment of such a highly placed and valuable intelligence asset increased dramatically when, in 1982, Gordievsky was assigned to the Soviet embassy in London as the KGB resident-designate, responsible for Soviet intelligence gathering and espionage in the UK.
Two of Gordievsky's most important contributions were averting a potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, when NATO exercise Able Archer 83 was misinterpreted by the Soviets as a potential first strike, and identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet heir-apparent long before he came to prominence. Indeed, the information passed by Gordievsky became the first proof of how worried the Soviet leadership had become about the possibility of a NATO nuclear first strike.

Escape (exfiltration) from the USSR

Although MI6 passed on information provided by Gordievsky to the American CIA, the British would not reveal their source, so the CIA conducted a covert operation to discover who the source was, and after about a year, they realised that it must be Gordievsky. However, a high-ranking American CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, who had been selling secrets to the KGB, passed Gordievsky's name to Soviet counterintelligence. Gordievsky was suddenly ordered back to Moscow. Although Gordievsky was advised to defect and stay in London, on 22 May 1985 he left for Moscow. On arrival, he was taken to a KGB safe house outside Moscow, drugged, and interrogated.
Gordievsky was questioned for about five hours. After that, he was released and told that he would never work overseas again. He was suspected of espionage for a foreign power, but for some reason, his superiors decided to stall. In June 1985, he was joined by his wife and two children in Moscow.
Although he almost certainly remained under KGB surveillance, Gordievsky managed to send a covert signal to MI6, which activated an elaborate escape plan that had been in place for many years for just such an emergency. Gordievsky waited on a particular street corner, on a particular weekday at 7.30 pm, carrying a Safeway bag as a signal. An MI6 agent walked past carrying a Harrods bag, eating a Mars bar, and the two made eye contact. That indicated that the escape plan was in place.
On 19 July 1985, Gordievsky went for his usual jog, but he instead managed to evade his KGB tails and boarded a train to Vyborg, near the Finnish border, where he was met by British embassy cars, after they managed to lose the three KGB surveillance cars. Lying down in the boot of a Ford Sierra saloon, he was smuggled across the border into Finland, and then flown to the UK via Norway. Soviet authorities subsequently sentenced Gordievsky to death in absentia for treason, a sentence never rescinded by post-Soviet Russian authorities, but which cannot be legally carried out because of Russian membership in the Council of Europe. His wife, Leila was a KGB officer who was loyal to Moscow and who was unaware of her husband's defection. She and their children were on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape. She was interrogated and detained for some 6 years, the Soviets presuming that she had been complicit in Gordievsky's activities. She finally joined him in the UK six years later, following extensive lobbying by the British government, and personal appeals by Margaret Thatcher during her meetings with Gorbachev. However, the marriage was effectively dead by then and eventually it foundered completely. It was reported in 2013 that, since a date in the 1990s, Gordievsky had had a long-term relationship with a British woman.

Life in the UK

Gordievsky has written a number of books on the subject of the KGB and is a frequently quoted media pundit on the subject.
Gordievsky noted that the KGB were puzzled by and denied the claim that Director General of MI5 Roger Hollis was a Soviet agent. In the 2009 ITV programme Inside MI5: The Real Spooks, Gordievsky recounted how he saw the head of the British section of the KGB express surprise at the allegations that he read in a British newspaper about Roger Hollis being a KGB agent: "Why is it they are speaking about Roger Hollis, such nonsense, can't understand it, it must be some special British trick directed against us". The allegiance of Hollis remains a debated historical issue; the MI5 official website has cited Gordievsky's revelation as a vindication of Hollis.
In 1990, he was consultant editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security, and he worked on television in the UK in the 1990s, including the game show Wanted. In 1995, the former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot received an out of court settlement from The Sunday Times after the newspaper alleged, in articles derived from claims in the original manuscript of Gordievsky's book Next Stop Execution, that Foot was a KGB "agent of influence" with the codename 'Boot'.
In the Daily Telegraph in 2010, Charles Moore gave a "full account", which he claimed had been provided to him by Gordievsky shortly after Foot's death, of the extent of Foot's alleged KGB involvement. Moore also wrote that, although the claims are difficult to corroborate without MI6 and KGB files, Gordievsky's past record in revealing KGB contacts in Britain had been shown to be reliable.
On 26 February 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Buckingham in recognition of his outstanding service to the security and the safety of the United Kingdom.
Gordievsky was featured in the PBS documentary .
Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George for "services to the security of the United Kingdom" in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours. The Guardian newspaper noted that it was "the same gong given his fictional cold war colleague James Bond."
Gordievsky lives in a "safe house" in London, and security has been tightened since the Salisbury poisonings. Putin is said to especially dislike Gordievsky because Putin was at the time part of the KGB group that failed to foil Gordievsky's escape to Finland ; but Ben Macintyre considers that Putin is unlikely to authorise any assassination attempt on Gordievsky.

Suspected poisoning

In April 2008, the media reported that on 2 November 2007, Gordievsky had been taken by ambulance from his home in Surrey to a local hospital, where he spent 34 hours unconscious. Gordievsky claimed that he was poisoned with thallium by "rogue elements in Moscow". He accused MI6 of forcing Special Branch to drop its early investigations into his allegations; according to him, the investigation was only reopened thanks to the intervention of former MI5 Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller.
In Gordievsky's opinion, the culprit was a UK-based Russian business associate who had supplied him with pills, which he said were the sedative Xanax, purportedly for insomnia; he refused to identify the associate, saying British authorities had advised against it.

Works