Oleg Gordievsky

Oleg Gordievsky

Oleg Gordievsky (right) with U.S. President Ronald Reagan
Allegiance Soviet Union (British secret agent since 1974)
United Kingdom
Service KGB
SIS/MI6
Rank Colonel of the KGB
Award(s) CMG
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Birth name Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky
Born (1938-10-10) 10 October 1938
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality
  • British
  • Russian
Occupation Spy (retired)

Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (Russian: Оле́г Анто́нович Гордие́вский; born 10 October 1938) is a former colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985.

Early career

Oleg Gordievsky attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and on completion of his studies, joined the foreign service where he was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just prior to completion of the Berlin Wall. 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. This had been noticed by the Danish Security Intelligence Service which resulted in extensive efforts to see if Gordievsky could be recruited. When Danish Intelligence were convinced an approach could be made, they contacted MI6. DSIS felt they needed a partner among the big intelligence agencies due to the relatively small size of the DSIS to make the operation successful, and chose the British.[2] MI6 via DSIS, subsequently made contact with him. 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 ("rezident"), 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,[3] 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.[4]

Escape (exfiltration) from the USSR

Gordievsky was suddenly ordered back to Moscow on 22 May 1985, taken to a KGB safe house outside Moscow, drugged and interrogated by Soviet counter-counterintelligence. Apparently the leak came from two sources, one of which might have been Aldrich Ames, an American Central Intelligence Agency officer who had been selling secrets to the KGB.[5]

Gordievsky was questioned for about five hours. After that, he was released and told he would never work overseas again. Although he was suspected of espionage for a foreign power, for some reason his superiors decided to stall. In June 1985 he was joined by his wife and two children in Moscow.[5]

Although he almost certainly remained under KGB surveillance, Gordievsky managed to send a covert signal to MI6 about his situation, and they activated an elaborate escape plan which had been in place for many years, ready for just such an emergency.[5]

On 19 July 1985, Gordievsky went for his usual jog, but he instead managed to evade his KGB tails and boarded a train to the Finnish border, where he was met by British embassy cars, and lying down in the boot of a Ford saloon, he was smuggled across the border into Finland,[6] then flown to the UK via Norway. Soviet authorities subsequently sentenced Gordievsky to death in absentia for treason,[7] a sentence never rescinded by post-Soviet Russian authorities, although it cannot be legally carried out because of Russian membership in the Council of Europe. His wife and children – on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape – finally joined him in the UK six years later, after extensive lobbying by the British Government, and personally by Margaret Thatcher during her meetings with Gorbachev.

Life in the UK

Gordievsky congratulated by Margaret Thatcher on his investiture, 18 October 2007

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' Oleg Gordievsky recounted how he saw the head of the British section of the KGB, expressing surprise at the allegations that he read in a British newspaper about Roger Hollis being a KGB agent saying "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"[8]

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.[9] In 1995 the former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot received an out of court settlement (said to be "substantial") from The Sunday Times after the newspaper alleged, in articles derived from claims in the original manuscript of Gordievsky's book Next Stop Execution (1995), that Foot was a KGB "agent of influence" with the codename 'Boot'.[10] 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.[11]

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 safety of the United Kingdom.[12]

Gordievsky had a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 3 August 2005, accusing the BBC of being "The Red Service". He said:

"Just listen with attention to the ideological nuances on Radio 4, BBC television, and the BBC World Service, and you will realise that communism is not a dying creed."

Gordievsky was featured in the PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.

Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for "services to the security of the United Kingdom" in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours (in the Diplomatic List).[13] The Guardian newspaper noted that it was "the same gong given his fictional cold war colleague James Bond."[14]

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.[15] Gordievsky claimed that he was poisoned with thallium by "rogue elements in Moscow".[15] He accused MI6 of forcing Special Branch to drop its early investigations into his allegations;[15] according to him, the investigation was only reopened thanks to the intervention of former MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller.[16]

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.[17]

Publications

See also

References and notes

  1. ↑ "Heroes and Villains". MI6: A Century in the Shadows. Episode 2. 3 August 2009. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  2. ↑ https://www.dr.dk/tv/se/historien-om-politiets-efterretningstjeneste-series/-/historien-om-politiets-efterretningstjeneste-2-3
  3. ↑ Jones, Nate. "The Able Archer 83 Sourcebook". The National Security Archive.
  4. ↑ Gordon Corera. "How vital were Cold War spies? BBC News, 5 August 2009. (Retrieved 5 August 2009)
  5. 1 2 3 David Wise. "Thirty years later, we still don't know who betrayed these Cold War spies" Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015. (Retrieved 23 October 2015)
  6. ↑ "Spy who came in from the cold thanks to a packet of crisps".
  7. ↑ Archived 25 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ↑ "Inside MI5: The Real Spooks (ITV 2009)".
  9. ↑ Urban, Mark (1996). UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19068-5.
  10. ↑ Rhys Williams "'Sunday Times' pays Foot damages over KGB claim", The Independent, 8 July 1995
  11. ↑ Charles Moore: "Was Foot a national treasure or the KGB’s useful idiot?" The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2010
  12. ↑ Buckingham Honours Oleg Gordievsky, University of Buckingham, 28 February 2005
  13. ↑ "No. 58358". The London Gazette (Supplement). 16 June 2007. p. 3.
  14. ↑ Esther Addley (16 June 2007). "Literary world applauds Rushdie knighthood". London: The Guardian.
  15. 1 2 3 Gray, Sadie (6 April 2010). "Double agent Gordievsky claims he was poisoned by the Kremlin". London: The Independent. Retrieved 18 December 2010.
  16. ↑ "'Russian spy poisoned me' says former double agent Gordievsky". News.scotsman.com. 6 April 2008. Retrieved 10 December 2012.
  17. ↑ Lawless, Jill. Ex-Russian Spy Claims He Was Poisoned, Associated Press, 7 April 2008.

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