One of the most significant spies of the Cold War, who secretly passed Soviet secrets to Britain and helped change the course of history and prevent nuclear war, has died. Oleg Gordievsky, a former officer of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), was 86 years old. He died in the town of Godalming in England, where he had been living since his defection in 1985. Surrey Police said that on March 4, law enforcement officers were called to a house in Godalming, where an 86-year-old man was found dead. The police said that while the investigation was being led by counter-terrorism officers, “the death is not currently being treated as suspicious“ and “there is nothing to suggest an increased risk to the public”, the British television station "Sky News" reported.
Oleg Gordievsky's story reads like a plot from a John le Carré spy thriller, notes the British magazine "Spectator"
On a July afternoon in 1985, two cars pull up in a remote spot by the side of a road in Russia, kicking up a cloud of dust as a disheveled and disheveled man emerges from the bushes. After a brief conversation, the man gets into the trunk of one of the cars, which immediately drives off. The man, drenched in sweat with fear, is Colonel Oleg Gordievsky – a high-ranking KGB officer who for more than a decade passed the most closely guarded secrets of Soviet intelligence to the British foreign intelligence service MI6. But now he is on the run after being suspected of treason. The roadside encounter, near the Finnish border, is the final stage of a daring operation to get him to safety, according to an article by the British news agency PA Media.
It began four days earlier, when Gordievsky, following a prearranged signal, appeared outside a bakery on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, holding a recognizable shopping bag from the "Safeway" supermarket. A passerby eating a "Mars" chocolate bar and carrying a bag from "Harrods" is the sign that his message has been received. Operation “Pimlico“ begins.
According to the elaborate escape plan, he must evade the KGB agents who are watching his home and reach the agreed-upon location 800 kilometers away, using trains and eventually hitchhiking. At the same time, the head of MI6's Moscow residency, Raymond Asquith, and his deputy, Andrew Gibbs, set off in the same direction, accompanied by their wives and Asquith's 15-month-old daughter. The official pretext is that Gibbs' wife needs medical treatment in Finland.
The two spies rely on the fact that, under the Vienna Convention, their diplomatic cars will not be subject to inspection. However, the plan almost fails when, upon leaving Leningrad, they discover that they are clearly being followed by the KGB. At the last moment, they manage to slip away and pull over unnoticed to the side of the road.
However, the most dangerous moment remains - crossing the border. After a tense wait, during which the two women try to distract the border guards and their dogs by deliberately spilling chips and changing the baby's dirty diaper, the car is finally allowed through.
The symphonic poem "Finland" by Sibelius sounds from the speakers of the car's cassette player - a signal to Gordievsky, who is still in the trunk, that he is safe. Had he remained in Russia, he would almost certainly have been executed, notes PA Media's Gavin Corden.
The fact that MI6 was prepared to mount such a risky operation shows how highly they valued the man they considered the most valuable Western spy of the late Cold War.
In the early 1980s, Gordievsky warned Western leaders that the paranoid Soviet leadership mistakenly believed that NATO was planning a nuclear strike, which almost led to war. This prompted US President Ronald Reagan to tone down his anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Gordievsky's intelligence also helped establish the first contacts between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, who would later play a key role in the end of the Cold War.
Born October 10, 1938 in Moscow, the son of a staunch communist and an officer in the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB), Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky seemed destined for a career in Soviet intelligence.
After graduating from the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he demonstrated a talent for languages, he joined the KGB in 1961, following in the footsteps of his older brother Vasily. In 1966, he received his first overseas assignment at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, under diplomatic cover.
The freedom he saw in Western Europe enchanted him, and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 by Soviet tanks deepened his disillusionment with the Soviet regime, notes PA Media.
Gordievsky first came to MI6’s attention after a tip-off from Czechoslovak spy Standa Kaplan, who had fled to Canada. Kaplan referred to Gordievsky as an old friend from the KGB academy, where they had together questioned the direction the Kremlin was taking. At the time, Gordievsky was a KGB agent at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen. In 1972, he responded positively to delicate attempts by MI6 officers in the Danish capital to contact him after phone taps revealed that in conversations with his wife in Moscow he expressed growing anxiety about the Kremlin's actions, specifically mentioning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He began spying for Britain when he returned to Moscow in 1974, the Guardian newspaper reported.
To the delight of British intelligence, in 1982 he was transferred to London, where he was eventually appointed KGB resident - head of the local structure. Meanwhile, MI6 quietly helped Gordievsky’s career by providing him with bait – real but ultimately insignificant intelligence with which to impress his KGB superiors. But in 1985, Soviet suspicions of him emerged after a tip-off from Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA official who was spying for the KGB. Gordievsky was summoned to Moscow, where he was drugged and interrogated.
During his long career as an espionage agent, Gordievsky’s most valuable achievement was convincing the Kremlin that a major annual NATO exercise in Germany, codenamed “Able Archer 83,” was not a precursor to a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, according to the Guardian’s Richard Norton Taylor. This was a period of heightened Cold War tensions between the two superpowers, exacerbated by Reagan's rhetoric and the paranoia of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who had come to power in 1982. In 1981, when he was head of the KGB, Andropov initiated Operation Ryan, in which KGB officers were sent around the world to gather evidence of US plans for a first strike. Gordievsky later described how KGB officers in London were ordered to find out whether NHS hospitals were stocking up on blood and to watch the windows of the Ministry of Defence and other departments in Whitehall to see if their windows were lit at night.
Through his contacts in MI6, Gordievsky warned Thatcher, who in turn warned Reagan, that the Kremlin's concerns about what the US and NATO were doing were genuine. Since the KGB leadership in Moscow was unwilling to reject Andropov's paranoia, Gordievsky was tasked with reassuring the Kremlin that NATO had no intention of launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Later, Gordievsky's other valuable role was to convince Western leaders, especially Thatcher, that the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a genuine reformer who should be taken seriously.
When the MI6 operation to remove him from the USSR succeeded, he was deeply hurt, as he left his wife Leila and their two young daughters in Moscow. Margaret Thatcher, who was monitoring the case, responded to the USSR's refusal to allow them to leave the country by expelling all KGB agents from Britain.
It was only in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, that his family was finally reunited, but the long years of separation destroyed his marriage.
In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to death in absentia for high treason.
In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him the Order of St. Michael and St. Georgi“ – the same distinction held by the fictional superspy James Bond.