For more than a decade the senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, spied for MI6 before escaping execution by being dramatically smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car. He was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain, and his most important contribution as a spy was to warn Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan of the Soviet leadership’s paranoia at a time when the world was moving dangerously close to nuclear war.
Gordievsky first came to the notice of MI6 after a tip-off from a Czechoslovakian spy, Standa Kaplan, who had defected to Canada. Kaplan mentioned Gordievsky as an old friend from the KGB academy, where they would together question the direction the Kremlin was taking. By then Gordievsky was a KGB officer attached to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen; in 1972 he responded favourably to delicate approaches made by MI6 officers in the Danish capital, after phone taps revealed that in calls to his wife in Moscow he had expressed growing concern 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.
He continued to do so when – to the delight of British intelligence – he was moved in 1982 to London, where he was eventually appointed the KGB rezident, its head of station. However, in 1985 Soviet suspicions about him surfaced following a tip-off from Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who was spying for the KGB. Gordievsky was summoned back to Moscow for questioning and, after four months of being closely watched, escaped in an episode that might have come straight out of the pages of spy fiction.
Over his many years of spying, Gordievsky’s most valuable achievement was reassuring the Kremlin that a major annual Nato exercise in Germany, code-named Able Archer 83, was not the precursor to a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. It was a period of heightened cold war tension between the two superpowers, which was made worse by Reagan’s rhetoric and the paranoia of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who came to power in 1982. In 1981, when he was head of the KGB, Andropov had launched Operation Ryan, which dispatched KGB officers 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 supplies of blood and to watch the windows of the Ministry of Defence and other Whitehall departments to see if their lights were burning through the night.
Through his MI6 handlers, Gordievsky warned Thatcher, who in turn warned Reagan, that the Kremlin’s concern about what the US and Nato were up to was genuine. With the KGB hierarchy in Moscow reluctant to dismiss Andropov’s paranoia, it was left to Gordievsky to reassure the Kremlin that Nato had no intention of launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Later, Gordievsky’s other valuable role was assuring western leaders, notably Thatcher, that the new Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a genuine reformer who should be taken seriously.
Gordievsky was born in Moscow. His father, Anton, was a highly committed officer of the NKVD, the KGB’s precursor, and an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin’s purges, but his mother, Olga, a statistician, hinted privately to Oleg that she held Soviet communism in contempt. While his elder brother, Vasily, was establishing a career in the KGB, Oleg studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
He subsequently joined the Russian foreign service and was posted to East Berlin in 1961 just as the wall was being constructed. He accepted an invitation to join the KGB in 1963 and was posted to Copenhagen. After his second tour there, when he was recruited by MI6, he returned in 1978 to Moscow, where he threw himself into brushing up his English and learning about British politics. Helped by a shortage of KGB British experts, he was rewarded in 1982 with a posting to London.
In London Gordievsky regularly met his MI6 handlers at a safe house in Bayswater. Thatcher was told about him, but she knew his identity only as “Mr Collins”. MI6 officers passed him chickenfeed – snippets of low-grade intelligence – to keep Moscow Centre happy with his work. Among information he fed MI6 was material about Britain he saw in the KGB’s vast archives.
It included, he said, reports that the KGB regarded Michael Foot as an “actual agent” and made regular payments to the future Labour leader, whom they codenamed “Agent Boot”. However, Gordievsky’s claims about Foot, which he said MI6 believed, were inconsistent, and sit oddly with Foot’s longstanding record of opposing the Soviet Union and its policies. After the Sunday Times published allegations in 1995 that he was a Soviet “agent of influence”, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.
Gordievsky did, however, identify one individual with the potential to inflict real damage to British interests. He was Michael Bettaney, an unstable MI5 officer who had been sent to trouble-torn Northern Ireland, where various traumatic incidents led him into heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown. Confused and embittered, in June 1983 Bettaney had stuffed a batch of highly sensitive internal MI5 documents, including the names of senior MI5 staff, into the letter box of the London house of the KGB rezident, Arkady Guk.
Suspecting a trap, Guk consulted Gordievsky, who at the time was his deputy. Gordievsky told Guk he was clearly the victim of a set-up, before informing, as quickly as he could, his MI6 controllers. Bettaney became the first MI5 officer to face trial under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 23 years in jail, while the exposure of Guk during the trial enabled the UK government to expel him, conveniently paving the way for Gordievsky to take over as the KGB’s head of station in London.
Shortly afterwards the KGB got wind, through Ames, that one of their senior officers was a mole working for British intelligence. Various checks, allied to the way the Bettaney affair had panned out, soon pointed to Gordievsky as being that mole.
In May 1985 he was summoned back to Moscow and taken to a KGB safe house, where he was drugged and interrogated. Although he was released, he knew it would only be a matter of time before he would be interrogated again. Under a plan worked out in advance by MI6, at 7.30pm every Tuesday its officers would keep a watch on a certain bread shop in Moscow. In case of emergency, Gordievsky was told to turn up there wearing a grey cap and holding a plastic bag with the bright logo of Safeway supermarket.
An MI6 officer would then walk past him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat – a signal that would confirm the triggering of an operation, codenamed Pimlico, to smuggle him out of Russia. In July 1985 he activated the plan by visiting the bakers with his Safeway bag, and the next day caught a train to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), where he took another train to a Russian town close to the Finnish border.
In the course of an extraordinary day in which KGB teams tried to track down two cars driven by MI6 officers and their families, he was eventually shoved into the boot of one of them. After the tensest of moments, Soviet border guards, whose dogs were distracted by the smell of soiled nappies in Gordievsky’s car, let through the two vehicles, which had diplomatic plates. Gordievsky emerged in Finland and was flown to Britain via Norway. In Moscow he was sentenced to death, in absentia, for treason.
MI6 quickly found him a house near Godalming in Surrey, where his identity was protected. But he was without his family and lonely, and suffered the withdrawal symptoms that spies so often experience once the excitement of their secret life and defection has died down. Aware of the dangers, MI6 encouraged Gordievsky to write a history of the KGB with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. The KGB: The Inside Story was published in 1990, and the following year Gordievsky produced Instructions From the Centre, a book that described how he and fellow KGB officers conned Moscow headquarters into believing their intelligence reports were the result of expensive lunches with valuable British contacts.
His autobiography, Next Stop Execution, was published in 1995, accompanied by the claims about Foot.
In 2007, Gordievsky was appointed CMG, for “services to the security of the UK”.
Later that year he was rushed to hospital where he spent 34 hours unconscious. He claimed he was poisoned with thallium by “rogue elements in Moscow”, a contention that was never proved but led him to criticise MI6 for not looking after him properly.
His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, a KGB officer, ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Leila Aliyeva, whom he met in Copenhagen, where she worked for the World Health Organization. They had two daughters, Maria and Anna.
Gordiesvky told neither of his wives that he was a double agent, to protect them if they were subjected to interrogation if he was caught or fled. Leila and his daughters were on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape. Under pressure from the KGB, Leila divorced him. In 1991, she and their daughters were allowed to join him in Britain. But forced separation and the knowledge that Gordievsky had led a double life meant their relationship could not be restored. She soon returned to Russia. Their daughters, who do not use their father’s name, are believed to still live in Britain.
• Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, intelligence officer, born 10 October 1938; death announced 21 March 2025
