Britain’s most valuable Cold War spy inside KGB dies at 86
Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet KGB officer agent who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets to Britain, has died.
He was 86. Gordievsky died March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting in 1985. Police said Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious.
Historians consider Gordievsky one of the era’s most important spies. In the 1980s, his intelligence helped avoid a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.
Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became KGB station chief.
He was one of several Soviet agents who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by Britain’s MI6 in the early 1970s.
He worked for British intelligence for more than a decade during the chilliest years of the Cold War. In 1983, Gordievsky warned the UK and US 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 precursor to a nuclear attack.
Soon after, US President Ronald Reagan began moves to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
Gordievsky was called back to Moscow for consultations in 1985, and decided to go despite fearing — correctly — that his role as a double agent had been exposed. He was interrogated but not charged, and Britain arranged an undercover operation to spirit him out of the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car.
Documents declassified in 2014 showed that Britain considered Gordievsky so valuable that 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 the KGB agents he had exposed.
Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher ordered the expulsion of 25 Russians, despite objections from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who fared it could scuttle relations just as reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West.
Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons, sparking a second round in which each side kicked out six more officials. But, despite Howe’s fears, diplomatic relations were never severed.
Gordievsky’s family was kept under 24-hour KGB surveillance for six years before being allowed to join him in England in 1991.
In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to death for treason. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2007.
