Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet KGB officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets and techniques to Britain, has died. He was 86.
Gordievsky died March 4 in England, the place he had lived since defecting in 1985. Police mentioned Saturday that they aren’t treating his demise as suspicious.
Historians contemplate Gordievsky one in all the period’s most essential spies. In the Eighties, his intelligence helped keep away from a harmful escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.
Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early Sixties, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, the place he turned KGB station chief.
He was one in all a number of Soviet brokers who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom motion in 1968, and was recruited by Britain’s MI6 in the early Nineteen Seventies.
The 1990 e-book KGB: The Inside Story, co-authored by Gordievsky and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, says Gordievsky got here to imagine that “the Communist one-get together state leads inexorably to intolerance, inhumanity and the destruction of liberties.”
He determined that the finest approach to combat for democracy “was to work for the West.”
He labored for British intelligence for greater than a decade throughout the chilliest years of the Cold War.
In 1983, Gordievsky warned the U.Okay. and U.S. that the Soviet management was so apprehensive a couple of nuclear assault by the West that it was contemplating a primary strike.
As tensions spiked throughout a NATO army train in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not precursor to a nuclear assault.
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Quickly after, U.S. President Ronald Reagan started strikes to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
In 1984, Gordievsky briefed quickly-to-be Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev forward of his first go to to the U.Okay. — and likewise briefed the British on how you can method the reformist Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s assembly with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was an enormous success.
Ben Macintyre, writer of a e-book about the double agent, “The Spy and the Traitor,” advised the BBC that Gordievsky managed “in a secret approach to launch the starting of the finish of the Cold War.”
Most senior Soviet spy to defect
Gordievsky was referred to as again to Moscow for consultations in 1985, and determined to go regardless of fearing — appropriately — that his position as a double agent had been uncovered.
He was drugged and interrogated however not charged, and Britain organized an undercover operation to spirit him out of the Soviet Union — smuggled throughout the border to Finland in the trunk of a automobile.
He was the most senior Soviet spy to defect throughout the Cold War.
Paperwork declassified in 2014 confirmed that Britain thought-about Gordievsky so valuable that Thatcher sought to chop a take care of Moscow: If Gordievsky’s spouse and daughters have been allowed to hitch him in London, Britain wouldn’t expel all the KGB brokers he had uncovered.
Moscow rejected the provide, and Thatcher ordered the expulsion of 25 Russians, regardless of objections from International Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who fared it may scuttle relations simply as Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West.
Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons, sparking a second spherical wherein all sides kicked out six extra officers.
However, regardless of Howe’s fears, diplomatic relations have been by no means severed.
Gordievsky’s household was saved beneath 24-hour KGB surveillance for six years earlier than being allowed to hitch him in England in 1991.
He lived the remainder of his life beneath U.Okay. safety in the quiet city of Godalming, 64 kilometers southwest of London.
Dying not being handled as suspicious
In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to demise for treason.
In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 2007 for “providers to the safety of the United Kingdom.”
It’s the similar accolade held by the fictional British spy James Bond.
In 2008, Gordievsky claimed he had been poisoned and spent 34 hours in a coma after taking tainted sleeping capsules given to him by a Russian enterprise affiliate.
The dangers he confronted have been underscored in 2018 when former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter have been poisoned and severely sickened with a Soviet-made nerve agent in the English metropolis of Salisbury, the place he had been residing quietly for years.
The Surrey Police drive mentioned officers have been referred to as to an deal with in Godalming on March 4, the place “an 86-year-outdated man was discovered lifeless at the property.”
It mentioned counterterrorism officers are main the investigation, however “the demise shouldn’t be presently being handled as suspicious” and “there may be nothing to recommend any elevated danger to members of the public.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
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