Oleg Gordievsky, who died on 4th March 2025, knew as much as anyone about the darkness of the Soviet Union. He heard his mother mutter about it at home. And as he grew, he observed it in scarcity, the queues for bread, in the corruption and everyday indignity experienced by Soviet citizens grappling with the obstinate pettiness of the bureaucracy. Like many other bright and capable young Soviets, Gordievsky saw a way out of this gloom in becoming part of the system, to become an intelligence officer, a ‘Chekist’. His work for the KGB (the main security agency of the Soviet Union) allowed him the rare luxury of a life abroad. On posting with the KGB in Copenhagen he busied himself running illegal agents, and other exciting tasks for the cause. But joining the ranks only offered a different perspective, rather than escape. He could simply view it all from a different angle. With those postings came a glimpse beyond the drumbeat propaganda, assuring all who would listen that things were really better, richer, freer in the East; and a different perspective on the border guards and barbed wire that would end the lives of those who dared attempt to test the theory for themselves.
Already wavering in his loyalty to the system that both his father and brother had served, and in which he himself was a high-flyer, he snapped following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. No longer would he spy for the Soviets, he decided, but against them. He set to it, to the extremely risky task of becoming a double agent, by speaking candidly about his views on Soviet policy on an insecure telephone line which he knew would be monitored by a western service. But it took a while for it to come to anything. Cold War spooks were a paranoid bunch. An alluring morsel could easily be set on a sharp hook, western services reckoned, nursing more than a few KGB inflicted scars. Using ‘dangles’ to draw out western spies was a tried and tested tool of Soviet intelligence. They had fooled the British in the 1920s with ‘the Trust’ operation, and had not deviated from the practice since. Gordievsky’s career took him back to Moscow, and then back again for another tour in Copenhagen before he was approached, gently, by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Despite the fact that it had taken years to get to this point, his conviction that the Soviet system was one that needed to be undermined was undiminished. British spooks offered him the opportunity to do just that in 1974, and he became their agent known as SUNBEAM.
Sources like SUNBEAM were rare finds for western spymasters during the Cold War, a precious commodity. The Soviet secret state was effective, brutal, with a talent for generating true believers on the one hand and intimidating those whose Soviet faith wavered on the other. Disincentives were clear, and the risks enormous. It was rumoured (almost certainly inaccurately) that new recruits were shown a recording of another double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, being fed into a furnace, alive, as the cost for his betrayal, and a not-so-subtle message for any who would follow his footsteps. But, truly, new inductees to the ranks of the KGB did not need such grim snuff to warn them of the costs of transgression; the basement of the KGB’s headquarters, the Lubyanka, was haunted by countless ghosts of Chekists past, men and women who had met their maker by their colleagues’ hands for crimes real or, more commonly, imagined. Gordievsky acted fully in the knowledge that were he to be unmasked, his blood would flow down the same drains as theirs.
Nonetheless, he remained in place for over decade. He developed his career and developed new skills. His British handlers conspired to ease his path to senior positions. His reward, and SIS’s, was a plum posting to the KGB’s busy London station, where he eventually became the senior most officer stationed there, the Rezident. There he could be run with more ease, though with great care. And the secrets flowed: the names of agents, the plans for operations, the penetrations and provocations. Payback, many in British intelligence would have thought, not doubt, for the humiliations the Soviets had inflicted over the decades in the form of former SIS officers turned KGB agents Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and all the rest of them. The risk grew as time passed. But in his mind he had no doubt that he was doing the right thing. He did not want money; it did not interest him particularly. But his fate became intertwined with a man who did and who lived thousands of miles away: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned KGB agent Aldrich Ames. From his post in the CIA, Soviet asset Ames was well-placed to pull the rug from beneath many of the West’s prized assets. So secret was Gordievsky’s identity that the British had not shared his name with the CIA. Irked, they investigated for themselves who it might be, and narrowed it to a few names, of which Gordievsky was one. His fate was a line item in the over 4 million dollars Ames was paid over the years.
The story of his subsequent recall, arrest, interrogation and escape was known in detail to only a select few for years. But it has now been told in detail, thanks to the painstaking work of Ben Macintyre and a more permissive attitude from the British secret state. It is a story of courage: Gordievsky chose to return to Moscow rather than to defect immediately. It is a story of ingenuity and planning: the details of his escape plan ‘Operation PIMLICO' read as if from the pages of a slightly farther fetched John le Carré novel. He escaped Moscow, and crossed the border to Finland tucked up in the boot of a Ford Sierra. It is also a story of consequence. For Gordievsky personally, certainly: the KGB never forgave his betrayal; his death sentence survived the collapse of the USSR and Russia’s dabble with democracy. But also for those alive in Europe at the time, though almost none of them knew anything of it. Among them he lived out his days low profile, but busy, in Surrey. A modest existence for a man credited by some with preventing a Third World War.
The list of individuals credited with doing similar is short. Gordievsky’s name sat alongside Penkovsky and Stanislav Petrov, a member of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who wisely chose to disregard his radar system’s warning of a phalanx of US intercontinental ballistic missiles crossing the Arctic toward Moscow in 1983, choosing instead to wait, the western targets of Soviet missiles completely oblivious of their near brush. Gordievsky, unlike Petrov, helped avert conflict by providing information. He offered context, and that all important feel for the Kremlin and what made it tick. He illuminated for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher what the Soviets were thinking, what they feared, and how, for all the CIA’s Sovietologists and satellites, the West failed to grasp how US President Ronald Reagan’s more bellicose rhetoric was genuinely scaring Moscow. He illuminated how the preparations for the annual NATO exercise Abel Archer 83 were suspected of being a cover for a first strike. The Soviets had mobilized elements of their nuclear forces in response. He was persuasive, a talented cultivator of people, and trusted. Reagan cooled his language, and NATO trimmed the sharper edges of the exercise. A potential catastrophe averted. And an unambiguous answer to any who raised questions about the value of the extent, expense, and risks run in maintaining an espionage apparatus, of the difficult and slow grind of finding, recruiting, and running human agents in hostile environments.
The late Queen awarded him the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) in 2007 for services to the security of the UK. Indeed. Like many of those who took a similar journey, though often by less convoluted routes, he shared all he knew before offering Allied services his insights and experience. But he did more than spy. With the support of his handlers, and partnered with academics like Professor Christopher Andrew, he set about performing another service, less dramatic but significant, nonetheless: educating those who would listen and read about the world from which he escaped, about the KGB, the work it did and the regimes it reinforced. About the violence, corruption, the cynicism. He did this most notably in his book ‘KGB: The Inside Story’. Another potential antidote for those who romanticised the Soviet experiment; another indictment of its crimes; and a spotlight on a history that was otherwise unlikely ever to see the light of day. His books remain core texts for students of intelligence. His own story, shared more fully as the years passed, revealed fascinating glimpses of Cold War tradecraft, and of how insight from intelligence can guide leaders during dangerous times. His clear-eyed view of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the modern, more corrupt version of the counter-intelligence state he manages, rung truer as time passed. It is likely that when Richard Moore, current Chief of SIS or ‘C’, in 2023 called on Russian spooks disaffected by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to ‘join hands’ with his service in pursuit of stability, he had at the back of his mind the image of another SUNBEAM. Someone teetering and then pushed over the edge by the undeniable ugliness of it all. Gordievsky, for one, lived out his life relatively lonely, but not regretful.
Image by Mary Anne Fackelman (White House photographer) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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