Oleg Gordievsky in London in 1990. While serving as a colonel in the KGB, he shared intelligence with the West and defected to Britain. He arrived for the photo shoot wearing a wig, false beard and glasses. (David Levenson/Getty Images)
For more than a decade, as Cold War tensions threatened to escalate into all-out war, senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky passed intelligence to the British spy agency MI6, sharing secrets that helped guide Western diplomacy and unmask Soviet spies.
A steely double agent who had grown disillusioned by communism, he continued to spy for the British until he was forced to flee the Soviet Union in 1985, traveling across the Finnish border while hidden in the trunk of a car — a daring escape that made international headlines and led the Kremlin to sentence him to death in absentia.
“My decision is not the result of irresponsibility or instability of character on my part,” he had written to the head of MI6 in 1974, when he began spying for the West. “It has been preceded by a long spiritual struggle and by agonizing emotion.” He had arrived, he added, at “the belief that democracy, and the tolerance of humanity that follows it, represents the only road for my country.”
“If a man realizes this,” he wrote, “he must show the courage of his convictions and do something himself to prevent slavery from encroaching further upon the realms of freedom.”
Until the end of his life, Mr. Gordievsky lived in exile in England, where he was watched over by British security and appointed a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, a royal honor awarded by Queen Elizabeth II. He was found dead on March 4, at 86, at his home in Godalming, Surrey, about 30 miles southwest of London.
Police said in a statement Saturday that an investigation into the death was being led by counterterrorism officers, but added that it was “not currently being treated as suspicious.”
Mr. Gordievsky was among the most consequential spies of the Cold War, rising to become the KGB “rezident,” or station chief, in London, where he shared information with MI6 during a period of strident American rhetoric and Kremlin paranoia about a potential first-strike attack by the West.
In the early 1980s, as President Ronald Reagan adopted a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union — what he called an “evil empire” that would be left on “the ash heap of history” — Mr. Gordievsky offered reassurances to his Russian superiors that a NATO military exercise, Able Archer 83, was only an exercise, rather than a ruse intended as cover for war. Through his clandestine communications with British intelligence, he was able to relay concerns that Soviet officials really did believe a U.S.-led strike might be imminent.
The Kremlin was so worried, Mr. Gordievsky reported, that it had launched an intelligence program known as Operation RYAN, intended to detect signs that an attack was about to begin — including by tracking the stockpiling of blood supplies and noting whether military brass were keeping the lights on late at night, attempting to finalize their war plans.
Through the information he passed along, Mr. Gordievsky was also credited with encouraging British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to take Russian politician Mikhail Gorbachev seriously as a reformer in the years before Gorbachev took power as the Soviet Union’s last leader. His reports were passed from MI6 to the CIA, offering Washington a new window on Moscow.
“He was giving us information about the thinking of the leadership, and that kind of information was, for us, scarce as hen’s teeth,” Robert Gates, then the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence, later said.
According to Ben Macintyre’s 2018 book “The Spy and the Traitor,” British intelligence officers first approached Mr. Gordievsky in the early 1970s, getting his name from a Czechoslovak spy, Stanislaw “Standa” Kaplan, who had defected to Canada.
Mr. Gordievsky was by then running and recruiting agents out of Copenhagen. Dismayed by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he had come to view Russia as a “vast, sterile concentration camp” and a “totalitarian cacophony.” After meeting an MI6 officer on the badminton court and developing a relationship with the British operative, Mr. Gordievsky started sharing clandestine documents and details, including the names of Soviet spies operating in Scandinavia.
The flow of information continued after Mr. Gordievsky, known by the MI6 code names “Sunbeam” and “Nocton,” was transferred to the KGB’s London station in 1982. Among other revelations, he helped expose the treachery of Michael Bettaney, a British intelligence officer who shared sensitive documents with the KGB and was later sentenced to 23 years in prison. The case gave British officials an excuse to expel the KGB station chief in London, who had gained public exposure during the Bettaney trial, and paved the way for Mr. Gordievsky’s promotion to the job.
Although British intelligence sought to protect Mr. Gordievsky, limiting access to his reports and feeding him low-level intelligence that he could provide to his superiors, he came under Soviet suspicion in 1985, when he was abruptly recalled to Moscow.
The circumstances of his unmasking remain the subject of debate, although Mr. Gordievsky — along with his biographer Macintyre and others — came to believe that the KGB had been tipped off to his betrayal by Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who had started working with the Soviets in an exchange of secrets for money.
Mr. Gordievsky was brought to a KGB dacha outside Moscow, where he was drugged, interrogated and accused of being a mole. When he denied spying for the West, he was set free but kept under surveillance.
“They expected I would do something stupid,” he later told American journalist David Wise. “Sooner or later they would arrest me.”
An escape plan was already in place, developed years earlier by his handlers at MI6 and detailed on a plastic-wrapped sheet hidden inside a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Only by soaking the book in water could Mr. Gordievsky extract the plan and remind himself of the details: How he was supposed to visit a Moscow bakery at a certain time on a Tuesday evening, standing outside with a plastic bag from Safeway, the British grocery chain, to indicate that he needed to leave the country. An MI6 operative would be monitoring the shop, and would signal that he had received the message by eating a chocolate bar as he walked past.
Mr. Gordievsky went to the shop, bag in hand, and soon spotted a man carrying a green Harrods department store bag — an unusual sight in Moscow — and munching on a Mars bar.
The escape was on.
Three days later, Mr. Gordievsky managed to shed his KGB surveillance team and board a train to Leningrad, now known as St. Petersburg. Traveling by bus, he reached a rendezvous point outside the Russian town of Vyborg, near the Finnish border, where he waited in the mosquito-filled brush until a two-car MI6 convoy arrived. He was hustled into the trunk of one of the cars and given a thermal blanket, according to Macintyre’s book, to stymie heat-detecting sensors at the border.
After arriving at the border checkpoint, a British operative pulled out a bag of chips, attempting to distract Soviet sniffer dogs looking for fugitives and contraband. Then the wife of the MI6 station chief, traveling in the convoy with their baby, began changing her child’s dirty diaper on top of the trunk containing Mr. Gordievsky. The smell was enough to keep away the dogs, who moved on to other cars, enabling the convoy to cross safely into Finland.
Mr. Gordievsky was exhausted but relieved. Let out of the trunk after hearing a recording of Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” an audio signal that they had made it through the checkpoint, he was greeted by a British diplomat who, Mr. Gordievsky recalled, called MI6 to announce the good news: “The luggage has arrived. It’s all in order.”
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was born in Moscow on Oct. 10, 1938. His father, a member of the Soviet secret police, was a communist true-believer who helped enforce the Stalinist bloodletting known as the Great Purge. His mother was a statistician who quietly questioned the party’s infallibility, never joining as a member.
Mr. Gordievsky studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations before joining the KGB around 1961. His older brother, Vasili, was working for the agency’s “illegals” program, operating under a false identity, and recommended Mr. Gordievsky to recruiters. For his first posting as a trainee, he was sent to East Berlin, arriving in the city just as the Berlin Wall was going up.
His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Leila Aliyeva, who worked in Copenhagen for the World Health Organization. He never told his wife he was a double agent — “it was too dangerous,” he said — but in 1991 she and their two daughters, Maria and Anna, were allowed to join him in Britain.
He and his wife later separated, and the Guardian reported in 2013 that he had “little contact” with his children. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Although he spent most of his life trying to avoid public recognition, Mr. Gordievsky was eager to tell his story in retirement. He wrote essays for British newspapers; published a memoir, “Next Stop Execution” (1995); and partnered with historian Christopher Andrew for several books, including “KGB: The Inside Story” (1990), which identified British civil servant John Cairncross as the mysterious “fifth man” in a ring of spies that gave secrets to the Soviets during World War II.
Mr. Gordievsky made headlines in 2008, when he claimed that he had been the target of an attempted assassination that left him unconscious for 34 hours the previous year. He said he had been given tainted sleeping pills by a Russian business associate, which he asserted were poisoned with thallium, a toxic metal once used in rat poison and pesticides.
No evidence emerged to support his claims, but he would not have been the first Russian defector to be killed in England: His friend Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer, had been murdered in London in 2006, poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 that had been slipped into his tea. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Russia was responsible for the killing.
After another Russian defector, Sergei Skripal, survived an attempted poisoning in England in 2018, Mr. Gordievsky’s “security was tightened and he seldom left the safe-house,” his biographer Macintyre wrote in a tribute. “He became, in some ways, a prisoner of history.”
Yet by all accounts, Mr. Gordievsky had no regrets about betraying the KGB and coming to Britain.
“Everything here is divine,” he told the Guardian in 2013, “compared to Russia.”