The Spy Who Saved the World

It’s amusing and perhaps a little self-indulgent to wonder if Oleg Gordievsky would have become a double agent had it not been for Johann Sebastian Bach. Why does a spy turn and work for the Enemy? There are usually three reasons: money, blackmail, and principles. For the KGB colonel recruited by the British in Copenhagen in 1974 who was subsequently posted to London and eventually became the KGB rezident (station head) to the delight of MI6 and MI5, it was the last. Oleg Gordievsky had fallen in love with freedom, living and working as a spy in the West.

He wanted to live in a world where you could listen to the music you wanted to and not the “patriotic mush” they played from loudspeakers in Moscow. Turning against his country, or the Soviet version of it, therefore, was a natural progression for a mind that had long ago begun questioning the direction in which KGB was taking itself, the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

Before Gordievsky, another Oleg had provided the West valuable information on Soviet ballistic missile installations and the flaws in the Soviet ICBM programme which had helped the US determine the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba as well as their weaknesses which could be used by President John F Kennedy in dealing with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Unfortunately, Oleg Penkovsky’s story did not have a happy end for himself. The GRU colonel was caught and executed in 1963. Gordievsky, on the other hand, got to die of old age (he was 86) in his home in Surrey.

Gordievsky’s intelligence had been helping the West since the mid-1970s but his most important contribution was in perhaps preventing an accidental nuclear war triggered by misunderstanding in the 1980s. It’s not an exaggeration therefore to say he saved the world.

His advice worked both ways. He was trying hard to convince the Soviet leadership—beholden to Yuri Andropov’s paranoia that the West would carry out a first strike with nuclear weapons—that the US and the UK had no such intention. At the same time, his information helped British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and subsequently US President Ronald Reagan to grasp the depth of Soviet paranoia. Reagan’s rhetoric, only serving to flame Soviet fears, was toned down (just as later it would be toned down again to make things easier for Gorbachev at home). While Gordievsky assured the Soviets that NATO exercise Able Archer 83 in Germany would not lead to a nuclear strike on Moscow, he in turn made the West realise that the Soviets remained unconvinced and were preparing to carry out pre-emptive strikes of their own. This intelligence helped clear the air.

Gordievsky’s other history-altering success was making Thatcher understand that the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was very different from the succession of geriatric hardliners Brezhnev, Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Gorbachev was a genuine reformer and wanted to change things. It’s interesting how Gordievsky himself read the Soviet leader right when few in the Kremlin or at the Lubyanka could have known what Gorbachev’s intentions were. At the same time, he advised Gorbachev, in his position as the London resident, what to expect in Britain and how to deal with Thatcher. The two got along famously as would Gorbachev later with Reagan.

And that’s when things took a nasty turn for Gordievsky himself. If he was brilliant and conscientious, paradoxical as the last sounds for a double agent and ‘traitor’, and the biggest double agent the British had in living memory, a disgruntled mediocrity named Aldrich Ames had put his name on a list he sent to his KGB paymasters (Ames did it for money) who first became suspicious of him in 1985. Ames would be convicted in 1994 and become the CIA’s biggest embarrassment, having compromised more classified assets in the field than anybody else, till the FBI’s Robert Hanssen was caught in 2001.

If Gordievsky’s life had not been dangerous enough already, his last few months in Soviet service would rival the most gripping spy thriller. Recalled to Moscow, he was placed under close surveillance at home awaiting arrest. It was Next Stop Execution, as the title of his 1995 book said. But a daring escape in the boot of a car with the families of Western agents in Moscow on board took him to Finland where he was handed over to two Danes and a senior MI5 officer (Eliza Manningham-Buller, later MI5 director, one of the few people who knew of his identity as a double agent) who took him to safety in England. The details of this dramatic episode are recounted in Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor (2018). Suitably for the man in the boot and the occasion, they played Jean Sibelius’ Finlandia on the car stereo to let him know they had crossed the border.

Oleg Gordievsky was born in Moscow and his father Anton was a loyal NKVD officer, a Stalinist who didn’t question the dictator’s purges. His brother elder Vasily had trained to become a KGB illegal infiltrated into the West. It was his statistician smother Olga who was the non-believer in the family, sceptical of the communist project and how it was unfolding around her. Had it not been for her, Oleg may not have had the instinct to question, dispute, disagree and defect. It didn’t turn out that well for his own family—his (second) wife Leila Aliyeva and their two daughters—who were on holiday in Azerbaijan even as Gordievsky was escaping. They would be forced to stay in the Soviet Union till its collapse, joining him back in England later, only to return again. The KGB had made Leila divorce Gordievsky. Despite the family reunion, the strain of the years of separation and the complications of his double identity didn’t let the marriage survive. The daughters lived on in the UK.

Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George by the Queen in 2007, the same honour bestowed on James Bond. His subsequent work for British intelligence uncovered extensive Soviet spy networks and led to the unmasking and expulsion of 25 Soviet agents. In 2008, suspected Russian agents had poisoned him with thallium. Gordievsky had accused MI6 of trying to “hush up the crime” and throttle the investigation. It was Manningham-Buller’s intervention that had reopened the case.

Gordievsky is one of those figures in history who stay in the background but through periodic or consistent interventions alter its course, in his case definitely for the better. His was a moral choice, made out of a faith in humanity.

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