The first thing Oleg Gordievsky did, having decided in July 1985 to defect, was to barricade the door of his Moscow flat. When the KGB men came for him, that would slow them down.
He had once been a star among them. An ideal young recruit from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, expert at languages, highly intelligent and with a retentive memory. Good at cross-country running, too. He had risen swiftly, working for Line S, which ran “illegals”, agents living abroad under false identities. First he was posted to East Berlin, then to Copenhagen, and in 1982 to London, where he rose to the top job, rezident. But when he was called back to Moscow Centre to be “formally confirmed”, he knew it was a trap. After five hours of interrogation, drugged with doctored brandy, he had still not given anything away. But now, granted short leave, he urgently needed his exfiltration plan. To stay in Russia was a death sentence.
From a bookshelf he took down Shakespeare’s Sonnets, dumped the book in the kitchen sink, and ran the tap. Gradually the binding fell off to reveal, wrapped in cellophane, his escape instructions from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. For MI6 was his informal employer, too.
Ingenuity like the secret Sonnets was one reason why he had become a spy. Finding clever deadletter spots; practising brush-pasts, to invisibly pass microfilm to a colleague; leaving bent nails and chalk marks in certain places to convey messages; and “dry-cleaning”, or shaking off surveillance without turning round. But there were several draws. His father, a devoted communist, had been a low-level member of the NKVD, ancestor of the KGB. His brother Vasilko had already joined the agency. For a young Russian in the Soviet era who wanted to use languages and travel abroad, the KGB was the obvious place to go. Spying was exciting.
Sometimes too much so. Now, in a panic—too much Cuban rum, too many sedatives—he read his instructions. He was to wait on a certain street corner, near a bakery, on Tuesday at 7pm, carrying a Safeway plastic bag. Twenty-four minutes later a man would come past with a Harrods bag, munching a Mars bar. He must look him in the eye and silently plead: It’s me. Get me out.
His destination was Finland. Or, to be honest, anywhere in the West. Slowly but inexorably, he had been drawn towards it. As a boy he had sometimes caught Voice of America through the jamming on his radio. More indelibly he had heard his mother, with her commonsense peasant attitude, express contempt for the Soviet regime. On his trainee posting in East Germany in 1961 he witnessed people’s despair as the Berlin Wall went up. In Copenhagen he was astonished by the beauty, abundance and openness of the West. He compared it with the queues in Moscow, the misery, the shortages and rude officials. But the final straw was the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He called his wife Leila to pour out his anger then, into a phone he knew was tapped by MI6, in the hope they would want to cultivate him. He had resolved to fight for freedom and democracy, on the side of good rather than evil. That was so strong a duty that he would do it for nothing.
The next stage of the exfiltration plan was delivered in a brush-past in St Basil’s cathedral. It told him to catch two trains, then a bus, to a forest near the Finnish border. There he waited by a particular rock, plagued by mosquitoes, for his MI6 handlers to arrive in cars. They were 15 minutes late. Had he been wrong to trust them? His mother often said he was too trusting, a risky quality in an officer. He had almost given up hope when they appeared.
The British had been late to cultivate him, too. It took a year. They clearly thought he might be a provocation. Instead, he was an extraordinary find. From 1974, using the KGB’s own archives in Moscow, he helped MI6 identify communists in Britain, including trade unionists, and follow the track of Soviet funding. He also fingered 25 Soviet spies, who were expelled. The KGB knew it had a mole on board, and began to suspect it was him, but he was still sending titbits back home, too. In 1984 he provided briefings to Mikhail Gorbachev about Margaret Thatcher, and vice versa, leading to an amicable meeting. The ground for that had also been prepared by him the year before, when he warned MI6 that the Russians, paranoid about a NATO exercise and Ronald Reagan’s tough talk, were preparing a first nuclear strike.
He was now in the boot of a diplomatic car, wrapped in a foil space blanket to throw off heat-detectors at the several checkpoints. He was sweating with terror that he might be found. At long last, instead of loud pop music, a burst of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” came on the car radio. The boot opened on blue sky, clouds and pine trees. He was out, and he was free.
Free in a way. But his death sentence in Russia, for treason, was never rescinded. He could not return. He needed to live incognito, in a safehouse, for the rest of his days. His marriage was shot, because he had never been able to tell Leila about the activity that took up half his existence. He therefore barely saw his daughters, either. Allied governments still asked him for advice, and he co-wrote four books about the KGB; but there was no more spycraft. Instead in deepest Surrey he wrote reviews, read the Spectator and went, with caution, to the pub. Queen Elizabeth gave him the CMG, the same honour granted fictitiously to James Bond. That made a sort of sense.
He missed nothing about Russia, especially under Vladimir Putin. Putin was an abomination, and to think that Russia could ever be democratic was just naive. On “Desert Island Discs” in 2008 his second record was Feodor Chaliapin singing “The Song of the Volga Boatmen”, as faint and crackling and far away as he had once heard the voice of the West. ■
Correction (March 31st 2025): This article originally said that, by causing the curtailment of a NATO exercise in 1983, Oleg Gordievsky averted a third world war. That is indeed what he believed, but recent scholarship shows that a pre-emptive Soviet strike was not imminent.