KGB spy defected in the boot of a Ford Cortina
IT sounds like something from the pages of a John le Carre spy novel.
In the midst of the Cold War, in September, 1985, the USSR expelled 25 British diplomatic staff from their Moscow embassy.
The Kremlin’s move came just 48 hours after the UK Government ordered the expulsion of the same number of alleged Soviet spies.
And it was all sparked by the defection to the West of Soviet double agent and KGB chief, Oleg Gordievsky.
He gave the British intelligence services an unprecedented amount of information about Russian spies operating in the UK.
To add insult to injury, so well thought of was Colonel Gordievsky by his superiors behind the Iron Curtain, he’d recently been appointed head of the KGB in London, in charge of the USSR’s entire espionage operation in Britain.
The defection itself was a dramatic operation the like of which Hollywood’s top scriptwriters would have been proud to pen.
Gordievsky’s KGB bosses were tipped off, probably by CIA double agent Aldrich Ames, that he’d betrayed the Soviet Union in May and suddenly ordered him back to Moscow.
He was taken to a safe house outside Moscow, drugged and interrogated by Soviet counterintelligence before being let go.
Despite being under surveillance, he managed to signal to his handlers – by holding a Safeway carrier bag – that his cover was blown and they put into operation an elaborate escape plan that had been on standby for many years.
One morning in June, Gordievsky went for his usual jog, but shook off his KGB tails and boarded a train for the Finnish border.
There he was met by British embassy cars and, lying down in the boot of a Ford Cortina, he was smuggled over the border and into Finland.
He had to huddle under a “space blanket” to hide his body heat from the guards’ thermal cameras, and a female passenger fed their dogs cheese and onion crisps and changed a dirty nappy on the boot lid to stop them sniffing him out.
Gordievsky was the highestranking KGB spy to be identified and his defection was described by Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe as “a very substantial coup for our security services”.
The Foreign Office then revealed he had been a double agent since 1966, having been persuaded to work for MI6 soon after the KGB posted him to Copenhagen posing as a press attaché.
Now 77, Gordievsky lives in London.
He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Soviets, a sentence that still stands, and he suspects an incident in 2007 when he spent 36 hours in a coma was due to poisoning with thallium by “rogue elements in Moscow”.
He was drugged and interrogated by Soviet intelligence