Miss Marple mastermind of Cold War spy’s escape
John Twomey
NEIGHBOURS of the old lady in a sleepy village thought she had once been a lowly Foreign Office clerk.
Unassuming Valerie Pettit led a quiet life, just like Agatha Christie’s razor-sharp sleuth Miss Marple.
But in realityValerie was a retired senior British intelligence officer, a veteran of daring clandestine operations behind the Iron Curtain.
She was also the brains behind the most audacious escape plan of the ColdWar – to smuggle MI6 double agent Oleg Gordievsky out of
Russia. Valerie’s role at the heart of Operation Pimlico, a secret for over three decades, can now be revealed following her death at 90.
Senior KGB officer Gordievsky was one of the key spies of the late Soviet era and had provided MI6 and the West with a stream of vital intelligence while based in London.
After being recalled to Moscow in 1985, he knew he was under suspicion and would die unless MI6 could whisk him to freedom.
Valerie had devised Operation Pimlico while working for MI6’s P section, an elite team running agents inside Russia. At 7.30pm on July 16, 1985, Gordievsky stood outside a bread shop in Moscow holding a Safeways carrier bag.
An MI6 officer strolled past him carrying a Harrods bag and munching a Mars bar as a signal of acknowledgement.
Four days later, Gordievsky went to the Soviet-Finnish border to meet two MI6 officers and their wives in two cars. Wrapped in a heat-reflective blanket and with a handful of pep pills, he clambered into the boot of one of the vehicles.
MI6 assumed the Soviet guards would wave the cars, which had diplomatic plates, through the crossing.
But sniffer dogs homed in on the scent from the boot – and to confuse them one of the wives quickly ripped open a bag of cheese and onion crisps while the other dropped her baby’s soiled nappy.
Minutes later, the cars stopped in a clearing in Finland where Valerie and other MI6 officers were waiting.
Gordievsky, who is now 81 and living in London, later recalled: “She opened the boot and was the first person I saw as a free man. She was, and always will be, my angel.”
Valerie, the daughter of a lawyer, was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service while working for the Foreign Office.
After she retired she moved to West Clandon, Surrey, to live with her widowed mother, sister and several cats. She enjoyed the theatre, opera and countryside walks.
If neighbours asked about her background, she said she had been a secretary and changed the subject.
Historian Ben MacIntyre – who met Valerie while researching his book about Gordievsky, The Spy And The Traitor – described her as “one of those brisk, practical, quintessentially English women who brooks no nonsense”.