Spy who came in from the cold thanks to a packet of cheese and onion crisps
A true story more gripping than Le Carre
The boot of the Ford saloon was very cramped, and the 46-year- old man trapped inside it was suffering from intense claustrophobia. It was also very hot, and the contorted exertions he had undergone to remove his jacket had made him hotter still.
A kidnap victim? No. Unlikely as it may seem, the man shut in the boot had chosen to be there. he had met neither the people driving him, nor their colleagues in the accompanying car in front, but they represented his only hope of escaping death.
If they failed, he would be taken back to Moscow, interrogated and then shot in a killing-room deep in the dark heart of the headquarters of his employer, the dreaded KGB. Safety would come if they reached Finland, which was only a few miles away. But first, the small convoy had to pass through five frontier controls, all of which were manned by zealous Soviet guards.
The cars arrived at the first barrier. The man pulled a metallic silver ‘space blanket’ over himself to mask his body heat from the guards’ thermal-imaging cameras. For the next few minutes, the cars were stationary while their engines ticked over. It seemed like an eternity, but they soon drove on.
Two more checkpoints were driven through, leaving just two to go.
however, the next checkpoint proved to be far more of a problem. The drivers were asked to come into a building with their passports. The man could not see the checkpoint, but he would have known what it looked like — barbed wire, watchtowers, umpteen guards with rifles.
While the drivers showed their British diplomatic passports to the officials, their two wives waited. The woman in the car in front was nursing a baby, and she prayed that the wait would not be long.
In the boot, the man could hear the two drivers chatting to the female frontier officers, who were complaining about the workload caused by a large number of drunken Finns who had been crossing the border for a Russian youth festival. had they known that the two men they were speaking to were members of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, they would have soon forgotten their concerns about a few tipsy Scandinavians.
And then the man heard a noise that made him freeze: the sniffing and whining of Alsatian dogs. If they smelt him, as they surely would, with his clothes sodden with sweat and dirt, then the game was up. But the dogs ignored the boot, and they seemed more interested in the front of the car.
The reason was simple: a packet of cheese and onion crisps, which was being casually fed to the dogs by the woman in the front seat to distract them. Then, in a moment of improvised genius, the woman with the baby got out and changed its nappy on the lid of the boot in which the man was lying. She threw the dirty nappy on the ground and the smell was enough to overpower the noses of the Alsatians.
After a few more minutes, the cars drove off. There was a brief pause for the final checkpoint, and then the man felt the car accelerating. The pop music that had been playing on the car radio changed to something classical, which was much more to his taste.
It was a piece of music by Sibelius called Finlandia. The man knew what that meant. It meant he was free . . .
SUch a dramatic rescue reads like something out of a John le carre thriller, but it is a true story, and happened exactly 30 years ago this month.
The man in the boot was called Oleg Gordievsky, who was without doubt the most valuable mole MI6 had in the heart of the KGB during the latter decades of the cold War.
Until now, the full story of his daring rescue has never been told, but it emerged this weekend in an interview given by Gordievsky himself. Now aged 76, he lives in a suburb somewhere in Britain — a world away from his life in the Soviet Union as a senior KGB officer.
‘ I am British now. I miss nothing from Russia,’ he told The Times. ‘I have been British ever since the day I decided to become an agent for the British intelligence service.’
That day was in 1974, when Gordievsky was recruited during his posting to copenhagen, where he was running KGB agents.
ever since the brutal Soviet repression of the so-called Prague Spring in 1968 — when czechoslovakia briefly flirted with democracy — Gordievsky had become disillusioned with the system and, unbeknown to everyone, including his wife, he decided to work against the regime and be a spy for MI6.
For the next three years, Gordievsky supplied the British with an astonishing amount of top-secret material. he was then posted back to Moscow but, in June 1982, to the utter delight of MI6, Gordievsky was sent to London, where he rose to be the de-facto head of the KGB’s operations in Britain.
It is hard to overestimate quite what a coup this was. It meant that not only did the British know what the KGB were up to on their home turf, but Gordievsky also provided a valuable insight into Soviet thinking at a crucial stage of the cold War.
Gordievsky was able to show that the Russians were paranoid that the West was planning a nuclear strike, and he also revealed that a senior Politburo functionary called Mikhail Gorbachev might well become a future Soviet leader.
These insights, and others, gave Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan a deep understanding of the Soviet position around the negotiating tables, and ultimately helped to bring a peaceful end to the cold War.
however, Gordievsky’s luck did not hold. Partly thanks to the revelations made by American traitor Aldrich Ames, who worked for the cIA, the KGB suspected that their man in London was a mole.
In 1985, Gordievsky was summoned back to Moscow, where he subjected to a lengthy interrogation that involved the administration of truth drugs.
Gordievsky may not have cracked but he knew that his career was finished and that exposure was inevitable.
It was now time for him to activate the daring escape plan already formulated by MI6. In his flat on 103 Leninsky Prospect in Moscow, Gordievsky retrieved a hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and soaked the flyleaf so he could peel it off. Inside, he found a sheet of cellophane containing his escape instructions, which he then memorised.
It was in accordance with those instructions that Gordievsky stood on a street corner at 7pm on July 16, clutching a Safeway carrier bag. This was the signal — to British agents working in an office across the street — that he had been blown, and that he needed to escape as soon as possible.
exactly 24 minutes later, a man walked past him carrying a harrods bag and eating a Mars Bar.
He WAS an MI6 officer, and this was the signal that the escape plan would be put into action. ‘As he passed within four of five yards, he stared straight at me,’ Gordievsky recalled in his memoirs, ‘and I gazed into his eyes shouting silently: “Yes, it’s me! I need urgent help!” ’
Gordievsky bade farewell to his wife and children, who he would not see until many years later.
he then took a train north to Leningrad, from where he was to make his way to the town of Vyborg, some 12 miles south- east of the border with Finland. There, next to a large rock on a loop road south of the town, he was to rendezvous with a car driven by the British.
Meanwhile, the MI6 officers in Moscow organised their escape plan. Knowing that their phones were tapped, they openly arranged the cover for their expedition to Finland, which involved some medical treatment for one of their wives, as well as a spot of shopping.
While Gordievsky headed north via trains and buses, the British couples made the same journey by road. All the way, they were tailed by a KGB car, which they knew they would have to lose if they were to rescue their best ever agent.
Fortunately, the MI6 officers were driving two powerful Western cars, a Saab and a Ford, and as they approached Vyborg, they pulled away from their tail.
Finally, at 2.45pm on July 20, the two cars drew up next to the large rock. There, they found a bedraggled KGB officer, who smelled and looked bad after two days of travelling. After telling Gordievsky to get into the boot of the Ford, the cars drove off, and soon passed the KGB tail waiting further up the road. The Soviets could only assume that the British had made a rest stop in a nearby wood.
Later that day, after those five heart-stopping checkpoints, they crossed into Finland. Down a dirt track, the boot was finally opened. Gordievsky looked up to see the beaming faces of his rescuers set against pine trees and blue skies.
‘ Thanks to the courage and ingenuity of my British friends,’ he recalled, ‘I had outwitted the entire might of the KGB. I was out! I was safe! I was free!’
And it all came down to a packet of crisps and a dirty nappy.