MI6 Hero Oleg Gordievsky, Whose Death Was Announced After His Burial
Sergei Cristo offers a personal tribute to the Russian defector John Le Carré once described as "the real thing"
Oleg Gordievsky CMG, my friend and mentor, one of the wisest, warmest, and bravest people I have ever known, passed away after a long illness in late March.
Having worked secretly for the British for over a decade from the depths of the KGB, Colonel Gordievsky was probably the most important source of Western intelligence about the Soviet Union in the closing years of the Cold War. His escape through the Russian-Finnish border in the boot of a diplomatic car in 1995 was, and still is, the stuff of legend.
Death is Announced
The benefit of writing after most of the papers have published their obituaries is that one doesn’t have to repeat much of the same. Instead, I would like to draw a more personal picture of the man and his life, based on my impressions and memories of him.
The most authoritative of the standard obituaries appeared in The Times. Written by Oleg’s closest (long-retired) colleague from MI6, it gives the most accurate and measured description of Gordievsky’s life and achievements. And yet, the paper made one serious error, in assuming that Oleg passed away on 21 March 2025, the day his death was announced. The Times had no way of knowing that, in fact, the authorities decided not to announce Gordievsky’s death until after his body was laid to rest, in order to minimise any chance of Russian shenanigans. Sentenced to death in absentia by the Russians, he had been on a list of Kremlin targets for 40 years.
This final twist in a life full of riddles and mysteries served as a testament to both the uncontrolled escalation of Russian spying and sabotage in Britain and the rest of Europe, and to our old-fashioned national security model still struggling to properly mitigate it.
Born to the System
Oleg Gordievsky was born on 10 October 1938 in Moscow, just as the worst of Stalin’s purges were ending. His family survived intact, probably because it was of the humblest of origins and of modest education. In his childhood, he, his brother, sister, father and mother lived, like most families in Moscow, all in one room of a large “komunarka”, a large communal flat. Four or five families occupied one living room each, sharing a kitchen and a toilet.
His father, whose loyalties were always to the Communist Party, worked as a low-level officer at the domestic KGB. Oleg’s elder brother, Vasilko (Vasily), first followed in his father’s footsteps to the KGB and became an “illegal”, a Soviet agent living in Western Europe and Czechoslovakia under deep cover, speaking German with an Austrian accent.
A teenager with a great talent for languages, Gordievsky dreamt of working abroad. In those days, the KGB was almost the only career path which could enable an underprivileged Soviet kid to travel and live abroad, and so when, at the end of his university course, he was ordered to start employment at the KGB, Oleg did not see why he should not take it.
Just before that, in 1961, he was sent with other students chosen by the KGB to East Berlin, where he witnessed the construction of the first version of the Berlin Wall. While instructed to stay at the bedbug-ridden Soviet embassy digs, he told me that he, nevertheless, saw Soviet tanks hidden in the side streets in case of the locals putting up any trouble.
Later, in his memoir Next Stop Execution, he reflected that the significance of what he was seeing formed his later decision to work against his Government: “seeing the Wall go up, and witnessing the hatred and despair that Communism inflicted on ordinary people, showed me that the system was both illegal and criminal”.
In 1962, he enrolled at KGB School 101, at that time the main Soviet training establishment for future foreign spies. Located in an idyllic Russian forest not far from Moscow, it provided an invigorating backdrop for him and other like-minded young men and their teachers, who seemed to Gordievsky at the time to be civilised and well-travelled. In his memoir, he wrote that this was the best time of his life. On graduation, he entered the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Intelligence).
Black & White to Technicolour
In January 1966, after four years of various desk jobs in Moscow, now speaking fluent German and passable Swedish, Gordievsky and his first wife Elena quite suddenly found themselves in their first posting in Copenhagen.
Gordievsky later wrote that it was a culture shock, like suddenly switching from the grey and glum Soviet reality, into fresh, bright colours of a civilised, lovely European city. In his job, he looked after “illegals”, helped build their “legends” (fictional life stories) and learnt Danish. His wife monitored local communications (and taped conversations), including those of the police, during KGB operations. Mikhail Lyubimov, his KGB station chief, became one of Oleg’s best friends at work. Lyubimov arrived in Denmark soon after he was expelled from London in 1964. A great anglophile and a lover of British literature, he played a role in forming Oleg’s initial views about life in Britain. When, in July 1968, in response to Alexander Dubcek’s liberal reforms unveiled that spring, the Soviets moved 1000 tanks and 75,000 troops near the Czech border, Gordievsky and Lyubimov apparently made a bet, drinking vodka with their embassy colleagues, that the Kremlin wouldn’t dare to invade Czechoslovakia. They lost that bet.
The crushing of the Prague Spring by Moscow had a profound effect on Oleg, prompting him to make his first signal to the West that he was willing to talk. Knowing that his embassy telephone was tapped by the Danes, he made a call to his wife expressing his outrage about Moscow’s actions. As he expected, the counterintelligence section of the Danish police picked up his call at once, Gordievsky was positively ID’d as KGB, and the matter subsequently passed to MI6, with whom the Danes worked closely. They also started to observe Oleg more intensely, but there was not enough time to run all the checks and make a proper approach to the young Soviet intelligence officer before he and his wife were recalled to Moscow in January 1970.
Copenhagen – Moscow - Copenhagen
The return from his first overseas posting had served to convince Gordievsky even further to become an agent for the West. He later wrote that, back in Moscow, “once again, I saw the queues, the shortages, the filthiness of the public lavatories, the bureaucracy, the corruption, the red tape, the rudeness of the officials, the impossibility of obtaining redress when one had a complaint – when I saw all this, I felt physically sick”. He also found “the relentless propaganda actively offensive, and I came particularly to dislike the official music which blared out from radios and loudspeakers in public places, all the patriotic and least interesting pieces, written according to Communist formulas”. In contrast to his colleagues, who preferred pop music and playing guitar at parties, Oleg had become a connoisseur of classical music, which was quite unusual for the KGB.
His language talents and sharp-mindedness, however, always helped him avoid being singled out as an intellectual snob (never a good thing in a communist country). A tragic event in 1972 helped progress his career. His older brother, Vasilko, one of the illegals, died of alcoholism and related illnesses at the age of just 39, ultimately unable to cope with the stress and divided loyalties that came with his type of work. After the funeral, Oleg appealed to his boss that he could no longer continue in the same department as his late brother and his request was granted. He was then asked to return to Copenhagen to help rebuild the KGB station after the expulsion of intelligence officers by the Danes.
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Welcome to MI6
It was during this second tour to Denmark that the British finally approached Gordievsky, and he started to give them information. He refused all payment. As often happens in such relationships, there was a fair dose of suspicion and testing to start with, particularly on the British side. Gordievsky, however, had a brilliant power of recall and gave it straight as it came. Later, he could also produce documents that confirmed his verbal reports and MI6 soon realised his true value.
There was never a question in his mind about telling anyone close to him that he worked for the British. All his life, he was surrounded by KGB people at home and at work, and he knew well enough that even telling the mother of his children could be his death sentence. Thankfully, it was easier for him to keep the secret early on. By the time of his recruitment, he and his first wife Elena were living together only for convenience, and Oleg was having an affair with his future second wife, Leila, the daughter of a KGB general.
The value of Gordievsky’s information increased as he progressed up the KGB career ladder, and gradually the view he offered became higher level, with important policy implications for the UK Government.
After Oleg arrived with his second wife and their two children in London in 1982, as a councillor at the Soviet Embassy, his information was considered so important that it was shared with the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on a regular basis. As Geoffrey Howe, who was the Foreign Secretary at the time, wrote to me in a note, “[the] Prime Minister and I (and three officials, two at the Foreign Office and one at No 10) were the only people outside the Intelligence Services who were aware of his existence. His intelligence was made available to us on an almost weekly basis and was on many occasions of huge significance.”
Gordievsky has been credited with helping to avert a nuclear war during NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983, and with identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as the next Soviet leader, and then playing a crucial role in briefing both in the coming years, easing the path to the end of the Cold War.
Betrayed
Gordievsky’s intelligence was shared with the Americans, who were so impressed with it that they wanted to know where it was coming from. The team at CIA HQ in Langley, which identified Oleg Gordievsky as the source, was headed by Aldrich Ames. What the CIA did not know at the time was that Ames was selling information to the KGB. As a result of his treachery, 11 American agents in Russia were detained or shot within a relatively short period of time. Now he gave Moscow the name of Gordievsky.
Oleg, at that time acting head of the KGB station in London, was recalled to Moscow under the pretext of confirming his promotion in 1985. Once back there, he was drugged and interrogated by the KGB and put under effective house arrest. MI6 eventually managed to save Oleg from execution by smuggling him through the Russian-Finnish border in the trunk of a diplomatic car, which in those days had virtually no chance of succeeding, given the KGB surveillance of Oleg in Moscow and the level of control at the Soviet border. When he finally got out of the car on the Finnish side, his first words were “we were betrayed”.
Ames is certainly still the official theory, but it has a small timeline mismatch, which for years has given rise to suspicions that there was also a traitor inside MI6 or MI5, who gave Gordievsky’s name to the Soviets before Ames. Oleg was certainly aware of this, as he once told me, totally unprompted, that he had learnt there were far more people inside the British Government who knew of his existence at the time than he was initially assured by his MI6 colleagues.
Broken Family
Following the extensive intelligence debriefings with MI6 after his escape in 1985 and being taken to Washington and intelligence services around the world, he settled down in his safe house in the English countryside and for six years campaigned to get the Kremlin to release his family, who were effectively captive in Moscow. He succeeded just after the putsch in August 1991, but Leila had become a different person by then. When she joined Oleg at his English home, the marriage foundered. Gordievsky eventually divorced her, but not before putting their daughters through private schools and getting one of them into Oxford.
Another Life
I first met Oleg in the mid-1990s when he came to be interviewed at the BBC Russian Service for a programme presented by Seva Novgorodsev MBE. I was freelancing for the BBC and doing some work for Seva. Gordievsky and I kept in contact, talked on the telephone, I interviewed him a couple of times for BBC radio programmes, but we became real friends after a lunch together to celebrate Seva’s MBE from the late Queen in the early 2000s.
Oleg viewed his English life as an unexpected gift and felt that he was saved by a miracle. In the last few years, whilst very ill and needing constant medical care, he lived under round-the-clock protection and police surveillance. But this was not the case until the Salisbury poisoning. In fact, it took quite a lot to convince MI6 that Oleg needed proper protection. His own feelings about security were a mixture of pride in his freedom and the willingness to tease his British handlers. On the one hand, he wanted to be independent and did not want anyone at the house. On the other hand, when a guest asked him about security, he used to point to the first-floor window of the house across the road and say, “You see that window? There is a team watching my house all the time!” It was his standard joke.
There was no question that Russian intelligence knew where he lived. There were many dubious visitors to the house over the years, including those from abroad, as well as journalists. One of Oleg’s drinking partners was even a “retired” officer of the Soviet military intelligence (GRU), who was subsequently suspected of an attempt to poison Gordievsky. Not only was he not prevented from spending lots of time with Oleg, but once he was even allowed to accompany him to an event at the MI6 HQ in Vauxhall.
My impression was that the biggest concern for the authorities was that Gordievsky’s address did not become public property for the mainstream press.
Russian propaganda tried to do its usual character assassination job, painting a picture of an old traitor, squeezed like a lemon of everything he knew by the British authorities, no longer interesting, and living a lonely life, not visited by anyone.
The truth, of course, could not have been more different. I organised a celebratory lunch following Gordievsky’s appointment by the Queen as a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), which was attended by the great and the good from Government, intelligence, academia, journalism, and politics. Lady Thatcher arrived for tea and, at her request, chaired, alongside Oleg, an impromptu round table discussion with everyone present about Russia.
A couple of months later, Lady Thatcher’s private secretary called to ask whether Oleg and his partner and I would like to attend the Lady’s Christmas party. When we arrived, Oleg was immediately surrounded by a circle of people eager to meet him and talk to him. I remember the late Lord Inge, the former Chief of the General Staff and Oleg walking towards each other like old friends as soon as we entered the room, and then David Frost and Michael Howard joining their circle. Oleg was greatly admired and warmly welcomed everywhere he went.
It is perhaps unsurprising that any sentimentality in his own views was reserved wholly for his beloved England, which he treated as a magical source for his “life No 2”. Often idealising the West, like another great late Russian, Vladmir Bukovsky, Oleg had not grasped fully (or refused to accept?) that Putin had turned the tables on the Western order and it was no longer the Left but the Right of the political spectrum that was often singing from the Kremlin’s hymn sheet. Like Bukovsky, Oleg was not mortified when Trump won his first term, stating, “It’s too early to judge him”. He continued to watch Fox News throughout.
On Russia, however, he remained remarkably sharp, even during the last years of his long debilitating illness, in contrast to some in the British Government. A senior retired British diplomat, who was with me at Oleg’s soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, asked him if he also thought (like many in Whitehall at the time) that Putin wouldn’t last more than a few months. In his typical matter-of-fact tone, Oleg replied, “6-8 years”.
The late David Cornwell (John le Carré) wrote to me once that Oleg “is the real thing”, continuing “I admire him greatly. Where he was a participant, I was at best a spectator, and a pretty baffled one, already finding difficulty in distinguishing between the fictional version and the reality”.
In today’s murky world of fakery, lies and delusion, for me, Oleg Gordievsky had always been a light of decency and truth. He was a dangerous enemy of oppression, a great patriot of freedom, the West’s most important intelligence source in the 1980s, who helped to hasten the collapse of the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. He will be very hard to replace. Farewell, my friend, a true hero.
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