Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who spied for the West throughout the top of the Chilly Warfare, has died on the age of 86.
Gordievsky died on March 4 in England, the place he had lived since defecting from the Soviet Union in 1985. Police stated on Saturday that they aren’t treating his dying as suspicious. The BBC reported on Friday that Gordievsky “died peacefully” at his dwelling in Surrey.
The world realized his identify 4 many years in the past, when the British Overseas Workplace introduced on Sept. 12, 1985, that Gordievsky — initially described as being a senior official of the KGB — had sought and been granted asylum in the UK.
After his defection, then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher sought to chop a cope with Moscow: If Gordievsky’s spouse and daughters had been allowed to affix him in London, Britain wouldn’t expel the entire KGB brokers he had uncovered.
Moscow rejected the supply, and Thatcher, pointing to info Gordievsky supplied, ordered the expulsion of greater than two dozen folks — diplomats, journalists and commerce officers amongst them — over allegations they had been concerned in spying.
The transfer was introduced regardless of objections from Overseas Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who feared it may scuttle relations simply as reforming Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West.
Soviet officers rejected the spying allegations, with a spokesperson telling reporters that “all accusations, or insinuations, as to the alleged unlawful actions of the Soviet representatives don’t have anything to do with actuality.”
Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons. However regardless of Howe’s fears, diplomatic relations had been by no means severed.
Reassuring a jittery Moscow
Two years earlier than his defection, in 1983, Gordievsky had warned Britain and the US that the Soviet management was so apprehensive a couple of nuclear assault by the West that it was contemplating a primary strike. As tensions spiked throughout a NATO navy train in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not a precursor to a nuclear assault.
Quickly after, Ronald Reagan, U.S. president on the time, started strikes to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
With time, the general public would study extra in regards to the dramatic circumstances that introduced Gordievsky to a brand new life within the West.
He’d been posted to the KGB’s London workplace in 1982, however his tenure there abruptly ended just a few years later, when Gordievsky was recalled to the Soviet Union on suspicion of being a Western mole — which he was, as he’d been sharing secrets and techniques with British intelligence for years.
Daring escape, first heading to Finland
In Might 1985, Gordievsky returned to Moscow, as directed, and he endured interrogation however was not charged.
In July of that yr, he made a dramatic escape from the Soviet Union, by way of a British exfiltration effort that noticed him spirited throughout the border to Finland whereas he hid within the trunk of a automotive.
Brokers concerned in his rescue are stated to have performed a cassette recording of Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia as a sign to Gordievsky that they’d made it throughout the border. He was then flown to Britain by means of Norway.
Gordievsky’s household remained below KGB surveillance for six years earlier than being allowed to affix him in England in 1991, the yr the Soviet Union dissolved.
“Many instances, I used to be saying to myself: ‘It is like a film, it is like a film,'” Gordievsky instructed the BBC’s Witness Historical past podcast in 2015, recounting the story of his escape. “It was unbelievable.”
British authorities credit score Gordievsky with having made “an excellent contribution” to the nation’s nationwide safety and to serving to tamp down tensions between Russia and the West throughout “a important time of the Chilly Warfare.”
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