“Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world,” wrote J R R Tolkien. “Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” Oleg Gordievsky was, perhaps, not the smallest of hands, but he died this week little known to the wider world: a world which in no small part he saved from nuclear oblivion.
Oleg Gordievsky was a former KGB spy, who, disgusted with the Soviet regime, turned double agent for MI6 in mid-’70s. His exploits read like a John Le Carré novel – he even looked as you’d expect George Smiley to – but his effect on world history is perhaps in direct contrast to his fame, or lack of it. Most of us would never have heard of Gordievsky, which is probably as he intended, but we all likely owe him the greatest debt.
Everybody knows about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but until recently very few knew that, in 1983, the world probably came even closer to nuclear war than in 1962. Oleg Gordievsky was the man who stopped it.
Gordievsky began life as a dutiful communist in the USSR of Stalin. His father was an officer in the NKVD, the brutal precursor to the KGB. When he graduated university, he was soon recruited by the KGB, and posted to East Germany in 1961 – just in time to witness the building of the Berlin Wall. The wall appalled him and the crushing of the Prague Spring uprising in 1968 was the final turning-point.
Secretly, passionately and permanently, he turned against communism, the KGB and the Soviet state.
In 1974, he was recruited by MI6 from his KGB posting in Denmark. For the next 11 years, he secretly spied for Britain, while rising through the ranks of the KGB, becoming appointed as KGB station chief in the UK.
Gordievsky was able to tell British intelligence (and through MI6, the CIA), not only what the KGB was doing during the most frigid period of the Cold War, but what it was planning to do. His information played a crucial role in averting nuclear confrontation when the Kremlin wrongly interpreted a NATO military exercise, codenamed Able Archer 83, as the prelude to a first strike.
Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency in 1980 in part on a platform of tub-thumping anti-Soviet rhetoric. Reagan was in no doubt – and was no doubt correct – that the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire’. By 1983, Reagan had announced the Strategic Defence Initiative: a proposed Iron Dome-like programme to protect America from ballistic missiles. If successful, it would have completely upended the calculus of Mutually Assured Destruction that had kept the world from nuclear war for nearly 40 years. At the same time, the US began deploying Pershing II medium-range ballistic missiles across Western Europe.
When NATO began its annual massive military exercise, Able Archer, in Europe in 1983, the Soviet command became truly alarmed. After all, the last time an enemy had massed so much military might on its border with Germany, it was a front for Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet leadership became convinced that Reagan was about to launch a first strike. Their only option, as they saw it, was launching their own first strike.
None of us knew it at the time, but the world was teetering on the edge of WWIII.
Then Gordievsky intervened.
First, he warned Britain and the US just how worried the Soviets were. At the same time, he helped reassure the Kremlin that the exercise was really just that. Two things immediately followed: Reagan toned down his rhetoric and reached out to the Soviets to start new arms-limitation talks, and rising Soviet star Mikhail Gorbachev travelled to Britain to meet PM Margaret Thatcher. Thanks again to Gordievsky, who again secretly advised both sides, the meeting was a diplomatic triumph.
Ben Macintyre, author of a book about the double agent, The Spy and the Traitor, told the BBC that Gordievsky managed “in a secret way to launch the beginning of the end of the Cold War”.
For Gordievsky, though, it looked like the beginning of the end of his life. Betrayed by his evil twin, as it were, American double-agent Aldrich Ames, Gordievsky was marked for death. Ames’ betrayal led to the murders of at least 12 Russians. Gordievsky was in line to be number 13 when he was summoned back to Moscow and subjected to a terrifying interrogation.
Drugged, disoriented and terrified, he was told repeatedly that he had already confessed. His interrogators simply needed him to confirm his confession. Gordievsky was sure it was a lie, but after five hours of questioning under drugs, he couldn’t be sure. He managed to bluff his interrogators enough that he was released pending further investigation.
He knew he was marked for death.
So, he activated long-prepared escape plans. In his Moscow apartment, he removed instructions hidden in two books of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The instructions said to stand on a specified street corner on any Tuesday at seven pm, holding a Safeway shopping bag.
Wait long enough to be noticed. Make eye contact with a man carrying a Harrods bag who’ll be munching food. On the third Sunday after that, pass a written message by brush contact in St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square.
Gordievsky’s first outing ended in agonizing failure so he returned the following Tuesday and locked eyes with a man carrying a Harrods bag and chewing a Mars bar: “As he passed within four or five yards, he stared straight at me,” Gordievsky said. “I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, ‘Yes! It’s me! I need urgent help!”
Using his own spy training to lose the KGB agents surveilling him, he took a succession of trains and buses out of Moscow, then hitchhiked to a forest to wait. After being tormented by fear and mosquitos for three long hours, the British exfiltration team appeared: two British men and their wives, one with a baby. They bundled him into the boot of a Saab car, covered him with an aluminium space-blanket to foil infra-red detectors and blasted for the Finnish border.
At the border, they were inspected by Russian officials with sniffer dogs.
A quick-thinking diplomat’s wife saved the day by using the border stop as an opportunity to change her baby’s diaper. She lay the child on the trunk as Gordievsky lay in hiding, then dropped a dirty diaper to the ground to distract the sniffer dogs from Gordievsky’s scent. The guards, happy to keep their distance, waved the vehicles through the checkpoint.
Gordievsky, uncertain about what was transpiring, heard the car radio switch from loud pop music to Sibelius’ Finlandia. The trunk was soon opened. “I saw blue sky, white clouds, and pine trees above me,” Gordievsky said. “Thanks to the courage and ingenuity of my British friends, I had outwitted the entire might of the KGB. I was out! I was safe! I was free!”
He was free, indeed, but it cost him his marriage, his family (he never saw his mother again) and an easy life. He spent the next 40 years living in obscurity in a modest home in Britain, where his neighbours never knew that the little man living next door (under a new name) had averted World War III.
Why did he do it?
[…] His belief that, in changing sides, he had done a great service to the world, never wavered. People with absolute convictions can be difficult company: he was sometimes a hard man to like, but impossible not to admire.
Oleg Gordievsky died on 4 March, 2025, aged 86.
