Oleg Gordievsky, the UK’s most significant cold war double agent inside the KGB, has died at his home in Surrey aged 86.
Gordievsky, who would eventually defect to Britain from Moscow under threat of exposure, was considered a key agent operating for the UK’s intelligence services working within the Soviet Union.
While counter-terrorism police were said to be assisting the coroner, his death at his home in Surrey was not being treated as suspicious.
Gordievsky’s career as a double agent was something that could have come from John le Carré novels about the height of the cold war’s deadly and dangerous spy wars, which have coloured the public imagination around intelligence work ever since.
A colonel in the KGB, the precursor to the current FSB, Gordievsky supplied information to MI6 and MI5 which led to the expulsion of several dozen Russian agents in the UK.
His most significant contribution, however, was generally agreed to be his warning during the Thatcher-Reagan era over the increasingly paranoid thinking inside the Kremlin concerning the west’s nuclear posture, which he suggested was pushing it toward considering a first strike.
Nato curtailed a major military exercise and a potentially dangerous escalation was avoided.
After intercept information suggested he had concerns about Soviet policy – not least the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 while he was stationed in Denmark – he was recruited as a British spy in the 1970s under the codename “Sunbeam” before being posted to London as the KGB rezident – or station chief.
While he was credited with providing much valuable intelligence, his claim in a book that former Labour leader Michael Foot was a Soviet “agent of influence” would ultimately lead to a substantial out-of-court settlement.
However, Gordievsky did expose the activities of Michael Bettaney, a disaffected, alcoholic MI5 officer who had approached Russia in an effort to expose how several Soviet agents had been discovered by British intelligence.
His clandestine career as a British spy – and his life – was, however, threatened after a tipoff from Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer working for the Soviets. He was recalled to Moscow in 1985 and placed under surveillance, despite being offered the opportunity by London to defect.
Realising his peril in Moscow, he triggered a long-planned extraction by MI6, evading his KGB watchers during a jog to flee to the Finnish border where he was smuggled to safety.
Explaining his motivation, Gordievsky said: “I hated the communist system, I wanted to fight against it,” in an archive recording, which featured in a BBC documentary Secrets and Spies: A Nuclear Game.
“Gordievsky was once described to me by an MI6 guy as the only truly ideological Soviet spy he could think of,” wrote journalist Mark Urban on X after the news of his death.
“He despised the USSR and sought to undermine it by passing secret intelligence to the west.”
After his defection to the UK, Gordievsky lived near Godalming in Surrey, where his identity was protected.
However as Richard Norton-Taylor notes in his Guardian obituary he was lonely without his family “and suffered the withdrawal symptoms that spies so often experience once the excitement of their secret life and defection has died down”.
Later, at the encouragement of MI6, he wrote several books including the one that would prompt the libel action from Foot.
In 2007, Gordievsky was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II with the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George.
His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, a KGB officer, ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Leila Aliyeva, whom he met in Copenhagen, where she worked for the World Health Organization. They had two daughters, Maria and Anna, who are believed to still live in the UK.