Crucial role in the Cold War • Smuggled out in luggage lid • May have saved the world from nuclear war
He was the KGB officer who became a crucial double agent during the Cold War.
The Russian Oleg Gordievsky also helped to reveal the Swedish spy Stig Bergling.
Now he has died, 86 years old.
KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky was recruited in the 1970s by the British intelligence service MI6. He was the most experienced Soviet spy that jumped off during the Cold War.
Gordievsky went by the code name “Hetman” and for more than a decade he gave valuable information to the British about how the Kremlin and KGB reasoned.
In the early 1980s, he warned, among other things, the West for the Soviet Union feared that NATO would potentially carry out a sudden nuclear attack. As a result, US President Ronald Reagan toned down his rhetoric against the Soviet Union.
Was smuggled out of the Soviet
His intelligence information also helped in the early contacts between Margaret Thatcher and Michail Gorbachev.
In addition, Gordievsky helped to reveal the protagonist in one of Sweden’s largest spy scandals: Stig Bergling. He noticed his British clients in 1977 to the Soviet Union succeeded in recruiting a spy in Sweden.
The detailed information helped Stig Bergling being arrested and brought to trial.
In 1985, when he was head of the KGB office in London, the Soviet Union began to suspect he was a double agent. He was taken to Moscow where he was drugged and interrogated.
In the summer of the same year, MI6 launched a prepared emergency plan to smuggle him out of the country. The signal that the operation would be put into action was that a British spy passed him on the street with a harrod bag and eating on a March.
The plan was based on him being smuggled across the border to Finland in the luggage compartment on a car. And it succeeded.
Was sentenced to death
He lived the rest of his life in England under British protection after being sentenced to death in his absence in his home country. His wife and daughter joined him in 1991 after being held under constant surveillance of KGB for six years.
Gordievsky was poisoned in 2008 and was in a coma for 34 hours after receiving a sleeping pill by a Russian business partner.
At the beginning of March he was found dead in his home in Godalming, reports Sky News. An investigation into the death has been initiated, but there is currently no suspicions of crime, police say for the TV channel.