33 Facts About Oleg Gordievsky

The son of an officer of the NKVD, Gordievsky was born in 1938.

Oleg Gordievsky proved an excellent student at school, where he learned to speak German.

On completion of his studies, Oleg Gordievsky joined the foreign service and was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just before the erection of the Berlin Wall.

Oleg Gordievsky joined the KGB in 1963, and was posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen in 1966.

Oleg Gordievsky became outraged by the USSR's cruel crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and began sending covert signals to Danish and British intelligence agents and agencies that he might be willing to cooperate with them.

Oleg Gordievsky continued to provide secret documents and information to MI6.

Oleg Gordievsky was suddenly summoned back to Moscow via a telegram on 16 May 1985.

Oleg Gordievsky felt, given the huge benefits MI6 would reap if he remained rezident of the embassy, that he was being encouraged by MI6 to return to Moscow as ordered, and decided on that; MI6 began to revive a plan to extricate him if necessary.

Oleg Gordievsky tried to send a covert sympathetic message to the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, called PET, but his three-year stint ended and he returned to Moscow before making any direct contact.

MI6 subsequently made contact with Oleg Gordievsky, and began running him as a double agent in 1974.

Indeed, the information passed by Oleg Gordievsky became the first proof of how worried the Soviet leadership had become about the possibility of a NATO nuclear first strike.

Oleg Gordievsky was suddenly ordered back to Moscow in mid May 1985, a few weeks after he had been promoted to KGB station chief in London.

Oleg Gordievsky was suspected of espionage for a foreign power, but his superiors stalled on taking any overt further action against him.

Ames first met and sold classified information to a KGB agent on 15 May 1985, in Washington, DC; the following day Oleg Gordievsky received the telegram from KGB leadership recalling him to Moscow.

Nevertheless, biographer Ben Macintyre and most people involved in the Oleg Gordievsky case believe that during his first visit with the KGB in Washington in early May 1985, Ames provided sufficient information to prompt an investigation by Colonel Viktor Budanov, the KGB's top investigator, and trigger Oleg Gordievsky's recall.

Oleg Gordievsky waited on a particular street corner, on a particular weekday at 7.30 pm, carrying a Safeway bag as a signal.

On 19 July 1985, Oleg Gordievsky went for his usual jog, but he instead managed to evade his KGB tails and boarded a train to Vyborg, near the Finnish border, where he was met by British embassy cars, after they managed to lose the three KGB surveillance cars following them.

Oleg Gordievsky was flown to the UK via Norway; in the UK, his MI6 codename was changed to OVATION.

Oleg Gordievsky was interrogated and detained for some six years, the Soviets presuming that she had been complicit in Gordievsky's activities.

Oleg Gordievsky's exfiltration greatly embarrassed both the KGB and the Soviet Union and resulted in disruptions by Viktor Babunov, the KGB's chief of counterintelligence, within the KGB including Sergei Ivanov's career with the KGB, who was KGB resident in Finland, as well as numerous members of the Leningrad KGB, which was responsible for surveillance of British subjects, and numerous persons close to Vladimir Putin, who was a member of the Leningrad KGB.

Oleg Gordievsky included a discussion of his exfiltration in his memoir, Next Stop Execution, published in 1995.

Oleg Gordievsky has written a number of books on the subject of the KGB and is a frequently quoted media pundit on the subject.

In 1995, the former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot received an out-of-court settlement from The Sunday Times after the newspaper alleged, in articles derived from claims in the original manuscript of Oleg Gordievsky's book Next Stop Execution, that Foot was a KGB "agent of influence" with the codename 'Boot'.

Oleg Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George for "services to the security of the United Kingdom" in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours.

Oleg Gordievsky said that the KGB were puzzled by and denied the claim that Director General of MI5 Roger Hollis was a Soviet agent.

Oleg Gordievsky was featured in the PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.

Oleg Gordievsky lived for years in a "safe house" in London, and security has been tightened since the Salisbury poisonings.

Oleg Gordievsky claimed that he was poisoned with thallium by "rogue elements in Moscow".

Oleg Gordievsky accused MI6 of forcing Special Branch to drop its early investigations into his allegations; according to him, the investigation was only reopened due to the intervention of former MI5 Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller.

In Oleg Gordievsky's opinion, the culprit was a UK-based Russian business associate who had supplied him with pills, which he said were the sedative Xanax, purportedly for insomnia; he refused to identify the associate, saying British authorities had advised against it.

Oleg Gordievsky accused MI6 of trying to suppress the incident from being known.

In March 2020, Oleg Gordievsky's story was recounted in an episode of Spy Wars With Damian Lewis, on the Smithsonian Channel in the US, streaming on various cable services.

The episode, The Man Who Saved The World, recounts the "years-long effort by Oleg Gordievsky to pass Soviet intelligence to the British, all but preventing a nuclear Armageddon between the Soviet Union and the West".