43 Facts About Oleg Gordievsky

Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was a colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate and bureau chief in London.

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

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

Oleg Gordievsky studied at a prestigious Moscow University, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and later undertook NKVD training, where in addition to espionage skills he mastered German and learned to speak Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian.

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 was 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's second posting to Denmark ended in 1978 and he was recalled to Moscow, this time for a lengthy period, because he had divorced his wife and married a woman with whom he had been having an affair.

MI6 steadily banished his direct superiors back to Moscow on trumped-up charges so that Oleg Gordievsky could take their place, and he continued to provide secret documents and information to MI6.

In late April 1985, Oleg Gordievsky was promoted to KGB station chief in London at the Soviet embassy.

Oleg Gordievsky was abruptly summoned back to Moscow by 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 he decided to go.

Unbeknownst to him, Oleg Gordievsky had been betrayed in early May 1985, or early June at the latest, by a CIA officer, Aldrich Ames.

Oleg Gordievsky became disenchanted with his work in the KGB during his first Danish posting, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Oleg Gordievsky tried to send a covert sympathetic message to the, 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.

Oleg Gordievsky rose through the ranks there, becoming able to access higher and higher levels of Soviet secrets which he passed to MI6 via a London safe house.

The information supplied by Oleg Gordievsky provided 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 refrained from 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 a telegram from the KGB leadership recalling him to Moscow.

Biographer Ben Macintyre and most people involved in the Oleg Gordievsky case believe that during his first meeting with the KGB in Washington in early May 1985, Ames had 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 7:30p.

On 19 July 1985, Oleg Gordievsky went for his usual jog.

Oleg Gordievsky managed to evade his KGB tails and boarded a train to Leningrad, and then travelled to a rendezvous south of Vyborg, near the Finnish border.

Oleg Gordievsky's couriers were two British diplomats and their wives, and to deter sniffer dogs at the Finnish border one of the wives dropped her baby's dirty nappy on the ground, causing the dogs to flee.

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

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

Oleg Gordievsky wrote a number of books on the subject of the KGB and was frequently quoted in news media on the subject.

Oleg Gordievsky worked in television in the UK in the 1990s, including the game show Wanted.

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'.

On 26 February 2005, Oleg Gordievsky was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Buckingham in recognition of his outstanding service to the security and the safety of the United Kingdom.

Oleg Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the 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 was tightened after the Salisbury poisonings.

Oleg Gordievsky said he had been poisoned with thallium by "rogue elements in Moscow" and accused MI6 of forcing Special Branch to drop its early investigations into his allegations.

Oleg Gordievsky believed 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.

Oleg Gordievsky refused to identify the associate, saying British authorities had advised against it.

Oleg Gordievsky accused MI6 of trying to prevent the incident from becoming known.

Oleg Gordievsky died at his home in Godalming, Surrey, on 4 March 2025, at the age of 86.

In March 2020, Oleg Gordievsky's story was told 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", recounted 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".