10 questions · History
One July afternoon in 1985 a man stood at a roadside in central Moscow holding a plastic bag from the British supermarket chain Safeway. To passers-by it meant nothing; to British intelligence it was the emergency signal it had been waiting on for years: Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel of the KGB, wanted out. A few days later he lay curled up in the boot of a diplomatic car while British diplomats drove through the Soviet checks at the border with Finland. Born in Moscow in 1938, the son of an intelligence officer, Gordievsky was a model cadre. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 made him doubt the system. In Copenhagen, where he served the KGB, he was recruited by MI6 in 1974. For more than a decade he supplied names, plans and assessments as a double agent. Especially valuable were his reports on the nervousness in the Kremlin during the NATO exercise Able Archer in 1983, which Moscow took for cover for a nuclear strike. London and Washington thus grasped how dangerously close the world had come to a fatal misunderstanding. From 1982 Gordievsky worked in London and was due to become resident there, head of the KGB station. But he was probably betrayed by the CIA officer Aldrich Ames. Summoned to Moscow, he was drugged, interrogated and watched until he gave the agreed signal. The escape, code-named Pimlico, succeeded; in the Soviet Union he was sentenced to death in absentia. Ben Macintyre told his story in a 2018 bestseller. Gordievsky died in England in March 2025.
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MI6
The British shared his findings carefully with the United States without revealing where they came from.
💡 Did you know? For years even the CIA did not know the name of London’s most valuable source.
Copenhagen
He was working there for the KGB at the Soviet embassy.
💡 Did you know? The crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 had already shaken him deeply.
London
He had worked there at the Soviet embassy since 1982 and was chosen to head the station.
💡 Did you know? For the first time the British would have had the KGB’s chief in their own country as their agent.
Able Archer
His warnings helped the West understand how real the war scare in the Kremlin was.
💡 Did you know? Afterwards Ronald Reagan struck a more conciliatory tone towards Moscow.
1985
The KGB had recalled him to Moscow in May and drugged and questioned him, but had not yet arrested him.
💡 Did you know? His wife and daughters were only allowed to join him in England in 1991.
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