FLASH
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Oleg Gordievsky, the most important Cold War double agent for the United Kingdom within the KGB, has died at the age of 86.
He had been living in Surrey under police protection since Moscow became suspicious of his actions in 1985 and narrowly escaped arrest, trial and execution by illegally crossing the border, hidden in the boot of a car.
He had spent many years previously as a double agent, passing vital information to both MI6 and Britain's MI5.
As the KGB's resident in London at the height of the Cold War, he warned British leaders that Moscow had become so paranoid about an imagined surprise attack by the West that the Soviet Union began making preparations to strike first.
In fact, the CIA believed that he played a catalytic role with the secret information he channeled to London to such an extent that the two main rival blocs were not involved - largely thanks to him - in an armed conflict, especially a nuclear one.
As a result of his intelligence, NATO scaled back its military exercise codenamed Able Archer and the crisis was averted.
How did he manage to escape from Moscow?
Oleg Gordievsky worked as a simple KGB agent in Copenhagen until the late 1960s. His double life began a few years later. While in Denmark - he was recruited as a British spy in the 1970s under the code name 'Sunbeam'.
His secret career as a British spy - and his life - was threatened, however, after a tip-off from Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer working for the Soviets. He was withdrawn to Moscow in 1985 and placed under surveillance, despite being offered the chance to leave London.
Realizing the danger he faced in Moscow, he triggered a long-planned breakaway from MI6, evading KGB observers during a run to escape to the Finnish border, where he was smuggled to safety.
"I hated the communist system, I wanted to fight it," he said, referring to a recording that appeared in the BBC documentary Secrets and Spies: A Nuclear Game.
“Gordievsky was once described by an MI6 man as the only truly ideological Soviet spy he could think of,” journalist Mark Urban wrote in X after news of his death.
“He despised the USSR and tried to undermine it by passing secret information to the West,” he said.
After his departure to the United Kingdom, Gordievsky lived near Surrey.
However, as Richard Norton Taylor notes in his obituary in The Guardian, he felt lonely without his family "and suffered from the withdrawal symptoms that spies so often experience when the thrills of their secret lives and defection have subsided."
His first marriage, to Yelena Hakobyan, a KGB officer, ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Leyla Aliyeva, whom he met in Copenhagen, where she worked for the World Health Organization. They have two daughters, Maria and Anna, who are also believed to live in the UK.
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