Oleg Gordievsky, famed Cold War spy and KGB defector, dead at 86

Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who spied for the West during the height of the Cold War, has died at the age of 86.

Gordievsky died on March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting from the Soviet Union in 1985. Police said on Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious. The BBC reported on Friday that Gordievsky “died peacefully” at his home in Surrey.

The world learned his name four decades ago, when the British Foreign Office announced on Sept. 12, 1985, that Gordievsky — initially described as being a senior official of the KGB — had sought and been granted asylum in the United Kingdom.

After his defection, then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher sought to cut a deal with Moscow: If Gordievsky’s wife and daughters were allowed to join him in London, Britain would not expel all of the KGB agents he had exposed.

Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher, pointing to information Gordievsky provided, ordered the expulsion of more than two dozen people — diplomats, journalists and trade officials among them — over allegations they were involved in spying.

The move was announced despite objections from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who feared it could scuttle relations just as reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West.

Soviet officials rejected the spying allegations, with a spokesperson telling reporters that “all accusations, or insinuations, as to the alleged illegal activities of the Soviet representatives have nothing to do with reality.”

Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons. But despite Howe’s fears, diplomatic relations were never severed.

Reassuring a jittery Moscow

Two years before his defection, in 1983, Gordievsky had warned Britain and the United States that the Soviet leadership was so worried about a nuclear attack by the West that it was considering a first strike. As tensions spiked during a NATO military exercise in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not a precursor to a nuclear attack.

Soon after, Ronald Reagan, U.S. president at the time, began moves to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.

With time, the public would learn more about the dramatic circumstances that brought Gordievsky to a new life in the West.

He’d been posted to the KGB’s London office in 1982, but his tenure there abruptly ended a few years later, when Gordievsky was recalled to the Soviet Union on suspicion of being a Western mole — which he was, as he’d been sharing secrets with British intelligence for years.

Daring escape, first heading to Finland

In May 1985, Gordievsky returned to Moscow, as directed, and he endured interrogation but was not charged.

In July of that year, he made a dramatic escape from the Soviet Union, via a British exfiltration effort that saw him spirited across the border to Finland while he hid in the trunk of a car.

Agents involved in his rescue are said to have played a cassette recording of Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia as a signal to Gordievsky that they had made it across the border. He was then flown to Britain through Norway.

Gordievsky’s family remained under KGB surveillance for six years before being allowed to join him in England in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved.

“Many times, I was saying to myself: ‘It’s like a movie, it’s like a movie,'” Gordievsky told the BBC’s Witness History podcast in 2015recounting the story of his escape. “It was incredible.”

British authorities credit Gordievsky with having made “an outstanding contribution” to the country’s national security and to helping tamp down tensions between Russia and the West during “a critical time of the Cold War.”