Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB Soviet officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by secretly passing from secrets to Great Britain, has died. He was 86 years old.
Gordievsky died on March 4 in England, where he had lived since his harm in 1985. The police said on Saturday that she did not deal with his death as suspect.
Historians consider Gordievsky one of the most important spies of the time. In the 1980s, his information contributed to avoiding a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.
Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became head of the KGB station.
He was one of the many Soviet agents who were disillusioned with the USSR after the Moscow tanks crushed the Prague Spring Freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by the British M6 in the early 1970s.
The 1990 book KGB: interior historyCo-written by Gordievsky and the British historian of intelligence Christopher Andrew, says that Gordievsky ended up believing that “the State a single communist party leads inexorably to intolerance, intohumanity and the destruction of freedoms”.
He decided that the best way to fight for democracy “was to work for the West”.
He worked for British Intelligence for more than a decade during the coldest years of the Cold War.
In 1983, Gordievsky warned the United Kingdom and the United States that Soviet leaders were so worried about a nuclear attack in the West that it was considering a first strike.
While tensions increased during a NATO military exercise in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that he was not a pioneer of a nuclear attack.
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Shortly after, American president Ronald Reagan began to alleviate nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
In 1984, Gordievsky informed the future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before his first visit to the United Kingdom – and also informed the British how to approach the Reformrist Gorbachev. Gorbachev meeting with the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a huge success.
Ben Macintyre, author of a book on the double agent, “The Spy and the Transor”, told BBC that Gordievsky succeeded “in a secret way to launch the start of the end of the Cold War”.
Most Soviet seniors spy on default
Gordievsky was recalled in Moscow for consultations in 1985 and decided to go despite the fear – correctly – that his role as a double agent had been exposed.
He was drugged and questioned, but not loaded, and Great Britain organized an infiltration operation to spirest it outside the Soviet Union – billed from the border to Finland in the trunk of a car.
He was the most senior Soviet spy to undo during the Cold War.
The documents declassified in 2014 showed that Great Britain considered Gordievsky so precious that Thatcher sought to conclude an agreement with Moscow: if the women and girls of Gordievsky were authorized to join him in London, Great Britain would not express all the agents of the KGB he had exposed.
Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher ordered the expulsion of 25 Russians, despite the objections of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Howe, who was sabotaging relations as well as Gorbachev softened the dead end between Russia and the West.
Moscow responded by expelling 25 British, causing a second round in which each team expelled six other officials.
But, despite the fears of Howe, diplomatic relations have never been cut.
The Gordievsky family was maintained under the supervision of KGB 24 hours a day for six years before being authorized to join him in England in 1991.
He lived the rest of his life under British protection in the quiet city of Godalming, 64 kilometers southwest of London.
Death is not treated as suspect
In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to death for betrayal.
In Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him companion of the Order of Saint-Michael and Saint-Georges in 2007 for “Security services of the United Kingdom”.
It is the same distinction held by the British spy fictive James Bond.
In 2008, Gordievsky said he was poisoned and spent 34 hours in a coma after taking contaminated sleeping pills which were given to him by a Russian partner.
The risks he was confronted with was underlined in 2018 during the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal And his daughter was poisoned and seriously ecological of a nervous agent made by Soviet in the English city of Salisbury, where he had lived quietly for years.
The Surrey police forces said that police had been called to an address in Godalming on March 4, where “an 86 -year -old was found dead on the property”.
He said that terrorism fighting officers lead the investigation, but “death is not currently treated as a suspect” and “nothing suggests an increased risk for public members”.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press
