Guest post from Mike Murtagh.

I was saddened to read of the death of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB double-agent, who was one of the most important SIS (MI6) – and probably the entire West – agents of the Cold War. He was an incredibly courageous man and the story of his work on behalf of the West against the Soviet Union and his eventual exfiltration from under the KGB’s noses is epic. He was betrayed by the American CIA officer, Aldrich Ames.

I have kept quiet about this little story for years out of concern for Gordievsky’s safety, not wishing to divulge clues to his location, given the FSB’s record on overseas assassinations, like the cases of the Skripals and Litvinenko, although I suspect they might have known where he was anyway. In something like this, however unimportant the details might be, you never know what the opposition really knows. What you know, and assume that the opposition surely knows, might be the last little clue to what, in fact, they want to know! Did you get that? ‘Known unknowns’, and all that!

Following his defection, there were a lot of wild theories about his exfiltration. One of the wildest and most widely put forward ones was that he was picked up by SIS agents in Gorky Park, which is almost impossible, given the very public nature of the area in question. I used to go there often and the difficulties were clear. What actually happened was that he made his way along the route we used to take in the days of the truck convoys, about which I write in Spying On The Kremlin. He was picked up by SIS near the Finnish border and taken out of Russia from there.

After I got back from my 3-year FCO posting to a visa-issuing office in Chennai, India, I was going out with a woman in the South of England. We were watching a documentary in which Gordievsky appeared. I had seen several of his appearances previously on similar programmes, wearing a variety of disguises. The documentary was a run-of-the mill, but still rather good, one and, when Gordievsky made his first appearance in it, she said, to my utter astonishment, ‘He comes to our shop!’ I was more than a little surprised and my interest was piqued, to put it mildly, so I asked her a few questions but left it at that.

It was probably no more than a few days later, when we were in the local Waitrose and my girlfriend said that she had seen the guy in the documentary at the end of the aisle. I made my way there and, sure enough, there was a bespectacled, smartly-dressed, middle-aged man who was definitely Oleg Gordievsky! There was no way that I was going to spook him by speaking to him – especially not in Russian – so I just observed him for a little while before finishing off my shopping. A truly great man to whom we owe such a lot. RIP.

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