Soviet spy defected to Britain from Moscow under threat of exposure after supplying information to MI6 and MI5 * Oleg Gordievsky obituary Oleg Gordievsky, the UK’s most significant cold war double agent inside the KGB, has died at his home in Surrey aged 86. Gordievsky, who would eventually defect to Britain from Moscow under threat of exposure, was considered a key agent operating for the UK’s intelligence services working within the Soviet Union. Continue reading...

Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet KGB officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets to the UK, has died at home in England.

Der KGB-Agent Oleg Gordievsky arbeitete heimlich für die Briten – und hat dadurch womöglich die nukleare Apokalypse verhindert. Er galt als einer der wertvollsten Spione überhaupt, nun ist er gestorben.

MI6 spy on the ‘Moscow watch’ who was involved in the audacious escape of the double agent Oleg Gordievsky

KGB's former spy chief in Britain says he has no regrets about betraying the Soviet Union as he likens Putin to Mussolini

Russian spy who was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain For more than a decade the senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, spied for MI6 before escaping execution by being dramatically smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car. He was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain, and his most important contribution as a spy was to warn Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan of the Soviet leadership’s paranoia at a time when the world was moving dangerously close to nuclear war. Gordievsky first came to the notice of MI6 after a tip-off from a Czechoslovakian spy, Standa Kaplan, who had defected to Canada. Kaplan mentioned Gordievsky as an old friend from the KGB academy, where they would together question the direction the Kremlin was taking. By then Gordievsky was a KGB officer attached to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen; in 1972 he responded favourably to delicate approaches made by MI6 officers in the Danish capital, after phone taps revealed that in calls to his wife in Moscow he had expressed growing concern about the Kremlin’s actions, specifically mentioning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He began spying for Britain when he returned to Moscow in 1974. Continue reading...

Sergei Christo offers a personal tribute to the Russian defector John Le Carré once described as "the real thing"

The KGB officer who spied for Britain died on March 4th, aged 86

Her tenure included participation in the 1985 extraction of KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky from the Soviet Union

Counter-terrorism police are assisting the coroner, but his death is not being treated as suspicious.