He resolved to fight the communist system from the inside.

By this point Gordievsky was a junior spy abroad, working for the KGB’s first directorate, and living in Copenhagen. He arrived just as the Berlin Wall went up, and woke one morning to the sound of tanks rumbling past the Soviet embassy.īut it was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that propelled Gordievsky towards the west and, as he put it, determined “the course of my own life”. Then as a KGB trainee he spent six months in East Berlin. It charts his recruitment by the KGB, where his older brother Vasili served as a deep-cover “illegal”, and Gordievsky’s growing disillusionment with the grey totalitarian world of 1960s Moscow. Gordievsky has told the story of his own improbable survival in a gripping 1995 memoir, Next Stop Execution. It went some way towards exorcising the Cambridge spies, who a generation earlier had travelled in the opposite direction. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries.

Even more astounding was that in summer 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. That he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time was remarkable. O leg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war.

The spy and the traitor ben macintyre