Colonel Gordievsky lately of the KGB left Russia before he was arrested then travelled to England where he talked. He was a major success for MI6. When he writes to The Telegraph to tell the world that the BBC is a Marxist propaganda machine, that it should be called #The Red Service it is time to take notice. BBC propaganda is not always blatant; they are too cunning for that. At times you might even think they are patriotic Englishmen. The reality is ugly.
Assuming that the BBC's protection of
Paedophile
perverts is accidental is possible. Forgiving them is not. Their marketing
of Feminism,
Homosexuality &
Racism as the great evil is policy
& practice but only when it is anti-English
Racism.
They are
Enemies Of The People. See more about him
when Time Out Interviews Oleg
Gordievsky
PS Oleg wrote a rather perceptive review of some books about the
USSR - see
Oleg Gordievsky reviews ‘Stalin’ by Dmitri Volkogonov, edited and translated by
Harold Shukman, ‘Stalin’ by Walter Laqueur and ‘The Prosecutor and the Prey’ by
Arkady Vaksberg, translated by Jan Butler
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (Russian: Олег Антонович Гордиевский) (born 10 October 1938 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union), is a former colonel of the KGB and KGB Resident-designate (rezident) and bureau chief in London, who was a secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1974 to 1985. Early career
Secret agent
Two of Gordievsky's most important contributions were averting a potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union when NATO exercise Able Archer 83 was misinterpreted by the Soviets as a potential first strike,[2] and identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet heir apparent long before he came to prominence. Indeed, the information passed by Gordievsky became the first proof of how worried the Soviet leadership had become about the possibility of a NATO nuclear first strike.[3]
Escape (exfiltration) from the USSRGordievsky was questioned for about five hours. After that, he was released and told he would never work overseas again. Although he was suspected of espionage for a foreign power, for some reason his superiors decided to stall. In June 1985 he was joined by his wife and two children in Moscow.[4]
Although he almost certainly remained under KGB surveillance, Gordievsky managed to send a covert signal to MI6 about his situation, and they activated an elaborate escape plan which had been in place for many years, ready for just such an emergency.[4]
On 19 July 1985, Gordievsky went for his usual jog, but he instead managed to evade his KGB tails and boarded a train to the Finnish border, where he was met by British embassy cars, and lying down in the boot of a Ford saloon, he was smuggled across the border into Finland,[5] then flown to England via Norway. Soviet authorities subsequently sentenced Gordievsky to death in absentia for treason,[6] a sentence never rescinded by post-Soviet Russian authorities, although it cannot be legally carried out because of Russian membership in the Council of Europe. His wife and children – on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape – finally joined him in the UK six years later, after extensive lobbying by the British Government, and personally by Margaret Thatcher during her meetings with Gorbachev.[citation needed]
Life in the UKIn 1990, he was consultant editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security, and he worked on television in the UK in the 1990s, including the game show Wanted.[8] In 1995 the former British Labour Party leader Michael Foot received an out of court settlement (said to be "substantial") from The Sunday Times after the newspaper alleged, in articles derived from claims in the original manuscript of Gordievsky's book Next Stop Execution (1995), that Foot was a KGB "agent of influence" with the codename 'Boot'.[9] In The Daily Telegraph in 2010 Charles Moore gave a "full account", which he claimed had been provided to him by Gordievsky shortly after Foot's death, of the extent of Foot's alleged KGB involvement. Moore also wrote that, although the claims are difficult to corroborate without MI6 and KGB files, Gordievsky's past record in revealing KGB contacts in Britain had been shown to be reliable.[10]
On 26 February 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Buckingham in recognition of his outstanding service to the security and safety of the United Kingdom.[11]
Gordievsky had a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 3 August 2005, accusing the BBC of being "The Red Service". He said:
Gordievsky was featured in the PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.
Gordievsky was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for "services to the security of the United Kingdom" in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours (in the Diplomatic List).[12] The Guardian newspaper noted that it was "the same gong given his fictional cold war colleague James Bond."[13]
Suspected poisoningIn Gordievsky's opinion, the culprit was a UK-based Russian business associate who had supplied him with pills, which he said were the sedative Xanax, purportedly for insomnia; he refused to identify the associate, saying British authorities had advised against it.[16]
Time Out Interviews Oleg Gordievsky
It’s striking that even though it’s 21 years since he fled execution by the Russians for being a double-agent, Oleg Gordievsky’s face rarely cracks into a smile. There seems little doubt that he’s extremely happy with the lifestyle he’s chosen – ‘This is paradise,’ he declaims as he gestures to the complacent prettiness of surrounding Godalming. Nor is there any doubt that he has a sense of humour, which he illustrates amply with tales of KGB incompetence. Yet no matter what emotion marks his distinctively Slavic voice, his features seem wary of reflecting it.Little surprise, perhaps, considering that for a significant part of his adulthood not betraying his feelings has been a matter of life and death. In the high-wire months before his arrest and interrogation, his bosses told him that ‘a traitor may be in the room at this moment’, and he had to pinch himself hard in the thigh to maintain his composure.
Post 9/11, the account of Gordievsky’s escape from Moscow seems like a story from a very different world, with le Carré-style flourishes ranging from escape plans hidden in the covers of hardback novels to a secret rendezvous in St Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square. After being summoned back from London – where he had been working since 1982, overtly as a Russian diplomat in Kensington Gardens – Gordievsky was hauled out into the Russian countryside and interrogated by the KGB about being a double-agent. Despite administering a ‘truth’ drug, the interrogators failed to determine his guilt and released him. However, the countdown to execution had started.
Thankfully, a brilliant young MI6 official had streamlined the complex details of an escape plan. After a failed first attempt to alert the British security services in June 1985, the next month Gordievsky went at 7pm to an assigned lamppost on a Moscow street corner, taking a Safeway bag as a signal. Proof that the signal had been received would be an Englishman approaching, chewing something. ‘At last after 24 minutes, I saw him,’ Gordievsky recounted later, ‘a man with an unmistakably British look, carrying a dark-green Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar. As he passed within four or five yards, he stared straight at me, and I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, “Yes! It’s me! I need urgent help!” ’
The operation was set in motion. With only a matter of days till leaving Russia, Gordievsky knew he was under constant surveillance. So he practised ‘dry-cleaning’ – a process where he would duck into buildings and check to see if anyone was following. On the day he bought his rail ticket for the Russian/Finnish border, this technique alerted him to presence of three KGB agents on his tail, speaking into microphones from their coffee-coloured Lada. He threw them off the trail by ducking into a block of flats. ‘That night I slept with the doors of the flat barricaded once more… To catch a glimpse of a single man or woman on your trail is one thing, but to see a whole carload of surveillance behind you – that gives you a terrible feeling.’
Luckily, the much-feared middle-of-the-night invasion didn’t happen. At 4pm the next day he left his flat for ever. Dressed shabbily, so as not to attract attention, he took a train towards the Finnish border. In a final adrenaline-fuelled manoeuvre, British agents met him and smuggled him out in the boot of a car. His wife and children – on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time – were unaware of the escape. This was particularly tough for Gordievsky, but left them immune to KGB interrogation.
Amid the complex, fractured power struggles of the twenty-first century, Gordievsky remains a prominent and pertinent commentator on subjects ranging from Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy to theories about Russian links to Saddam Hussein’s concealment of chemical weapons. He is as uninhibited in his dislike of Putin – ‘Bastard! It was a terrible mistake to appoint a KGB man; they are the most reactionary force in Russia’ – as he is in his praise for the current head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller: ‘Brilliant. Stella Rimington’s just a primitive girl next to Eliza.’ Gordievsky’s connections to the top seem impeccable: Manningham- Buller was one of the few agents aware of his identity before his arrest, and the clever young Englishman who masterminded his escape from Russia now happens to be running MI6. When the chorus of outrage broke out following John Scarlett’s appointment as head of MI6 in 2004 – he was running the Joint Intelligence Committee when it produced the dossier that made the case for going to war in Iraq – Gordievsky leapt to his defence in an article in the Sunday Telegraph, which bore the headline ‘…but I say he’s the best man. After all, he did save my life.’
Their connection dates back to 1982, when Scarlett, 34, was appointed as Gordievsky’s MI6 case officer. The safe house for their meetings was in a nondescript block of flats in Bayswater. Gordievsky tells me that Scarlett struck him immediately as ‘very quick, extremely intelligent… [and] showing more initiative than others. Despite his youth and lower rank he was able to make promises immediately without asking people for permission.’ At lunchtimes Gordievsky would leave the Russian embassy with six or seven documents in his pocket and take them to Scarlett, who would photograph them. Over two years, they copied several hundred documents, many of which went straight to America.
For our own meeting, Gordievsky and his British partner, Maureen, collect me from Godalming station. We drive along picture-postcard-pretty roads to their home. Inside the low-ceilinged house, the dining table is set for three. Smoked-salmon canapés appear. There’s also a bottle of red Bulgarian wine, the first of two that Gordievsky distributes generously during our three-hour conversation. The bookcase in the dining room is stuffed with writing on modern art: this and numerous paintings hanging on the walls indicate how much of a personal sacrifice Gordievsky made when he denied any interest in avant-garde art to a KGB officer who – not least because of President Khrushchev’s denunciation of major abstract works as ‘shit’ – was worried that such enthusiasms were dangerously decadent.
When asked to describe what opportunities London presented to the KGB when he first arrived in 1982, Gordievsky looks across the table sternly and says, ‘The most glorious time for the KGB in London was really from the end of World War II till 1971. In 1945 it had 150 agents – and some, like the Cambridge Five and Melita Norwood [who was exposed, aged 87, in 1999, for passing on British nuclear secrets to the Russians], were very important. But in 1971, because of the arrest of Oleg Lyalin, the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home expelled all of Russia’s spies [he already had tabs on them all, except five or six who had just arrived]. It was one of the most remarkably revolutionary actions in the Cold War.’
Lyalin was arrested on Tottenham Court Road on August 30, initially for drink driving. One of the police officers who arrested him, Charles Shearer, recounted how after they put him in the police car, ‘he was lying back in the seat with his feet up on my shoulder. I turned round and said, “What are you playing at? Take your feet off the back of my seat.” And he replied, “You cannot talk to me, you cannot beat me, I am a KGB officer.” We have people claiming all sorts of things, so we didn’t put much credence on it at the time.’
Despite the police officers’ initial scepticism, Lyalin’s arrest proved crippling for the KGB. By the time Gordievsky started work in London, the number of agents had shrunk from 105 in 1971 to a paltry 23. He paints a picture of an espionage operation riddled with incompetence, arrogance and farcical jobsworthiness. Just before he arrived, ‘The Falklands War – at the beginning – became a minor disaster for the KGB. The political analyst reporting on that situation said, when he was told that a war had broken out: “That’s rubbish. It’s nothing serious. Skirmishes – nothing to speak of.” On the third day, the KGB’s deputy department head for Britain wrote a furious telegram saying: “The whole world’s agencies are reporting on a major conflict in the south Atlantic. There is a war between Britain and Argentina, and you haven’t reported a single thing. How can it be?” ’
To the KGB, the methodical, politically experienced Gordievsky – the son of a KGB official – must have seemed an ideal candidate to help run the operation in London. He had risen steadily through the KGB’s ranks since starting work there in 1962. He describes how ‘in my office one whole wall was covered with a map of London. All places were available [for spy operations] unless they were near Whitehall, where MI6 was situated, where MI5 was situated, the police headquarters, other police stations, and military facilities.’ His assignations were dotted across the capital: Barnet, Morden, Coram’s Fields and the Gay Hussar in Soho were all selected locations. Once, when going to the Gay Hussar, he says, ‘To my surprise I saw two old KGB contacts there – lower-grade agents – sitting enjoying their lunch before having a big cigar.’
It was 32 years since Gordievsky had found himself listening with sympathy to a broadcast by Radio Liberty, from Munich, which denounced Stalin on his death as a tyrant and murderer of millions. He had hoped post-Stalin that Russia could transform itself for the better, but the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 destroyed his highly sceptical adherence to the dictates of the motherland. In his autobiography, he wrote that ‘Until the early 1970s I clung to the hope that the Soviet Union might still reject the Communist yoke and progress to freedom and democracy.’ When such optimism proved futile, he began, while working in Copenhagen in 1974, to leak information to the West after a well-known British diplomat, who ‘stood out at any gathering through the sheer force of his ebullient self-confidence’, appeared next to the badminton court where Gordievsky was having an early-morning match, and set up a sequence of covert meetings.
As late as 1985, Moscow suspected nothing. The extent of its trust in Gordievsky was indicated by a promise in the late spring that he would be promoted to head the KGB in London. But in May, he was ordered back to Moscow. His subsequent defection confirmed too late its suspicions that he was the highest-ranking KGB official ever to betray his commanders.
In Britain, Gordievsky’s escape was the prelude to some explosive revelations about public figures who he claimed had – both wittingly and unwittingly – proved helpful to the KGB. Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins was accused, as was Olof Palme, Sweden’s assassinated Prime Minister, and Richard Gott of the Guardian, who resigned from the paper but denied the claims. When the Sunday Times reported Gordievsky’s claim that Michael Foot was a KGB agent, Foot sued successfully for £100,000 in libel damages. It was a tough time for Gordievsky, both personally and professionally. When his wife and children arrived to join him from Russia – after a protracted political campaign involving figures including Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Bethell – the marriage finally fell apart.
But he also had his undisputed triumphs. Most significant was his unmasking – pre-defection – of Michael Bettaney, an MI5 agent who was passing secrets to the Russians, and later convicted of treason at the Old Bailey. His status was such that he was also granted an audience with several world leaders, including Margaret Thatcher: ‘When I saw her for the first time, I realised she was very well informed about biological weapons. It was a major worry – and as a trained chemist she had found out a lot from different sources.’
Since the question of how to interrogate those who threaten national security is once more topping the political agenda, I ask what he thinks is the best way of obtaining information. He replies controversially: ‘ “60 Minutes” [the American news programme] wanted me to condemn the use of drugs in interrogation, since the KGB had drugged me, but I could not. Physical torture is much worse and a drug can be easily controlled, especially if it is made under the supervision of a medical person. I felt poorly on the first day, but the second day I was okay. It didn’t affect my mental state, or leave any lasting damage.’
Certainly, at the age of 68, life seems to be treating him more kindly. Last year he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Buckingham in recognition of his outstanding service to the security and safety of the United Kingdom, and his byline continues to appear in the Daily Telegraph and Spectator. Just before I leave his house, Gordievsky reveals that one of his great pleasures now is feeding the foxes who visit his Surrey garden. It seems a curiously appropriate pastime for a spy who at last has come in from the cold.
You too can speak like a spy! Agent-of-influence A person working within the government or media of a target country to influence national policy. Babysitter A bodyguard. Bang and burn Demolition and sabotage operations. Birdwatcher British Intelligence slang for a spy.
Brush pass A brief encounter where something is passed between a case officer and an agent.
Clean Unknown to enemy intelligence.
Cobbler A spy who creates false passports, visas, and other documents.
Dangle A person who approaches an intelligence agency with the intent of being recruited to spy against their own country.
Ears only Material too secret write down.
Floater A person used just once, occasionally, or even unknowingly for an intelligence operation.
Ghoul An agent who searches obituaries and graveyards for names of the deceased for use by agents.
Musician A clandestine radio operator.
Raven A male agent employed to seduce people for intelligence purposes.
Shoe A false passport or visa.
The take Information gathered by espionage.
Uncle The HQ of any espionage service.
Wet Job An operation in which blood is shed.For more spy slang, visit www.spymuseum.org
From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3618799/The-Daily-Telegraph-letters.html
The Daily Telegraph Letters 3 August 2005
The Red Service
Sir - Just listen with attention to the ideological nuances on Radio 4, BBC television, and the BBC World Service, and you will realise that communism is not a dying creed (Leader, Jul 30).
Oleg Gordievsky, London WC1