Oleg Gordievsky
| Oleg Gordievsky | |||
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Oleg Gordievsky (right) with U.S. President Ronald Reagan
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| Allegiance |
Soviet Union  (British secret agent since 1974)United Kingdom 
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| Service |
KGB SIS/MI6 |
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| Rank | Colonel of the KGB | ||
| Award(s) |
CMG Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters |
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| Birth name | Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky | ||
| Born |
10 October 1938 Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
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| Nationality |
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| Occupation | Spy (retired) | ||
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Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG (Russian: Оле́г Анто́нович Гордие́вский; born 10 October 1938) 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.
Oleg Gordievsky attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and on completion of his studies, joined the foreign service where he was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just prior to completion of the Berlin Wall. He joined the KGB in 1963, and was posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen.
During his Danish posting, Gordievsky became disenchanted with his work in the KGB, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and made his sentiments known to MI6, who subsequently made contact with him. The value of MI6's recruitment of such a highly placed and valuable intelligence asset increased dramatically when, in 1982, Gordievsky was assigned to the Soviet embassy in London as the KGB Resident-designate ("rezident"), responsible for Soviet intelligence gathering and espionage in the UK.
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, 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.
Gordievsky was suddenly ordered back to Moscow on 22 May 1985, taken to a KGB safe house outside Moscow, drugged and interrogated by Soviet counter-counterintelligence. Apparently the leak came from two sources, one of which might have been Aldrich Ames, an American Central Intelligence Agency officer who had been selling secrets to the KGB.
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Wikipedia