The inside story of Oleg Gordievsky’s escape from Moscow – told by ex-MI6 chiefs

If there is one eternal rule of spycraft, Professor Sir David Omand says, “it’s that you’ve got to really understand your adversary.” The dangerous alternative is to guess. “The worst thing is to project your way of thinking onto them, imagining that somebody from a very different background, in very different circumstances, is going to think the same way as you.”

Good intelligence officers learn this, of course; but the most valuable spies of all, double agents, don’t need to – they already know their adversary as well as they know themselves. And rarely has this been truer than during the Cold War, says Sir David, a former head of GCHQ. It’s why people like Oleg Gordievsky are so useful.

The use and value of Gordievsky, arguably one of the most effective double agents in the history of British intelligence, is explored in a thrilling new BBC documentary series, Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game.

Sir David was principal private secretary to defence secretary John Nott in the early 1980s and later became director of GCHQ, the UK’s listening post. He joins a cast of talking heads in the series that includes former KGB and CIA agents, plus Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander, British political figures such as Lord Butler of Brockwell, Margaret Thatcher’s principal private secretary, and former Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officers, among them the 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith and Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale.

Usually for the first time on camera, they discuss a climate of nuclear paranoia, cultural misunderstanding and ideological tussle between East and West. “Both sides felt they had to arm themselves to the teeth to deter the other,” says Omand, now 77. “But neither side actually wanted conflict, and therefore it got displaced into what today we’d call ‘the grey zone’: intelligence activity, or what the Russians still call ‘active measures’.”

Because the conflict was largely played out in the shadows, “so much of the effort went into trying to recruit people from the other side’s intelligence community, who might be able to tell you you’ve been penetrated. This means that ‘spy vs spy’ became the dominant intelligence activity.”

At the time, in the early 1980s, London was crawling with spies from the Soviet intelligence agencies KGB and GRU; in turn, MI6 had its people in Moscow – albeit far fewer. But the prize, of course, was a double agent: somebody who could help Britain understand its adversary and keep the British and US governments one step ahead of the Soviets. Gordievsky, a senior KGB figure, became that man.

The son of an officer in the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB), Gordievsky had been working for the Soviet security agency for 11 years when he became disillusioned and was recruited by MI6 in Copenhagen in 1974. He then spent over a decade, on and off, passing secrets about the operations and motivations of the Soviets to his British handlers – an exchange which was interrupted for four years when he was moved back to Moscow in 1978, but resumed when he was posted to London in 1982.

“Everything to do with Oleg we were meant to take to the grave with us, and we tried very hard to muddy the waters, but then of course Oleg wrote a book,” says Lady Ramsay, over a pot of Earl Grey and slice of chocolate cake in the House of Lords tea room last week. As it is, it’s one of the few things she can talk about.

A Labour life peer, Lady Ramsay is now 87 and reluctantly walks with a stick, but remains sharp as a knife when it comes to recalling her extraordinary previous career. For 22 years, between 1969 and 1991, she worked for the Secret Intelligence Service, running its Helsinki station in the early 1980s, right on the Soviet doorstep.

“The Finns really understood the Soviets, in a way that we, and particularly the Americans, just didn’t,” she says. “So it was a very good posting to get, and quite senior. And everybody knew who the KGB were in Helsinki, and they knew who we were, and who the Americans were. They were so numerous, there in their hundreds.” She laughs. “I used to joke to my team that we ‘had them surrounded’. But of course we didn’t.”

Being one of the few female spies had unexpected benefits: the KGB didn’t really have female intelligence officers, and would never have put a woman in a position of equivalent seniority to Lady Ramsay’s. “The KGB were super chauvinist, which gave you a bit of an advantage, you know: you’re different.”

She never knew about Gordievsky when she was there, of course. Only around eight people in the world knew he was a double agent, such was the sensitivity and importance of his work, and the risk of losing him was far too great.

“He was special,” Sir David says. “He was a senior officer in the KGB, from a family of KGB, and beautifully placed. The Danes putting us onto him was a wonderful opportunity, and then the strategic patience of MI6 to not run him until he was back overseas, in London, was really the thing.”

Gordievsky’s motivations have always been explained as simple: his time in Copenhagen opened his eyes to the falsities of the Soviet doctrine, so he courageously decided to risk it all by flipping. “Everybody gets tested, to make sure they’re not a dangle, and he’d been recruited very carefully, to make sure he had genuinely turned against the Soviet system,” Sir David says.

“He was unusual in many ways,” says Lady Ramsay. “Not just his seniority, but in my experience usually KGB or GRU [double agents] had a problem of some kind. Usually they’re being overlooked, they’ve got money problems, a bad marriage, a messy personal life – something wrong with them that makes them think it’s an idea to get out. But he wasn’t any of those things. He was very successful, had a very happy second marriage, two wee girls he loved madly. He just saw when he was in Copenhagen that the Soviet system was a lie.”

In London, Gordievsky was invaluable in alerting Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the then US president, to what had never been clear before about the mentality of the Soviets – not least that Yuri Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was far more paranoid than they had ever realised. Yet in May 1985, just as he was to be promoted by the KGB in London, Gordievsky was suddenly summoned back to Moscow. It would later transpire that Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent secretly informing the Soviets, had identified Gordievsky as a double agent.

In Moscow, Raymond Asquith, now the 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, headed up MI6’s station. “We all had to act as if we were being listened to and followed wherever we went, but Asquith had the added difficulty of knowing even his own office was being listened to,” Lady Ramsay says.

In the documentary series, the now 71-year-old Lord Oxford, as he is known, tells a brilliant story about once arguing with his wife about where they’d agreed to take their children on a picnic that weekend. Pettily, he decided to address the ceiling and say, “Well, where did we agree?” To his amazement, a note shortly appeared under the door confirming they’d agreed on Kuskovo. “I thought that was a KGB surveillant who had a good sense of humour, actually,” Lord Oxford remarks today.

Once returned to Moscow, and after surviving being drugged and interrogated, Gordievsky briefly continued working for the KGB, but he was sure his security had been compromised when he realised his apartment had been raided by his superiors (they had locked the door behind them with a third bolt, which he never normally used). He then triggered an exfiltration plan, codenamed Pimlico, which would surely have been rejected by John le Carré’s editors for being too far-fetched.

It is legendary but worth sketching again, and well worth seeing Lord Oxford’s colourful retelling in the series. At 7.30pm on Tuesdays, Lord Oxford or another British officer would watch a bakery next to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a diplomatic complex in Moscow. If there was danger, Gordievsky would turn up holding a Safeway bag. When he did, an MI6 officer would walk past and lock eyes with him while holding a Harrods bag and eating a Mars Bar or a KitKat. This meant that Pimlico was being set in train. (The plan was years old and well-rehearsed, but if anybody involved needed a reminder, a memo was concealed in an Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.)

“Believe me, I’ve had so many KitKats or Mars Bars in our glove compartment that I absolutely hate them to this day,” Lord Oxford says in the documentary, the first time he’s spoken on camera about the operation. He was, he says, “bloody frightened”. A few days later, after Thatcher’s final approval of the operation, Gordievsky went for his evening jog, but managed to lose the KGB agents following him and catch a train to a meeting point near the Finnish border.

There, he hid in the boot of Lord Oxford’s car, which also contained the British spy’s wife, his baby daughter, his assistant and his assistant’s wife, who pretended to have a “gynaecological complaint” that required urgent attention. “Well the thing was, Moscow staff always came to Helsinki for their medical treatments and to have babies, so it wasn’t unusual for them to be making the trip,” Lady Ramsay points out.

Lord Oxford’s car was able to lose the pursuing KGB vehicles and make the Finnish border. The baby was a secret weapon. Lord Oxford would later learn that the KGB couldn’t believe a British intelligence officer would take his baby on such a perilous journey. “But babies, wives, they could be very helpful, you know. You do what you have to do,” Lady Ramsay says now, with a shrug.

Near the border, ingeniously, and absurdly, a well-timed nappy change over the boot distracted a pair of Soviet Alsatian search dogs just as they were about to sniff where Gordievsky was hiding. They moved on, and Gordievsky made it over the border into the safety of the west. Outlandishly, Pimlico had worked. It would be a long time before the Soviets even knew which border he made it through. “I had very convincing arguments for it being the Turkish one,” Lady Ramsay says.

She later came to know Gordievsky well. “You can’t not be quite a complex person to have a life story like Gordievsky’s.” He went on to meet with Reagan publicly, and wrote books about his career. Now 85, Gordievsky is still alive but “he’s not been well”, Lady Ramsay says.

His words are heard in the documentary but he is otherwise played by an actor in reconstructions (“better looking than the real thing,” Lady Ramsay makes sure to add). Sentenced to death in absentia by the Soviet Union after his defection, he has long been thought to have been living under British protection in the Home Counties.

“He was special,” says Lady Ramsay. “We don’t make a habit of exfiltrating people out of the Soviet Union. But he’s also a very special person. And make no mistake: they would [still] kill him. They really hate him. Don’t think they haven’t tried, he’s certainly still on their list.”

After leaving “the office” (MI6) in 1991, Lady Ramsay went on to work in politics, including as foreign policy advisor to her friend John Smith, the former Labour leader. And she can “certainly believe” a point made at the end of the series, that Vladimir Putin, a rising KGB agent by the end of the 1980s, would “hate Oleg for very special reasons, personally, because he’s got this big thing about ‘Mother Russia’.”

None of this is exactly ancient history, of course. Just last week, a British man accused of being a Wagner Group spy for Russia was alleged to have recruited two men to burn down a building in London linked to Ukraine. Both Lady Ramsay and Sir David agree there are likely just as many Russian spies in London today as there were at the height of the Cold War. “Who knows the numbers, but I wouldn’t have thought it was any less,” says Lady Ramsay.

As it is, the Gordievsky affair still stands out as a remarkable chapter in a fraught era, and one that remains largely shrouded in secrecy. Yet the eternal lesson persists: know your adversary, but ideally get them on side, like Gordievsky. “Absolutely,” Sir David says, “and sadly, it’s rare to have that kind of insight.”

These days, international relations between West and East are fraught once more, and who knows what is going on in the grey zone. In some ways, spying has changed enormously. But Lady Ramsay doesn’t think it’s changed quite as much as we’d think.

“Oh, there’s only so many ways you can do surveillance and counter-surveillance, and there’s only so many motivations human beings can have for being cultivated or not,” she says, with a slight twinkle in her eye.

She pushes her chocolate cake away. “The same things that made one generation tick will make the next generation tick. Technology changes, politics changes, it’s not the Soviet Union any more. But the human bits are always the same.”

Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game will air on BBC Two on Wednesday May 8 at 9pm, with all three episodes available on iPlayer