Oleg Gordievsky
Oleg Antonovich Gordijewski (Russian Олег Антонович Гордиевский; born October 10, 1938 in Moscow ) is a former KGB colonel and the highest-ranking public of a defector to the KGB in the West.
Life
Gordijewski occurred in 1963 in the KGB and worked among other things in the Soviet Embassy in Denmark. He was recruited in 1974 by the British secret service MI6 and henceforth acted as a double agent.
As Gordijewski 1982 Deputy Resident of the KGB in London, its value for Western intelligence services increased considerably. In 1983, he informed the MI6 about the Soviet misinterpretation of the NATO maneuver Able Archer 83 as a potential nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Gordijewskis information led directly to the fact that the maneuver was not played to the last detail in order not to provoke the Soviet Union and prevent a real nuclear escalation. Gordijewskis role during this crisis will be credited to him in the United States and in Britain today is very high. He also made the West with important information about the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, even before officially it was clear that Gorbachev would be appointed in 1985 as the new General Secretary of the CPSU.
In May 1985, Gordijewski was suddenly recalled to Moscow and interrogated by his organization. Since you could not prove it its betrayal, he came again in June released. He informed the MI6 in Moscow about his dangerous situation, and in July began a prepared by British intelligence sophisticated flight operation that brought Gordijewski about Finland and Norway to England, where he arrived in September. His family, meanwhile, was on holiday in Azerbaijan, he could only follow in 1991 to England, after the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had intervened with Gorbachev. The case went back then the world through the press.
Gordijewski enjoys great public reputation in the UK and is seen regularly as a guest or presenter in TV programs. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, the Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Buckingham.
Together with the author Christopher Andrew He has published numerous books about the KGB, where he reports on hitherto secret operations of the Secret Service.
In November 2006, he accused the Russian secret service FSB of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
On 2 November 2007 Oleg Gordijewski was admitted to the hospital and remained unconscious for 34 hours. He then worked partially paralyzed and maintained a numbness in the fingers back. Gordijewski claimed that they wanted to poison him.
Publications (selection)
- Oleg Gordijewski, Christopher Andrew: KGB. The story of its foreign operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. Bertelsmann, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-570-06264-3.