While in London, his MI6 code name was NOCTON. He continued to provide secret documents and information to MI6.
He steadily advanced in rank there with the help of secret aid and manipulation by MI6, which handed him abundant non-damaging information and contacts MI6 also steadily banished his direct superiors back to Moscow on trumped-up charges so that Gordievsky took their place. Īfter he learned to speak English and lobbied heavily for a position that opened up in London, the KGB posted Gordievsky to London in June 1982. During this Moscow period, it was too risky for him to send any information to MI6. His second posting to Denmark ended in 1978, and he was recalled to Moscow – this time for a lengthy period because he quickly divorced his wife and married a woman he had been having an affair with, and the KGB frowned upon affairs and divorces as immoral.
In 1974 he agreed to pass secrets to MI6, a step he viewed as "nothing less than undermining the Soviet system". He became outraged by the USSR's cruel crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and began sending covert signals to Danish and British intelligence agents and agencies that he might be willing to cooperate with them. Gordievsky joined the KGB in 1963, and was posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen in 1966. After spending a year in Berlin, he returned to Moscow.
The building of the wall appalled him, and he became disillusioned with the Soviet system. On completion of his studies, Gordievsky joined the foreign service and was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just before the erection of the Berlin Wall. He studied at a prestigious Moscow University – Moscow State Institute of International Relations – and later undertook NKVD training, where in addition to espionage skills he mastered German and also learned to speak Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. He proved an excellent student at school, where he learned to speak German.
The son of an officer of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police and precursor to the KGB), Gordievsky was born in 1938. The Soviet Union subsequently sentenced him to death in absentia. After being recalled to Moscow under suspicion, he was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in July 1985 under a plan code-named Operation Pimlico. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, CMG ( Оле́г Анто́нович Гордие́вский born 10 October 1938) is a former colonel of the KGB who became KGB resident-designate ( rezident) and bureau chief in London, and was a double agent, providing information to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1974 to 1985. From the BBC programme MI6: A Century in the Shadows, 3 August 2009
0 kommentar(er)
