Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who was spied on for the West during the highlight of the Cold War, died at the age of 86.
Gordievsky died in England on March 4, where he had lived since the Soviet Union was completed in 1985. The police said on Saturday that they did not treat his death as suspicious. The BBC reported on Friday that Gordievsky died “peaceful” in his house in Surrey.
The world learned its name four decades ago when the British Foreign Office announced on September 12, 1985 that Gordievsky – originally known as the KGB officer – was sought and granted in the United Kingdom of Asylum.
After his transfer, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to conclude a contract with Moscow: If Gordievsky’s wife and daughters were allowed to join him in London, Great Britain would not spend all KGB agents that he had exposed.
Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher showed information that Gordievsky provided, the designation of more than two dozen people – diplomats, journalists and trade officers – because of allegations that they were involved in spying.
Despite the objections of the Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe, the move was announced, who feared that it could delete the relationships as the reform of the Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the patting between Russia and the West.
The Soviet officials rejected the allegations of espionage, with a spokesman told reporters that “all allegations or assumptions in relation to the alleged illegal activities of the Soviet representatives have nothing to do with reality.”
Moscow reacted with 25 British. But despite How’s fears, diplomatic relationships have never been separated.
Soothe a nervous Moscow
Two years before his lying in 1983, Gordievsky Great Britain and the United States had warned that the Soviet leadership was so concerned about a nuclear attack by the West that it had considered a first strike. When the tensions during a military NATO exercise rose in Germany, Gordievsky, Moscow, helped assure that it was not a forerunner of a nuclear attack.
Shortly afterwards, Ronald Reagan, US President began to implement US President at that time to facilitate nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.
Over time, the public would learn more about the dramatic circumstances that Gordievsky brought to a new life in the West.
He was released in the KGB London office in 1982, but his term there ended abruptly a few years later when Gordievsky was called back to the Soviet Union because he had suspected of being a western mole – what he was, as he had shared it with British secret services for years.
Daring escape, first to Finland
In May 1985, Gordievsky returned to Moscow according to instructions and he endured the survey, but was not charged.
In July of this year, he dramatically flirting from the Soviet Union, about a British ex -filtration that tempered over the border to Finland while hiding in the trunk of a car.
Agents who are involved in his rescue are said to have played a cassette recording by Jean Sibelius Finlandia As a signal to Gordievsky that they had made it across the border. He was then flown to Great Britain through Norway.
Gordievsky’s family stayed under KGB surveillance for six years before he was allowed to be approved in England in 1991, the year, the year in which the Soviet Union was dissolved.
“I often said to myself: ‘It’s like a film, it’s like a film’,” said Gordievsky about the BBCs Witness of history Podcast in 2015 and told the history of his escape. “It was incredible.”
The British authorities deserve Gordievsky that they have made “an outstanding contribution” to the national security of the country and interrupted the tensions between Russia and the West during “a critical time of the Cold War”.
