The KGB doubles spy that prevented an atomic war in 1983

That the world balanced on the edge of an atomic war during the Cuban rocket crisis of 1962 is in all history books. Much less is known that humanity also crawled through the eye of the needle in November 1983. NATO then held the Able Archer exercise, and the leaders of the Soviet Union were convinced that this was a cover for an attack with atomic weapons on their country.

Panic code grams from the KGB headquarters in Moscow arrived on the Soviet-Ambassade in London. The “countdown to a first nuclear attack had begun,” said “the center.” Moscow wanted to know whether members of the British “political, economic and military elite” already evacuated their families from London, to bring them to safety for a possible counterattack from the Soviet Union.

Oleg Gordiavski, the highest KGB officer in London, read these telegrams-and passed them on to the British secret service MI6, for which he has been working since 1974. The British shared the information with the Americans and took the necessary measures to calm the Soviets. Geoffrey Howe, the British Foreign Minister later said about it: “There was no doubt about the exceptional but real Russian fear of a real nuclear attack by Gordievski. NatuDo has intended to change the exercise, so that there was no doubt about the Russians that it was only an exercise.”

Really KGB family

Oleg Gordievski, That died on Friday in his hometown in Surrey In Southeast England, Able Archer had again proven its value as the most important MI6 double agent from the Cold War. That he would ever go to the West was unthinkable for him for a long time. He was born in 1938 in a real KGB family. His father was a senior officer of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB) and his older brother also made a career within the secret service.

However, Oleg’s faith in the party got a sensitive blow when he was in Berlin in 1961, just when the wall was built there. Did this regime really have the best for its people? The precipitation of the Prague Spring in 1968 gave him the last push: communism did not have to be defended, but fought.

Gordievski was now as a junior kgb employee at the Russian embassy in Copenhagen. He left on the telephone, of which he rightly suspected that it was hungry by Western intelligence services, in a conversation that he was disappointed in his home country. The trick worked. It took years to come, but then he was tapped by Mi6 on his shoulder: did he want to be a double spy? The answer was a resounding yes.

Hidden in the trunk

In the years after he walked over, he made a steadily career within the KGB and his appointment as a resident on the Soviet-Ambassade in London gave him access to the most sensitive material that he all passed on to his contacts at MI6.

Unfortunately for Gordievski, the KGB also employed defectors. In 1985 he was betrayed by CIA doublespion Aldrich Ames. He was called back to Moscow, a certain death. However, Mi6 did not abandon him. During his regular running round through Moscow, Gordievski managed to shake off his KGB followers. He took the train to Leningrad, where he was met by employees of the British embassy who hid him in the trunk of their car. That’s how they crossed the border with Finland. The tracking dogs of the Soviet lines of the Life were brought from their Apropos with the poop diaper of a baby.

Once in the west, Gordievski was received by a grateful US President Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher. He spent the rest of his life in England, where he wrote a number of books. In 2008 he ended up in a coma in the hospital with poisoning symptoms. Revenge of the Russian secret servicesaid Gordievski, after he had recovered.

According to British media, there was no suspicious circumstances around his death this week.

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