The Dog That Didn't Bark

OLEG GORDIEVSKY & THE KGB REVENGE TOUR

Oleg Gordievsky died at home in the UK, last week. If you don’t know who he was, that’s understandable, he’s been out of the headlines for almost twenty years.

Gordievsky was career KGB, posted to Berlin and Copenhagen, and eventually in London, as resident station chief. By then, he’d been recruited by the Brits, and he functioned as a defector-in-place. MI6 shared product with CIA, although not sources and methods, and Gordievsky’s identity was closely held. CIA knew him only by the covername TICKLE. Understandably, the ayatollahs at Langley decided they needed provenance, to determine how trustworthy TICKLE’s intelligence was, and they mounted an internal operation to triangulate and identify him. They kept it secret from the British, of course, and even inside the Agency, the information was restricted. The only fly in the ointment was a CIA officer with compartmentalized access named Aldrich Ames, and Ames was a Russian spy, a KGB defector-in-place. Ames gave up dozens of names. Oleg Gordievsky’s was one.

KGB recalled Gordievsky to Moscow. Under interrogation, he admitted nothing. The only thing that saved him was that CIA – and therefore, Ames – weren’t 100% sure Gordievsky was MI6’s clandestine agent at the Soviet embassy. KGB released him, but kept him on a short leash. He’d never be assigned an overseas post again.

On the other side of the coin, it took CIA another nine years to expose Aldrich Ames. The losses, over time, are hard to calculate; Ames compromised several high-ranking KGB and GRU officers, and a number of technical and weapons specialists. Most of them were liquidated.

Gordievsky, meanwhile, knew the clock was ticking. Sooner or later, KGB would err on the side of caution. Using a brush contact with MI6, on a Moscow street corner, he activated the emergency extraction they’d set up for him. On the day in question, he shook off his surveillance, and got a hard-class ticket on the train to Leningrad. Then to Vyborg, on the Gulf of Finland, where he rendezvoused with two married couples, British diplomats. They put him in the trunk of their car, and drove him to the border. There were dogs at the checkpoint on the Russian side. One of the wives had a newborn, and she dropped a loaded diaper on the ground, which threw the dogs off the scent. (This story is told by Ben MacIntyre, when he later interviewed Valerie Pettit, retired deputy head of Soviet operations at MI6, who planned and executed the Gordievsky escape.)

Needless to say, this was a huge embarrassment for the Russians, and for KGB, in particular. Heads rolled. It almost ended the career of Sergei Ivanov, who was KGB’s second-in-command in Finland at the time – Ivanov recovered to become one of Putin’s hired guns. Counterintelligence teams from KGB Moscow went through the Leningrad field office like locusts, surveillance of British subjects being within Leningrad’s remit. Gordievsky was found guilty of treason, in absentia, and given a death sentence. By then, he was out of reach. Supposedly.

Gordievsky managed a pretty influential and profitable exile. He wrote books, he was a respected interview subject in print media and on TV, he got honorary degrees, he made the queen’s birthday list. He prospered. The fatwa was still in force, but it didn’t seem as if he were in anybody’s crosshairs. And then, things changed. The Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had a brief flirtation with democracy, and then a former Leningrad KGB hood came to power in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin had a different perspective on the Russian émigré population, and on past KGB defectors in particular. He took the same attitude Stalin had taken toward Trotsky. These were enemies of the state, and a personal injury to be avenged.

Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector to Britain, was murdered by agents from Moscow, in November of 2006. This is a notorious case, which happens to be the first known instance of using polonium poisoning for an assassination. The year after that, Gordievsky may have been the victim of an attempted poisoning - he was hospitalized for weeks – but a later investigation stalled, for reasons never quite explained. (Gordievsky, of course, being Russian, said MI6 was covering it up.) Much later, in 2018, there were the Salisbury poisonings, another notorious British case, where a Russian team used the nerve agent Novichok to mount a murder attempt against the defector Sergei Skripal, which backfired spectacularly, and resulted in the expulsion of a hundred and fifty Russian diplomats.

Mokrye Dela, popularly translated as Wet Work, looms large in the public imagination, and Vladimir Putin seems perfectly happy to murder people, and take credit for it. Or at least to allow his hidden hand to be whispered about. People fall down elevator shafts, or stairwells, out of windows, and even right out of the sky, in the case of Yevgeny Prigozhin, of Wagner Group, but the Kremlin lets it pass with a nod and a wink. This is sufficient.

In the case of Oleg Gordievsky, he seems to have died in bed, of natural causes. An incident of the dog that didn’t bark in the night. Your math may differ.