One of the most important spies of the Cold War, whose secret transition from secrets to Britain helped to change the course of history and prevent a nuclear war, is dead.
Oleg Gordievsky, a former Soviet KGB officer, was 86. He died in Godaling and has lived in England since the lack in 1985.
According to Surrey police, officers were called to a home in Godalming on March 4, where an 86-year-old man was found dead.
The power said although officers against terrorism are leading the investigation, death is not currently considered suspicious, and “there is nothing that has a greater risk to members of the public.”
Gordievsky was recruited by Britain’s MI6 in the early 1970s after he became disillusioned with the USSR and was the most senior Soviet spy that was defects during the Cold War.
With the help of the code name Hetman, its reports have given Britain invaluable for more than a decade about the thinking of the Soviet leadership and KGB.
In the early 1980s, his warnings against the West feared that the Soviets feared that a possible surprise of the NATO nuclear attack urged the then US President Ronald Reagan to turn off his anti-Sussr Retoric.
His intelligence then was decisive to guide Margaret Thatcher in her early contact with Mikhail Gorbachev, whose rise to power brought an end to the Cold War.
The apartment in Copenhagen where Gordievsky lived while working for the Soviet ambassad. Pic: ap
In 1985, while heading the KGB accommodation in London, the suspicion that he could be a British spy led him to be called to Moscow where he was anesthetized and questioned.
The realization that his life was in danger, and with the help of a long-arranged plan, a signal was transferred to his MI6 handlers, and a rescue mission was implemented.
The sign that a rescue was going on was a man walking past him in the street in Moscow with a Harrods -bag and eating a Mars bar.
On August 2, 1985, Raymond Asquith, great-grandson of former Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and Andrew Gibbs managed to give the Soviet supervision the slip and smuggle their man across the border in Finland in the boat of a car.
In his absence, Gordievsky in Russia was sentenced to death for high treason.
His wife and daughters were held under 24-hour KGB supervision for six years before being allowed to join England in 1991.
He lived for the rest of his life under British protection in Godalming, Surrey, wrote a number of books and received by Mrs Thatcher in Checkers and Mr Reagan in the Oval Office.
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Gordievsky was honored by Queen Elizabeth in 2007. Photo: Dad
In 2007, he was honored by Queen Elizabeth II, and became a companion of the Order of Saint Michael and St George (CMG) during a ceremony in Buckingham Palace.
It is the same honor held by fictional spy James Bond.
The following year, Gordievsky said he was poisoned and spent 34 hours in a coma after giving him contaminated sleeping pills through a Russian business partner.
The risks he faced was underlined in 2018 Former Russian Intelligence Officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned With a Soviet-made nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury, where he lived quietly for years.
