Codename Sunbeam - The story of MI6’s greatest Cold War spy (418)

0:00Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs You know back to school is coming in fast So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look Try it, style it, make it yours Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off First day fits, handled Walk out ready for whatever's next Visit your nearest Crocs store today Now at Lowe's, faster quotes start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes.

0:48And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com, right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's. The door clicked shut behind him with a finality that Oleg Gordievsky would never forget. He stood for a moment in the narrow hallway of his Moscow flat staring at the deadbolt. It had been locked when he arrived. He never used the deadbolt. It was the smallest thing. A simple twist of metal. But not in the life of a spy.

1:30Such details scream louder than sirens. This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history. Please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes. He was a KGB colonel, a double agent and the most valuable spy Britain ever had. Born into a KGB family in Moscow, Oleg Gordievsky's journey takes us from the waning days of Stalin to his disillusionment with the Soviet system and his defection to MI6. For more than a decade, he lived a secret life at the heart of Soviet intelligence, all the while feeding classified information to London.

2:14From within the KGB's London station, he exposed espionage operations, influenced diplomacy at the highest level, and warned of dangerous Soviet paranoia at the height of nuclear tensions. I'm delighted to share with you codename Sunbeam, MI6's greatest Cold War spy. Part 1. Born into silence. It's Moscow, 1938. Somewhere across the city the secret police are knocking on doors. But not here. Not at Anton Gordievsky's address. He was already inside the machine. And now, inside a cramped Moscow apartment, his son had just been born. Oleg Vladimirovich Gordievsky entered the world on the 10th of October 1938, in the waning days of Stalin's great terror.

3:06Outside, mass arrests and executions continued. Inside, the silence was generational. Taught by fear, perfected by routine, his father Anton, a loyal officer in the OGPU, the precursor to the NKVD and later the KGB, had helped enforce the state's collectivisation policies in the 1920s. He believed in Marxism as scripture and Stalin as its prophet. His wife Olga did not. Her father's watermill had been seized, her brother had spent a decade in a gulag for criticising collectivisation. She had learned early what the state did to dissent and so she played the role expected of her, the dutiful KGB wife.

3:52Their children, Marina, Vasily and Oleg, grew up fluent in the Soviet language of silence. Oleg's early life was by Soviet standards comfortable. His father's position afforded them a better apartment, access to food and educational privileges. Oleg excelled in school, particularly in history and languages. At the age of six, he discovered British Ally, a cultural pamphlet from the British Embassy printed in Russian. It was propaganda, yes, but it spoke with a different rhythm, a freer cadence, a world not bound by slogans and surveillance. He joined the Commissor, the Young Communist League, and quickly rose to a leadership role, but his mind wandered beyond Soviet borders.

4:35In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, and a brief period of liberalisation followed with relaxed censorship and the release of political prisoners. The same year, Oleg enrolled in the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he studied German, law, history and military affairs. He became close to a Czechoslovak student, Stanislav Kaplan, who was liberal-minded and held strong sceptical views about communism. The limits of liberalisation were starkly highlighted when in October of 1956 Soviet tanks entered Hungary to suppress a rebellion against Soviet rule.

5:18By 1961, with the Cold War deepening, the KGB quietly recruited Oleg. Aided by his older brother Vasily, an illegal spy trained to operate without diplomatic cover, Oleg's first work experience assignment was as a translator in East Berlin and the day after he arrived the Berlin Wall went up, sealing the city in concrete. The wall marked a turning point. Overnight families were divided, streets became barricades, guards stood at every intersection. As a translator at the Soviet embassy Oleg watched the fear, the desperation, the barricading of ideas and knew the system he served feared its own people.

6:01He joined the KGB officially in 1962 still clinging to the hope that the Soviet project would be reformed. But the events of the coming decade especially what happened in Czechoslovakia would silence that hope completely. Oleg was keen to work abroad but he knew that the KGB never sent unmarried men to the west. Yelena Akopan was training to be a German teacher and keen to work abroad like Oleg. They quickly got engaged and then married.

6:37Part 2. Denmark. The West and Disillusionment. In 1966 he was posted to Copenhagen with Jelena. Denmark would become the crucible of his transformation. Oleg was posted under consular cover. His official title was that of visa officer. His real job was KGB. He managed undercover agents and scanned Danish society for vulnerabilities. Officials, students, journalists, anyone who might be turned. The bookshops, the open conversations, the freedom to protest. It wasn't utopia but it was real. Then in 1968 the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring. Reformist communist leader Alexander Dubček had tried to create socialism with a human face.

7:26But Moscow's tanks erased the dream in six days. Oleg cursed the Soviet Union over the phone to his wife, knowing full well the Danes were likely listening through bugs in the apartment. In the torrent of recordings Danish intelligence were processing, they missed it. However, Gordievsky was already on their radar, having seen him buy a gay magazine whilst out shopping and saw the potential blackmail opportunity. Little did they know he'd bought it to show his wife the level of sexual freedom in Denmark. They even tried a gay honey trap on him but he didn't even realise he was being chatted up.

8:04By the time Oleg returned to Denmark in 1972 for a second posting, this time in a higher ranking political intelligence role, both the Danish intelligence service and Britain's MI6 were watching him closely. They had a tip from a defector, none other than Stanislav Kaplan, the former classmate of Gordievsky, who remembered Oleg as thoughtful, curious and increasingly disillusioned with the regime. Kaplan casually appeared at Oleg's door in Copenhagen claiming to be on business. They shared an awkward drink. Later Kaplan reported back to Danish intelligence and MI6, he's a possibility. Enter MI6 officer Richard Bromhead.

8:47It started with badminton. Oleg played every morning before work. One day in 1973, Bromhead, a diplomatic officer at the British Embassy, appeared at the court in an incongruous tweed suit. Oleg continued his match and when he'd finished, he wandered over and held out his hand, not sure if Bromhead was trying to recruit him or whether Bromhead wanted to work for the KGB. They'd seen each other at diplomatic events but never alone like this. Then came an invitation, lunch at the Osterport Hotel. Gordievsky reported the meeting to the KGB, framing it as part of his effort to recruit Bromhead, a clever bit of cover.

9:31Bromhead for his part came away uncertain. Was Gordievsky trying to turn him? Oleg heard nothing from MI6 for eight months. It appears that Bromhead may have dropped the ball as he was pursuing a number of other leads. But in 1974 he reappeared at the Babington Court. Another lunch was arranged. This time the proposition was clear. Would Oleg be willing to talk? He said yes. Part 3. Sunbeam Begins. MI6 assigned him the codename Sunbeam. At this time they had no idea of his motivations and there was fear of him being a dangle. A dangle is an agent or officer of one intelligence agency who pretends to be interested in defecting or turning to another intelligence agency.

10:22The goal of a dangle is to convince the second intelligence agency that they have changed loyalties by offering to act as a double agent. The dangle then feeds information to their original agency or gives disinformation. Bromhead had been given a new appointment in Northern Ireland and Sunbeam was then handed over to Philip Hawkins, a German-speaking officer. Hawkins was a no-nonsense MI6 officer. He interrogated German officers during World War II and was a former barrister. He grilled Gordievsky thoroughly in a safe flat on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Oleg passed the test. He set three conditions.

11:011. No harm to his KGB colleagues. 2. No secret recordings or photographs. 3. No payment. His motives were ideological, not financial. MI6 agreed, though they secretly recorded every meeting. It began with monthly meetings in the anonymous flat far from the Soviet embassy. Over time, Oleg described with great accuracy the make-up of the KGB, including names, training methods, as well as the politics and rivalries within it. Hawkins already knew some of what Gordieski told him, but the level of detail he was providing confirmed he was no dangle. in 1977 a new handler Jeffrey Guscott took over Oleg found him more personable their relationship grew to one of mutual respect even friendship however neither the Soviets nor MI6 knew that Gordievsky was running another deceit his marriage alongside his work with MI6 and the KGB he was having an affair with Leila Aleyeva 28 years old and 11 years younger than Oleg she was the daughter of KGB officers and a secretary at the World Health Organization.

12:17The intelligence Oleg was now providing began to shift how the West understood Soviet espionage. MI6 was cautious. If the Soviets suspected a mole they would shut everything down or worse. So the information was laundered, passed to the CIA and other allies in a sanitized form. But MI6 knew the truth. They had their man inside the KGB and he was just getting started.

12:47Part 4. The Waiting Begins It's Moscow, 1978. The grey sky hung low over Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport as Oleg Gordievsky stepped off the plane and into the cold arms of home. The air was thicker here, slower. In Denmark ideas moved, books lived and people smiled. In Moscow the faces were pale, the building solemn with fear. His shoes hit the tarmac with finality and he knew this was not just a homecoming, it was a countdown. In Copenhagen he'd walked a double path. KGB officer by day, MI6 asset by night. Now back in the heart of the Soviet capital he was a man without a mission. He returned to a city frozen in time where intellectual ambition meant danger and political ambiguity meant treason.

13:41His KGB superiors had no idea he'd spent four years now spying for the British but he couldn't shake the thought that someone might suspect. Paranoia was a condition of survival in the Soviet Union. Now it was his constant companion. MI6 told Gordievsky they would not contact him in Moscow. With its intensive surveillance, it was just too dangerous an environment to risk such a valuable agent. They cut off all contacts and waited. One of his first acts back in Moscow was to divorce his wife Yelena. The marriage had soured years earlier. the ideological divide between them sharpened by her quiet submission to the regime and his growing hatred of it.

14:25She'd also terminated a pregnancy without consulting him. That betrayal stung. But the personal decision carried a professional cost. In the KGB, divorce was considered a mark of instability, especially if the officer had engaged in extramarital affairs during a foreign posting. Gossip was currency in KGB corridors. His colleague pounced on the scandal, the promotion he had once been promised, deputy head of the first chief directorate's third department, vanished. Still he remained in the game. Meanwhile Leila had since returned to Moscow and in 1979 they married. They soon had two daughters, Maria and Anna.

15:06For a while family life grounded him but he knew he had unfinished business. In the early 1980s Oleg began positioning himself for another overseas posting. This time in Britain. He studied English privately, built a plausible internal record and transferred to the British section within the KGB's first chief directorate. Meanwhile, MI6 was still digesting the intelligence Oleg had delivered during his years in Denmark. The effect was seismic. Dozens of Soviet agents operating under diplomatic cover were identified and expelled from Europe. MI6 was careful not to expose their source and laundered it through other channels.

15:50But inside the KGB alarm bells were ringing. There had to be a mole and Oleg knew it could only be a matter of time. Somewhere around this time MI6 began preparing for the worst case scenario. if Oleg ever came under suspicion and needed to be exfiltrated from the Soviet Union how would they do it? The answer came from one of the service's most brilliant officers Valerie Pettit known within MI6 circles as Joan. She'd never met Oleg but she'd studied every page of his file every map of Moscow every route to the border. What emerged was Operation Pimlico a high risk escape plan inspired by wartime tradecraft and Cold War improvisation.

16:39Its premise was bold, extract a KGB kernel from the heart of the Soviet Union using British diplomatic vehicles, concealed signals and a single moment of perfect timing. The odds of success? Minuscule, but it was all they had. The exfiltration plan worked in two stages, signal and extraction. The signal. Every Tuesday at 7.30pm an MI6 agent would patrol outside a specific bakery in Moscow. If Oleg ever needed to escape he would appear there wearing a grey leather cap, grey trousers and carrying a Safeway plastic bag. The MI6 watcher would respond by walking past while holding a green Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar.

17:27He would also be wearing a grey item of clothing. no words just a glance the extraction three days after the signal oleg would take a night train to leningrad and then travel to a specific rendezvous point near the finnish border there hidden he would wait two mi6 officers using vehicles with diplomatic immunity would pull off the road under the guise of a picnic oleg would climb into the boot covered in a mylar space blanket to hide his heat signature, he would be driven across the border into Finland. It was a plan so improbable it might just work. But first, Oleg needed a posting to Britain.

18:11In 1981, that break came. A senior position opened up at the Soviet embassy in London. Enough time had passed since his divorce. His new family appeared stable, his internal record was clean, and crucially his ideological disillusionment remain undetected. The KGB approved the transfer. However, the wheels of Moscow's KGB bureaucracy moved slowly and in the weeks he waited he was assigned a desk in room 635 of the political section of the British department. In three metal cupboards were the records of those who the KGB considered agents, potential agents or secret contacts. Gordievsky diligently worked through the files and at one point was accused of swatting.

18:59It appeared to his colleagues that he was thoroughly researching for his new role but as they were to learn later he was secretly obtaining the deepest secrets of the KGB for his new friends in London. By June 1982 Oleg and his family were on a plane to London, back in the west, back in the game. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs You know back to school is coming in fast So why wait to find your new fave footwear Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look Try it, style it, make it yours Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off First day fits, handled Walk out ready for whatever's next Visit your nearest Crocs store today Now at Lowe's.

19:53Faster quotes. Start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com, right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that. At Lowe's. Part 5. Welcome to London. It's London, 1982. The clouds over Heathrow Airport broke into shards of grey light as the Aeroflot plane descended.

20:33Oleg Gordievsky looked out of the window at the city that at once only existed in books, the city he had betrayed his country to reach. Officially, he arrived as a senior officer in the KGB's Residentura at the Soviet Embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens. He's titled Councillor. His mission, to gather political intelligence on British leadership, penetrate the Foreign Office and support Soviet active measures. Unofficially, he was Britain's man in Moscow's heart, and now he was at the centre of it all. London in the early 1980s was a city in flux. Margaret Thatcher had recently won the Falklands War, the IRA were detonating bombs and NATO war games crackled across the continent.

21:22Tensions with Moscow were climbing and the Cold War was nearing its boiling point. Oleg's first impressions were mixed. The city struck him as dirtier than Copenhagen. his assigned flat on Kensington High Street was small and noisy his embassy colleagues were bloated arrogant and incurious and it irritated him but MI6 didn't care about his comfort they cared about the fact that a colonel in the KGB now sat at the centre of Soviet intelligence in London feeding them an almost daily stream of secrets the operation resumed almost immediately after he arrived in London. Oleg called the emergency number that he'd been given in Denmark years earlier.

22:06A voice answered, a meeting was arranged. He was introduced to a new case officer, a man he only knew as Jack, assisted by Valerie Pettit aka Joan, the MI6 legend and architect of Operation Pimlico. His codename was changed to Nocton, a village in Lincolnshire, but the rhythm of betrayal resumed. This was not Denmark. In London, Oleg had access to the inner sanctum of the KGB's British operations. Names of agents, instructions from Moscow, intelligence reports being compiled, even psychological assessments of British politicians. He fed it all to MI6. Among the information was his archival research in Moscow, which revealed an update on Kim Philby's continuing work for the KGB, the fact that John Cairncross was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring and the explosive details of Agent Boot, Michael Foote, the Labour Party leader and potentially the next British Prime Minister.

23:10He worked with increasing care. The stakes were higher. In the Soviet MSC, the atmosphere was one of suspicion and mistrust. His flat was likely under their surveillance. His official job required him to cultivate contacts in British politics and academia and he did so skillfully. Gordievsky fed plausible information provided by MI6 to Moscow as he played the role of the dutiful Soviet KGB officer. He also smuggled out documents during working hours and delivered them to MI6 safe houses around the city. Microfilm was no longer needed. Now they photograph documents on site and return them before anybody noticed.

23:50He worked late nights, long days, every minute he was under threat. In 1983 the Soviet Union launched Operation Rian, a global KGB directive to monitor and detect a western pre-emptive nuclear strike. It was a project born of paranoia, first conceived by KGB chief Yuri Andropov. To Gordievsky, the operation was lunacy. The Kremlin truly believed that NATO was prepared to launch a surprise nuclear attack. The KGB Residentura in London was ordered to track hospital blood supplies, observe lights on in government buildings at night, and monitor changes in traffic outside military installations. All signs, they believed, of imminent war.

24:37In November 1983, NATO launched Able Archer 83, a realistic nuclear war simulation. It terrified the Soviet leadership. According to Gordievsky's later report, senior KGB officers in Moscow genuinely believed the exercise was a cover for a real strike. The world edged closer to nuclear war than it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Oleg sounded the alarm. Through MI6, his warnings reach Washington. The Kremlin believes nuclear war is imminent. President Reagan's administration was stunned by the revelations and they scaled down provocative operations. Do check out our episode 316. It's titled 1983, the year the Cold War almost turned hot.

25:26There will be a link in the episode information. In 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev made an unprecedented visit to the UK. He was not yet the Soviet leader but he was clearly rising. Margaret Thatcher hosted him at Chequers and came away impressed, famously declaring, I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together. Behind the scenes Gordievsky played a quiet, pivotal role. Through MI6 he learned British expectations and attitudes towards Gorbachev and fed them selectively back to Moscow. He encouraged the KGB to see Gorbachev's visit as a diplomatic success and persuaded them that rapprochement with the West was possible.

26:09When Gorbachev ascended to power in March 1985 his view of the UK and of Thatcher had been shaped in part by Oleg Gordievsky. His success in his KGB work in Britain resulted in a promotion aided by MI6. His immediate boss Igor Titov was declared persona non grata by the British government in order to leave the country immediately. With Titov gone Gordievsky was in prime position to become the head of political intelligence and lieutenant colonel in the KGB. In his new role he confirmed what MI6 suspected that Soviet penetration of the British establishment was virtually non-existent. Part 6. The Knives in the Dark.

26:55December 1982, London. In the dark chill of a winter evening an envelope slid through a Hampstead letterbox. Inside was treason, raw, unfiltered and stamped top secret. Dozens of pages taken from the heart of British counterintelligence have been folded, wrapped and hand-delivered not to the British government but to General Arcady Gook, the head of the KGB in London. The man who delivered them was not Russian. He was Michael John Bettany, a junior officer in Britain's MI5. Bettany worked in the counter-espionage branch of the security intelligence services known as MI5. He received a final warning at work following a criminal conviction for fare dodging and an arrest for being drunk in the street.

27:45He knew that other misdemeanours would be discovered at his next routine security screening. In December 1982 he took a large number of secret documents home with him from the office before trying to hand over highlights to the KGB's London resident or head of KGB station General Arcady Gook. Bettany dropped the documentation through the letterbox of Gook's house. Gordievsky informed MI6 and the British authorities managed to identify and arrest Bettany at his home in September 1983 where he'd been preparing to fly to Vienna and hand over more secrets to the Soviets. Although Bettany probably had no knowledge of Gordievsky it was not a chance MI5 or MI6 was prepared to take.

28:31However a far more dangerous threat was developing on the other side of the Atlantic. In September 1983 a 23-year veteran of the CIA was promoted into the most sensitive element of the Department of Operations which was responsible for Soviet counterintelligence. Rick, as he was known to his friends, had access to all CIA plans and operations against the KGB and the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. However, as a mid-level CIA counterintelligence officer, Aldrich Ames was living far beyond his salary. He drank heavily, cheated on his wife, and had taken on expensive habits to appease his new partner.

29:14In 1985, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and sold the names of every CIA asset operating in the USSR for$50 ,000. Among the material he gave them were details of a mole working against the KGB in the West. He did not know Oleg's name, but Soviet counterintelligence put two and two together, files Gordievsky had accessed, arrests and expulsions that had followed. The pattern was too perfect. They were close. In the UK the press got on to the Bettany story and lapped it up. With General Gook identified as the London head of the KGB and photos of Gook being splashed over the front pages, Margaret Thatcher demanded his removal.

30:02On the 14th of May 1984 he was declared persona non grata by the British government and given a week to leave the country. However, who would be the best candidate to become the new London KGB resident, the head of the KGB in London? The acting London resident role had been taken by Leonhard Nikitenko, who was then the London head of KGB counterintelligence, with Gordievsky as his deputy. The two were in a direct battle for the permanent London resident role and Gordievsky's work on the Gorbachev visit had put him in a strong position with Moscow. During the Gorbachev visit, Nikitenko had asked his deputy to visit his office.