80. The Man Who Saved The World: Making of a Traitor (Ep 1)

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2:53Looking back now, I find it extraordinary that I was driven so hard by ideological compulsion. Yet my feelings were immensely strong because I was living and working on the frontier between the totalitarian world and the West. seeing both sides and constantly angered by the contrast between the two. The totalitarian world was blinded by prejudice, poisoned by hatred, riddled by lies. It was ugly, yet pretending to be beautiful. It was stupid, without vision, and yet claiming to be fit to lead the way and pioneer a path into the future for the rest of mankind. Anything I could do to damage this monster, I gladly would.

3:34Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And that, dear listeners, was former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky writing in his memoir, which has an exceptional title, I Feel Gordon, Next Stop Execution. And we are, in the coming episodes, going to be telling the absolutely remarkable story of Oleg Gordievsky, the man, his life and times, his work for the KGB, his work against the KGB, as he ends up spying for Britain's MI6. And I think, Gordon, I mean, it's probably fair to say that Gordievsky is right up there as one of the most consequential spy cases run during the Cold War.

4:21I don't think that's hyperbole to put him in that pantheon. No, I think that's absolutely right. I think there's a personal drama, there's excitement, there's all the other things, but it's also the importance of his case. And I sometimes get people asking, does spying really matter? And I think Gordievsky is so interesting because it is the one case where you can say, this is about one man, one spy who made a difference, who had a direct impact, not just, but certainly on the worlds of kind of counterintelligence and spy versus spy, but also on the kind of political and strategic direction of the Cold War.

4:59I think all of that just makes him really, really interesting and really, really important. The period that we'll be talking about, which is the period where he's most active, is kind of late 70s, early 80s. And it's a period in the Cold War that's maybe next to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the point where there's the greatest risk of the Cold War actually going hot. And it's fascinating because, I mean, there's so many spy cases during the Cold War where you could argue that maybe they don't actually make any practical difference on the outcome of events. And yet it does seem like with Gordievsky, there's almost, you could draw a line between this kind of atmosphere of rising tensions and Gordievsky's reporting, which as it made its way to London and other Western capitals, really helped leaders in the West, I think, make better decisions about how to deal with the Soviet Union to understand the leadership of the Soviet Union.

5:55And that insight, that is why these spy services exist. So Gordievsky is absolutely one of the most consequential kind of figures in the world of espionage. I mean, probably at least in that last half century. We talked before, I think in the Tolkachev series about how only a A few spies actually pay the bills for intelligence agencies. Yeah, exactly. And I think Gordievsky is one of those because he is operating at this time. And I think it's maybe hard for people to remember that there was a bit in the early 80s, a period when the danger signs were flashing quite red. The tension was growing.

6:29And the key to understanding why there was so much tension was misunderstanding on both sides. And that's when intelligence plays such a big role because intelligence can illuminate your adversary and help you understand them, not just in the kind of crude sense of war fighting or finding out about spies, but actually helping you manage tension and prevent it boiling over. And I think that's why he's so interesting, because I think it is an example of when is human espionage important and when is digital or cyber espionage important? What could you do with people and what could you do with machines?

7:03But actually, in this case, I think it needed a person to be able to tell people these things and talk to them and help them understand. And again, I think that's why Gordievsky is so important. I think what we'll hope to do in telling Gordievsky's story, just like we do with Tolkachev's, is to shine a light on the really fascinating connection between these kind of world-changing events and what's going on in the head of a single person. Because Gordievsky's psychology, I mean, as we'll see, he's a pretty abnormal guy. And I don't mean that in he's sort of a deviant or something like that, but he's got a particular psychology that I think is kind of alien.

7:45We should also note that this is essentially Gordon Carrera's Super Bowl because we have the nexus of Russia espionage. And this is a source run by British intelligence, SIS, MI6, right? This is not a source run by the Central Intelligence Agency. So this is his sweepstakes here. You've won the lottery, my friend. Congratulations. And I'd just like to say the CIA will feature in our story, but not necessarily in the happiest way. And we'll come to that later. Let's not spoil that surprise. It's not necessarily always the most positive role in this. But yes, it is a story that I'm really interested in.

8:24And I mean, Gordievsky died this year. You knew him. I knew the man. I kind of met him, I guess, about 15 years ago when I was making a documentary about MI6. And then I wrote a book about MI6. And I used to go to see him. I can now say where I went to see him because you used to have to keep it secret. It was at an undisclosed location, which is now, you know, can be revealed was Godalming in Surrey, which is a very quiet suburban kind of, well, not suburban, sleepy commuter, quite affluent town, you know, outside of London. You turn up at the train station, someone picks you up, someone takes you to his house.

8:55You go there for lunch and he'd sit there and there'd be a bottle of red wine on the table and some sandwiches and then you'd talk. And that was the way with Oleg. It was a good aftersight, actually, into the life of defectors. And I think we'll come to that at the end as well, what it was like for him, the security around him, some of the scares, because there were some even recently around his security. And, yeah, I think that also gives you a flavour of the reality of life for defectors, including the most important, like Gordievsky. But, yeah, he was a pretty unique individual. And there's a great picture, which hopefully I think we'll put it on social media or something, of a younger Gordon Carrera sitting with Oleg.

9:37I'm sure he was enjoying himself, but he doesn't look very happy. And neither do you. Everyone's kind of scoured. No, I'm smiling. You have half a smile, like a thin smile on your face, and Oleg sort of looks like he looks frustrated. I think that was his look. It's interesting, but I think he felt like, I'm a serious man. I must, when I'm having my picture taken, I don't think he did the smiles. I don't think you do Russian smile in pictures a lot. Maybe not. I mean, someone reach out if that's wrong. I mean, who is this guy? Begin at the beginning, Gordon. You know, we love to go back deep into context, of course.

10:11So he's born in Moscow in 1938. And I think few crucial things will come to. But one of them is that the KGB is family to Gordievsky. Poor guy. Exactly. I mean, his father is going to serve in its ranks. And his brother, as well as Oleg himself, are all going to be KGB officers, although it's called something different in the 30s. And within actually his slightly interesting, complicated home life, I think, are some of the seeds of what he will become, his betrayal and his discipline, I think. So his father's a committed communist, joins the party soon after the 1917 revolution, which brings the Bolsheviks to power, creates the Soviet Union, working as a food official originally, then joins what's called the NKVD.

10:59But that's basically the forerunner of the KGB around 1932. Oleg has an older brother, Vasily, born in 33, and then Oleg himself born five years later. Now, it's interesting because even at this period, this is 1938, this is the era of Stalin and the purges and what's called the Great Terror. And Stalin is purging the Soviet system of officials, but including the secret police themselves. And his father is both part of that and in fear of it as a member of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. His father's a kind of strict disciplinarian, doesn't speak to his son about his work, but he always says the NKVD is always right.

11:43I've always wanted to work for an organization like that. That wasn't the CIA mantra. No, not quite. But I guess you have to say the NKVD is always right, because if it's wrong, then you're in trouble. And I think Ole can already sense that there's a kind of fear beneath what his father says about the NKVD. and his father is seeing colleagues around him being arrested as part of this great terror. I think there's 28 flats in their apartment block and people lived in apartment blocks based on their work. So these are all other kind of people involved in the security world. And a quarter of the flats were raided with the people who lived them taken away.

12:21And, you know, they're going to the gulags, they're being executed. There's going to be just this wave of terror and people exiled to Siberia. So if you have any doubts about this, you have to hide it. You have to keep it secret. But then on his mother's side, what's interesting, his mother's slightly different. His mother is more willing to question. His mother's eldest brother had been deemed an enemy of the people and had been sent to die in the camps in the gulags. So you can see already his mother is going to be less keen on the system. And her mother, so Oleg's grandmother, had been religious and tried to get Oleg baptised.

12:56His father had stopped it because it's an atheistic country and he knew that would kind of get them killed as well. So you can see that the two different branches of the family are slightly tugging him already in slightly different directions. And Oleg's mother, you feel like, can see the brutality of the system. And he could hear his parents arguing in their bedroom at night about it. A little bit more context on how nasty the Great Terror was. I mean, producer Callum's popped in here, 692 executions as part of the Great Terror. So we're not talking about like, a sort of, you know, lazy purge here.

13:32I mean, this is hundreds of 1000s of people. And of course, in the in the gulags, I mean, I think the official figure is very low, but it's like 700 ,000 to like 1.2 million people, which is the estimate. So huge, huge numbers of people sort of pulled into this. And I do also find it fascinating, Gordon, because Tolkachev, the series we did earlier in the year, I mean, it's the same thing where you have family members who get sucked up into this meat grinder. And years later, you have these guys who joined the Soviet system and are sort of deeply resentful of it because of the deprivations and the predations of the 1930s.

14:10Yeah, it's very similar, isn't it? So I think with Oleg, this notion that you have to live a double life comes quite young. You have to bury your feelings, you have to hide them. And of course, that's going to make him a very good spy and a very good agent in his time, because he's understanding that need. And on the surface, he describes himself as making himself appear as a normal homo sovieticus, which is this phrase which means a Soviet man, which means you are the perfect man, you are like those kind of propaganda posters, you're bravely pushing forward for the revolution. But beneath the surface, he compares it to the double think that George Orwell talks about in 1984, where you tow the party line in public, but in private, you know that it's wrong and that it's different.

14:58And, you know, parents warn their kids not to joke about things. And this ability to lead a different exterior and interior life seems to come really young to Oleg and quite naturally to him. He's in the youth wing of the young pioneers, and he's actually a leader of it, which is basically the Boy Scouts plus Marxism. And he's head of the school branch. But inside his head, he's like a free thinker. But on the outside, he's able to appear as this loyal citizen of the state. So I think that's really interesting. And then there's one memory that he recalls from when he's 17, which is when a man his father's age turns up at their door, and he's looking thin, wearing strange clothes.

15:38And he says he was an old friend of his father, of Oleg's father from when they were young, and that he's just been released from the Gulag. And he was hoping to see his old friend, Oleg's father, again. But then he's told, well, Oleg's father is now in the KGB. And he goes pale, and he just vanishes. And then when Oleg's father comes home and finds out that this guy's been to visit, he's panicked and agitated. This plants these seeds in Oleg about what the system really is. We'll watch those seeds kind grow through the series. It is interesting how the entire Soviet system and the way it seeps into the minds of its citizens actually prepares many of them for successful careers betraying it.

16:25Because even if he doesn't take the steps that he's going to take in the future, you have this double-think system where you can operate as a defector in place in your mind already. Right. And you think of how many other hundreds of thousands of kind of young Soviet citizens had basically betrayed the ideals and the mantras of the Soviet state. They don't take the steps necessarily that Oleg does, which is an entirely different game. But you have all of this prepared mentally before he ever runs into a British intelligence officer. I think in a way that the inverse isn't true. Right. the Americans who commit espionage, I mean, in particular later in the Cold War, you don't have this kind of gigantic pool of potential recruits who have defected in place from the American system.

17:14It's interesting, isn't it? The nature of the totalitarian system also breeds people who will be quite good at betraying it because they understand the discipline and the need to kind of have double lives. It's a really interesting point. So at school, he's smart, he's bookish, he's got a voracious appetite to learn. He's cultured, good at languages. starts learning German, plans a career in the foreign ministry, goes to the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He notices that other students choose not to read Western newspapers. So ordinary Soviet citizens couldn't read them. But here at the Institute, you can read them to learn the languages.

17:48But they don't even want to do that because it's too risky, you know, to be interested in subversive views. But he's interested in them. He watches 1956 Soviet tanks crush the Budapest, the Hungarian uprising, when Hungarians were trying to loosen the grip of the Soviet Union, they were brutally killed. Interesting enough, though, he's still a part of the system, still not a defector or a dissenter. He's quite a handsome young man, good company, but reserved. And I think that's a kind of another big character trait. He's kind of focused, disciplined. Here's the really interesting bit of his story.

18:21At age 19, he takes up long distance, cross-country running. And I was talking with someone who knew him well just the other day, and we agreed that this was actually one of the secrets to understanding his personality and his whole life, including as an agent. Because the qualities you need to be really good at long distance cross-country, and he was good at it, are endurance and patience. The ability to see things through, to overcome obstacles, to be single-minded, even when you're in that race, block out everything to focus on it. Perhaps also to deal with a certain kind of loneliness, you know, the loneliness of the long distance runner.

18:59And it's not about being a sprinter. It's not about showing off. It's just about a disciplined finishing of the race. And I think that is Oleg. You know, that is his character in that kind of long distance cross-country runner. He's a grinder. He can just like grind through pain over long periods of time. And it sounds also like it would have been painful no matter how sort of grooved you got your mind to live this way, to live with just sort of a disgust and fear of the system around you, and also be part of it. You can kind of understand why some of these students with him at school don't even want to look at the Western newspapers.

19:36I mean, obviously, there's a whole security issue around it potentially, but it almost seems like it could be painful. And then also, one interesting, important fact, which we'll come back to, in his love of running at that time, he also gets to know a Czechoslovak student, who becomes a good friend who's also a runner. Meanwhile, his brother Vasily has followed in his father's footsteps. He's joined the KGB. Interestingly enough, he's going to become an illegal, which for those who haven't heard our previous episodes, are the kind of elite deep cover spies who go abroad posing as different nationalities, sometimes short missions, sometimes for years and decades.

20:09They are the elite of Russian spies. And his brother says, well, Oleg's good at languages. You might be interested in it. And I think Oleg himself at this point sees the interest in following in his father and his brother's footsteps. I guess you can understand why, perhaps, you know, even if he's got that bit of dissent. I mean, it's still an interesting career. It's the family business. I also do think we'll, I mean, we'll talk more about some of the distinctions inside the KGB, but where his brother is working kind of matters, right? Because they're talking about working in, I guess, what was then the first chief directorate of the KGB, right?

20:46So it's externally focused. It's not the knuckle draggers and the second chief directorate who are keeping sort of watch on everybody at home. I can understand why to Oleg it might appeal to him to sort of have a more external focus in his work. Yeah, it's probably the one chance, the one way you get to travel and go abroad. If he's interested in the world, you know, he's learning German, that thought is part of it. You know, he gets interviewed. He's not quite in yet, but he's on the path there. And then as part of his studies, he gets six months experience abroad. And where does he go? He goes to Berlin.

21:20And it's so interesting. Again, there's this kind of almost cinematic quality of this because he arrives late on the evening of August the 11th, 1961, to stay at the student hostel. And already he senses there's something going on in the city because refugees have been heading west by the thousands. So we should explain Berlin is a kind of strange bubble with an eastern and western zone, but sat in eastern Germany, and people are flooding into the western zone to escape the east. And I think more than two and a half million have done this since the end of the Second World War. Kind of voting with your feet against communism, right?

21:57Yeah, you know, young people looking for a better future. And of course, this looks terrible for East Germany and communism, doesn't it? You're supposed to be the future, and all the young people are kind of leaving. So Gordievsky just by chance has arrived at this moment when something absolutely pivotal in Cold War history is going to happen because he's warned on the evening after he arrives, don't go out anywhere by someone at the embassy because the next morning after that, barbed wire is going up over the city and the Berlin Wall is being built to stop that flow of people. This famous, iconic thing is being put up in front of his eyes to stop people.

22:36And you get the desperate scenes of some people trying to get up and get over the wall before it's finished. People are killed at that moment. So he's witnessing again, up close in this really intimate way, the reality of the communist system. It is also interesting because it doesn't send him on some radical new path. Whatever he internalizes in Berlin for a while stays inside, right? Because he goes and continues sort of his process to join the KGB. I think he's being tested out by the KGB at this moment. So he's not yet in. And they ask him to do a set of kind of quite small missions in Berlin.

23:16Like one is he's to go and see this woman who had been in touch with the KGB and tell her that they want to resume contact with her and see if he can persuade her. And he turns up with some flowers. He talks to her. He writes a report. I mean, later he realises that actually it was just a test. It was a game. She was working for them. She was reporting on him, basically, to say, how did he do it? And was he any good? Rather than him having actually to persuade her. That was just a bit of a game. But clearly, he's passing these tests. And so I think it is that lure of foreign travel, the thrill of espionage.

23:51Sometimes it's that simple, right? It seems like it'll be a fun adventure, no matter what you might think about the overall organization or the system around you. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think he's decided he can keep his descent closed deep inside him and outwardly lead this actually quite successful life as a KGB officer. So at that point, he is invited into the KGB. He can see the world opening up before him. And he's on a path to follow, I guess, in his father and his brother's footsteps. Yeah, so maybe there with the blast furnace of potential treason lit inside Oleg Gordievsky's heart and soul and mind.

24:32Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll see how he gets on when he joins the KGB. At the Home Depot, get up to 15 % off all installed carpet projects for a limited time. Featuring brands like LifeProof, LifeProof with Petproof technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master. Take your pick of carpet built for real life and designed for real comfort. Plus, with installation starting as low as 49 cents per square foot and a free measure to get you started, we'll handle the hard parts for you. Offer valid July 16th, 2026 through August 2nd, 2026. Exclusion supply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers.

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