From Russia, with Guts

YOU wouldn’t spot Oleg Gordievsky in a crowd—discreetly dressed, a man with graying hair. Yet he has his place in the history of our times. A colonel in the KGB, and acting head of their station in London, he experienced Communism from the inside. Repulsed, he decided to oppose it by working for MI6, the British intelligence service. When he was detected, he was obliged to return to Moscow, to be drugged and interrogated, and kept under house arrest, with the firing squad an eventual certainty. The FBI’s Robert Hanssen, we now learn, played a part in this, and Gordievsky says “he nearly got me killed.”

In a daring feat, MI6 agents then put him in the trunk of a car and drove blithely across the border into Finland. Surveillance and controls were so tight that such an escape was unimaginable to the KGB, and a humiliating slap in the face. So far as we know, Gordievsky is the one and only person to have been smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He was also the most senior KGB officer ever to defect. In revenge, the KGB sentenced him to death. In an interview with me a few years ago, Gen. Leonid Shebarshin, head of the KGB’s First Main Directorate towards the end of the Gorbachev era, said about Gordievsky, “The KGB has a long memory, and a long arm, and it doesn’t like traitors.” They aren’t squeamish over there. Brave man that he is, Gordievsky needs to pass in a crowd. That death sentence still stands.

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

YOU wouldn’t spot Oleg Gordievsky in a crowd—discreetly dressed, a man with graying hair. Yet he has his place in the history of our times. A colonel in the KGB, and acting head of their station in London, he experienced Communism from the inside. Repulsed, he decided to oppose it by working for MI6, the British intelligence service. When he was detected, he was obliged to return to Moscow, to be drugged and interrogated, and kept under house arrest, with the firing squad an eventual certainty. The FBI’s Robert Hanssen, we now learn, played a part in this, and Gordievsky says “he nearly got me killed.”

In a daring feat, MI6 agents then put him in the trunk of a car and drove blithely across the border into Finland. Surveillance and controls were so tight that such an escape was unimaginable to the KGB, and a humiliating slap in the face. So far as we know, Gordievsky is the one and only person to have been smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He was also the most senior KGB officer ever to defect. In revenge, the KGB sentenced him to death. In an interview with me a few years ago, Gen. Leonid Shebarshin, head of the KGB’s First Main Directorate towards the end of the Gorbachev era, said about Gordievsky, “The KGB has a long memory, and a long arm, and it doesn’t like traitors.” They aren’t squeamish over there. Brave man that he is, Gordievsky needs to pass in a crowd. That death sentence still stands.