Intelligence Studies Review

Introduction

As has been widely noted in the press, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky passed away on Tuesday 4 March, aged 86.  Not quite ten years ago, I actually had the rare and invaluable opportunity to meet and talk at some length with Gordievsky.  I had been invited to speak at a Pall Mall club by a group of what you might call intelligence-literate concerned citizens on the issues surrounding the Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS, aka MI6) human intelligence or HUMINT reporting prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  I had an article forthcoming on the matter in the CIA house journal Studies in Intelligence and had written my doctoral thesis on the organisation and management of SIS.  And so, somebody in the group clearly thought I might find it instructive to speak with one of SIS’ most important late-Cold War agents.

Gordievsky was far more diminutive than I had expected.  He was also intensely, almost desperately, earnest about the valour of the SIS personnel on whom he had depended for his very survival since the mid-1970s, and the scale and direction of threat of the current Russian leadership.  In truth, it was not so much a conversation as a soul-felt monologue in the manner of those of deeply held but suddenly acquired religious faith.  I listened attentively, and indeed respectfully, studying this man in as minute detail as I could achieve under the circumstances and in the time available.

It was clear that this was a man who had been, as they say, ‘in the wars’.  Not the raging, impersonal battlefield, but the chilly, cautious nerve-wracking no-man’s land of Cold War espionage where enemy actively sought to know you by name, where you lived, and where your loyalties truly lay.  For a decade Oleg Gordievsky provided high grade, highly reliable intelligence to SIS from deep within the KGB before having to be smuggled out across the Finnish border once he was blown.  Agents have their own equivalent of shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD, call it what you will.  Few of them escape unscathed.

In this BCISS on-line symposium Dr Kevin Riehle, Dr Steven Wagner and I reflect on Oleg Gordievsky’s significance, on his role as a penetration – not ‘double’ – agent and why that distinction matters, on some of the insights he provided into Soviet (and by implication Russian) strategic thinking and perceptions, and try to take some steps towards a balanced, methodical understanding of his place in what is now commonly perceived as the ABLE ARCHER nuclear crisis of 1983. 

These observations are by their nature limited in scope and depth and should be considered preliminary contributions to a more thoroughgoing deliberation and discussion of Gordievsky’s life, work and impact that now needs to take place.

Professor Philip H J Davies

Director, BCISS

Symposium Contributions

Professor Philip H J Davies ‘Oleg Gordievsky Was Not a Double Agent’

Dr Kevin Riehle ‘Oleg Gordievsky’s Revelations and Soviet Mirror Imaging’

Dr Steven Wagner ‘Gordievsky’s role in the Able Archer 1983 “War Scare”: Some synthetic evidence’