Category: BCISS Symposium on Oleg Gordievsky
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Gordievsky’s role in the Able Archer 1983 ‘War Scare’: Some Synthetic Evidence.

In November 1983 NATO held a command post exercise which rehearsed new procedures for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union by NATO, which was held following a very tense year in US-Soviet relations and used a new cryptographic system. The 1988 publication of The Storm Birds, wherein Gordon…
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Oleg Gordievsky Was Not a ‘Double Agent’
Professor Philip H J Davies Spies and their Shibboleths Every profession has its terms of art that have what appears – at least to outsiders to outsiders – a disproportionate significance to its practitioners. Intelligence has many of these. They serve simultaneously as shibboleths and what might be called professional…
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Oleg Gordievsky’s Revelations and Soviet Mirror Imaging
Dr Kevin Riehle With the death of Oleg Gordievsky, it is appropriate to look back to recap what the West learned about the KGB and the Soviet Union from his revelations. His eleven years as an UK Secret Intelligence Service penetration of the KGB, followed by years of debriefings as…
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BCISS On-Line Symposium on Oleg Gordievsky
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…
