Oleg Gordievsky, Britain’s most valuable Cold War spy inside the KGB, dies at 86

Historians consider Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior Soviet spy to defect during the Cold War, one of the era’s most important informants.

Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet KGB officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets to Britain, has died. He was 86.

Gordievsky died March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting in 1985. Police said Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious.

Historians consider Gordievsky one of the era’s most important spies. In the 1980s, his intelligence helped avoid a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.

Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became KGB station chief.

He was one of several Soviet agents who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by Britain’s MI6 in the early 1970s.

The 1990 book KGB: The Inside Story, co-authored by Gordievsky and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, says Gordievsky came to believe that “the Communist one-party state leads inexorably to intolerance, inhumanity and the destruction of liberties.”

He decided that the best way to fight for democracy “was to work for the West.”

He worked for British intelligence for more than a decade during the chilliest years of the Cold War.