Spy Who Helped Prevent WWIII Dead at 86

Oleg Gordievsky, a double agent who helped British intelligence during the Cold War while stationed in London as the Soviets' top spy, has died. He was 86. Police, who said they found him dead at his home near London, are investigating but said foul play is not suspected, the New York Times reports. Gordievsky was living there in exile under British security. He had been sentenced to death in absentia in Moscow after fleeing the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car in 1985. The sentence was never lifted.

When offering his services to the UK in 1974, Gordievsky wrote to the head of MI6 to say he wasn't irresponsible or unstable, per the Washington Post. He just decided that "democracy, and the tolerance of humanity that follows it, represents the only road for my country." He'd been recruited by the British while stationed in Copenhagen, before moving to London in 1982. Once there, the KGB assigned him to spread disinformation about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ahead of the election the next year. Gordievsky set up a front to satisfy his supervisors in Moscow while helping British intelligence find undercover operatives and informants working for his home country. He was quickly promoted to the top KGB agent in the UK.

In the early 1980s, Gordievsky used his ties to both sides to help pull the US and the Soviet Union back from what some historians have called the closest the two countries had come to starting a world war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Partly because of President Reagan's rhetoric, the Soviets became convinced that the US was going to launch a first-strike nuclear attack under the cover of a NATO exercise. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies went to a war footing. Gordievsky convinced his Soviet bosses that the exercise was not leading to an attack, and he got across Soviet concerns to the British and US. He also helped convince Thatcher that Mikhail Gorbachev, who was not yet in power, was genuinely interested in making reforms.

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His double role ended in 1985, when he came under suspicion; he blamed Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer working for the Soviets. Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, given drugs, and interrogated. When he denied everything, he was released but kept under surveillance. "They expected I would do something stupid," he later said. "Sooner or later they would arrest me." In an elaborate operation, two British agents smuggled Gordievsky across the Finnish border, with their baby in the car, per the Post. When the four successfully passed the checkpoint, they were greeted by a UK diplomat who telephoned MI6 to say, "The luggage has arrived." (More obituary stories.)