Oleg Gordiyevsky's Escape Across the Finnish Border
Thirty Years Later, Soviet-Era MI6 Double Agent Describes Escape From KGB
July 19, 2015 17:11 GMT
By Natalya Golitsina, Tom Balmforth
The KGB colonel knew his cover was almost blown.
Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET): Probably the most incompetent intelligence agency in the world
He had been suspiciously summoned to Moscow. They had got him drunk on cognac while a KGB general grilled him for four hours. He'd be executed if they could catch him. They seemed to be closing the net. But the MI6 double agent couldn't risk openly fleeing.
After he sobered up at home, Oleg Gordiyevsky turned to his last resort -- an emergency escape plan devised by the British intelligence services that was hidden in invisible ink in a collection of Shakespeare sonnets.
Pulling bed sheets over his head to elude surveillance cameras in the ceiling and walls of his Moscow apartment, Gordiyevsky soaked the book cover in water, revealing a set of instructions. He set about memorizing them.
The plan sketched out a risky rendezvous with two British diplomatic cars at the bend of a road near Finland. From there, Gordiyevsky would be smuggled across the border in the trunk of a car right under the nose of Soviet guards.
The meeting place was somewhere along the way, but he had only a description of the meeting place and no precise location.
Unsure exactly where to get off but having passed a big bend in the road that resembled the meeting place, he feigned sickness and nausea to convince the driver to let him off, and walked back along the road until he found the designated meeting place.
"I was surrounded by woodland where I laid down waiting for the diplomatic car of the [British] embassy. I lay there three hours waiting for the moment when the car was meant to come. At 2:20 a.m. two cars with two drivers arrived. They managed to hide around the bend for a few minutes away from the KGB car following them from Leningrad."
"I dived into the trunk of one of the cars. The whole operation took no longer than a minute, we managed to get going again before the KGB tail appeared round the corner."
Luckily, a slow goods train chugging through a railway crossing had separated the British diplomats from the KGB tail and put considerable distance between them. The KGB sped forward to catch up, but the British cars had waited by a small hill out of sight and the KGB overshot them.
"Our pursuers, having reached a traffic police post, asked the police: 'Where are the English cars?'"
"'What cars? No one has passed,' [they answered]. And then our cars appeared. They surrounded the English: 'Right, that's it, now they're going to arrest us,' they thought. But the KGB were also tired. It was half past five, Saturday, end of the working day. They'd been on duty since about 7 that morning and let us go through to the border point without checking us."
From the trunk of the car, all Gordiyevsky could hear was the driver turn on a piece of music by Sibelius called Finlandia.
"That's how I realized we were on Finnish territory."
In Finland, Gordiyevsky was let out of the stuffy trunk of the car and met by a young British diplomat named Michael Shipster. He called MI6, Gordiyevsky recalls, and announced: "The luggage has arrived. It's all in order."
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ussr-gordiyevsky-spy-mi6-escape/27137050.html