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Another KGB Poisoning? It’s All Very Confusing At The Moment

Here we go again: it’s been revealed that Scotland Yard’s Special Branch is investigating allegations that a Russian assassin tried to poison Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB spy who had worked for the British intelligence for nearly 17 years. Gordievsky is credited with wiping out a whole Soviet spy network in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s having supplied MI6 with names of agents recruited by the KGB.

Details of the attempted poisoning are sketchy at the moment. Gordievsky says that he had received a visit from an old friend of his, a former Russian military intelligence officer, in November last year at his secret address in Surrey. This man had supposedly slipped something into his food and drink and, on his departure, Gordievsky had collapsed. He was taken to hospital in a serious condition but later recovered. The police then began to investigate the incident on his request.

From that moment, though, the story becomes really confusing. The police investigation, according to Gordievsky, had been suddenly wound up on orders of none other than… MI6. The very same MI6 that had recruited him in 1968 when he was stationed in Denmark in the Soviet embassy as a KGB operative, paid him generously for his information and eventually smuggled him in 1985 out of the Soviet Union when his KGB bosses suspected him of being a double agent. That very same MI6 that had been looking after him all these years and even paying him a pension suddenly turned a deaf ear to his pleas for help and assistance.

But if you think that this is the only strange development in this story you’d be wrong. It turns out that the Russian assassin, who had visited Gordievsky at his safe-house, actually lives in Britain and is known to the police who have visited him at his house and interviewed him. Up to now he hasn’t been arrested or charged with anything and even travels freely abroad.

Weird, very weird all this, especially as now the police have reopened the investigation, allegedly on the request of former MI5 boss Elisa Maningham Buller, to whom Gordievsky turned for help.

Another puzzling thing is that none of the medical tests conducted on Gordievsky have produced any results, although the former double-agent insists that the KGB has been for many years producing poisons which are practically untraceable in a human body. He said that the poison used against him was possibly some sort of a derivative of Thallium which is extremely hard to detect.

So what should we make out of this story? Well, it is undeniable that there are people inside the former KGB who hold a grudge against Gordievsky and who would love to see him punished for his treachery. And these people could probably get their hands on some sophisticated poison and work out a way of bringing it into Britain. But how could they have traced Gordievsky’s whereabouts which have always been kept secret and why did MI6 ignore his complaints and even put a stop to an investigation into his alleged poisoning? It all just doesn’t make sense.

On the other hand, of course, Alexander Litvinenko, another KGB defector, had a similar problem convincing the British authorities that he’d been a victim of a hit. I remember well when my friends in Moscow alerted me to an article in one of the Russian daily newspapers about Litvinenko desperately trying to persuade the British police that he’d been poisoned and nobody treating his claims seriously. It was only about two weeks later that his version of events was finally accepted, although by then it was, of course, too late and he died in agony in a matter of days.

So at the moment there is nothing much left to do but wait for what the Scotland Yard people will come up with regarding Gordievsky’s allegations. Meanwhile let me tell you something from my own experience that might shed some light on what has happened here. There have been a lot said and written about Gordievsky’s spectacular escape from Moscow in 1985 when he gave a slip to the KGB agents tailing him and then crossed the Soviet border into Finland in the boot of a British embassy car with a diplomatic licence plate. I was then working for the state press agency TASS and one of my jobs included writing reports for the Kremlin about important events happening in the world. When I saw on the wires of Western press agencies the first reports about Gordievsky’s escape and his emergence in London as a British double agent I called a friend of mine who worked at the Lubyanka and told him about Gordievsky’s defection. ‘It must be a disaster for you people,’ I remember saying. ‘The acting KGB station chief in London turns out to be a British agent. What a coup for the British intelligence.’

But what I heard from my friend the next moment took me by complete surprise. ‘Yeah, sure, huge success for the Brits,’ he said, sounding rather sarcastic. ‘The only problem is that his defection comes as no big surprise for some people.’

‘What do you mean, no big surprise?’ I said in amazement. ‘Are you saying that it was known the he was working for the British?’

But my friend was evasive.

‘Let’s just say,’ he said, ‘that no one escapes from Moscow with the KGB breathing down their necks without a reason.’

And he declined to say anything more on the subject.

I then realised that it was probably not a clear cut case of a KGB agent recruited by a foreign intelligence service. There must have been something more to it, much, much more. And who knows, maybe what has happened here is a continuation of an extraordinary story that had started 17 years ago in Denmark.

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