Spies And Mistries

A ripping journalistic tale about a Soviet double agent leaves an ex-SAS man’s yarn for dead.

- Greg Dixon

It was a glorious summer’s evening in 1985, and on a Moscow street a man stood sweating and smoking and waiting for a sign. In his hand was something utterly incongruous in the heart of the Soviet Union: a bright plastic bag from British supermarket Safeway. Yet he was nervously scanning the busy footpath for something stranger still: someone eating a Mars bar.

It sounds apocryphal, but it’s all true. The bag was a desperate plea for help; the Mars bar an acknowledgement it’d been heard. This was a spy urgently trying, albeit in the summer heat, to come in from the cold.

In the three decades since that singular, almost comical scene played out, the true story of double agent Oleg Gordievsky – a career KGB man who betrayed his country for a decade before his dramatic escape to Britain – has been told more than once, not least by the man himself in an autobiography in the 1990s. And Gordievsky, who still lives in Britain under an assumed name and guarded by MI6, has, at times, leveraged that story as a rent-a-quote for those wanting views from an ex-spy and KGB expert.