Ben McIntyre
Appearances
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
Well, Oleg Gordievsky was the child of the KGB. I mean, his father had been a KGB officer involved in some pretty unpleasant stuff in the 30s and 40s. And Oleg was sort of born into the kind of… Soviet Praetorian Guard. But he's one of the very few spies I've ever come across who really was an ideological spy. He didn't, as he said in that clip, he didn't do it for money.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
He didn't even do it for sort of adventure or ambition. He did it because he genuinely believed that The system that he was working for was a barbarous, brutal anomaly. And it had to be. So he sort of worked for 11 years. He worked from inside the regime to try to bring it down. And it's almost impossible to exaggerate the courage that that required. I mean, Oleg was a complicated man.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
He could be very difficult at times. But his raw bravery is quite extraordinary because had he been caught, he was going in front of the firing squad, probably with some torture in between. You know, he knew the stakes he was playing for and yet he stuck to it and he paid a huge price in many ways.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
Well, Oleg Gordievsky was able to open up the KGB for the West in a way that had never happened before. He just cracked it open and he was able to tell people both MI6 and latterly the CIA, not just what the CIA was doing, but what they were planning to do. And that is gold dust in intelligence terms. He was able to put the West one step ahead.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
The event you're referring to was a moment very little known, in fact, when the world very nearly did have a full-scale nuclear confrontation. And this was because The bosses in the Kremlin genuinely believed, they were paranoid, but they genuinely believed that the West was planning a first strike. And they deployed the KGB to go and find evidence of it.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
And indeed, they were ready to attack first if they found that evidence. And there was a particular moment, a sort of a kind of training exercise that was taking, a NATO training exercise that was taking place. And Oleg Gordievsky was able to warn the West that this was being seen as the run-up to a genuine first strike.
Global News Podcast
Erdogan condemns Turkey protests as dozens arrested
So the West backed off, wound down that operation, and in fact began to sort of strip back some of the rhetoric that had been going on up until that point. And in a way, you can see Gordievsky's influence as being the beginning of the end of the Cold War in some ways.