Oleg Gordievsky

Assembled from 13 blocks · 1 evidence · 5 related

1. Story
2. KGB officer who worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service from the mid-1970s while rising to head the KGB station in London, and who was exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in 1985 after coming under suspicion. His importance to this Journey is specific: he reported the instructions being sent to KGB residencies under Operation RYAN, the intelligence-collection programme initiated in 1981 to detect preparations for a surprise Western nuclear attack, and he conveyed to London the alarm with which parts of the Soviet apparatus read the NATO command post exercise Able Archer in November 1983. That reporting is the principal reason Western governments learned at the time that the exercise had been read as possible cover for a real attack, and it shaped how British and American leaders subsequently spoke about Soviet fears. It is also a reason for caution: much of what is known about Soviet perceptions in 1983 comes through a single well-placed source, and historians disagree over how representative his picture of Soviet leadership opinion was.
3. Knowledge
4. Oleg Gordievsky
5. Exercise Able Archer 83
6. Connections
7. Exercise Able Archer 83
8. Exercise Able Archer 83
9. Oleg Gordievsky
10. North Atlantic Treaty Organization
11. Oleg Gordievsky
12. Evidence
13. Named as the principal published account of Operation RYAN and of Gordievsky's reporting on Soviet reactions to Able Archer 83. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. It is also, by construction, a source co-authored by the intelligence officer whose reporting it describes, which is a reason to treat its picture of Soviet leadership opinion as one account rather than as settled fact.