The Mars Bar defector: How MI6's greatest ever KGB mole was smuggled out of Moscow thanks to a chocolate bar, a Safeway bag and a very secret dash to Balmoral

• e-mail

Charles Powell — Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted adviser — arrived at the gates of Balmoral Castle, where the then prime minister was on her annual summer visit to stay with the Queen.

Powell was anxious and exhausted.

He had left Downing Street that afternoon in 1985 without telling No 10 officials where he was going, caught a train to Heathrow and boarded a flight to Aberdeen which he had booked himself. On arrival in Scotland, he hired a rental car and headed to the palace in the pouring rain.

His trip was so secret, he would remark: ‘I later had a problem getting my expenses reimbursed.’

Russian Spy Oleg Gordievsky, widely acknowledged to be the most valuable secret service mole at the heart of the KGB during the latter decades of the Cold War, with his ex-wife Mrs Leyla Gordievsky 

What followed was the combination of a scene from a West End farce and a John Le Carre spy novel.

The equerry at the Balmoral gatehouse was stuck on the phone for 20 minutes, despite Powell’s frantic attempts to disrupt the conversation. The call was being made to arrange for the Queen to borrow her mother’s video recorder to watch an episode of Dad’s Army.

Finally, after another delay during which the Queen’s private secretary, a courtier of ‘ingrained caution and immovable protocol’, had to be convinced of the vital importance of his visit, the determined Powell was allowed passage.

After being escorted to Mrs Thatcher’s cottage in the grounds of Balmoral by a royal footman, he found the PM propped up in bed, surrounded by papers.

Gordievsky continues to defy Moscow but has escaped the fate of subsequent turncoat and defector Sergei Skripal, a victim of the Salisbury Novichok poison attack (Gordievsky pictured in 1976)

Powell uttered two words to her during the cloak-and-dagger briefing: Operation Pimlico.

Behind them is a story which, 30 years on, continues to make headlines.

Operation Pimlico was the MI6 operation to spring a high-ranking KGB official, who had been spying for Britain but who was in danger of being exposed, from Moscow.

Thatcher’s approval was needed urgently. She gave it unhesitatingly.

Even as Powell and the PM spoke, the double agent himself was being smuggled, thousands of miles away, across the Russian border into Finland and safety in the boot of a Ford saloon car.

His name was Oleg Gordievsky, widely acknowledged to be the most valuable secret service mole at the heart of the KGB during the latter decades of the Cold War.

He was 46 then, and 79 now.

Oleg Gordievsky receives the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and Saint George from Queen Elizabeth II for his services to UK security (pictured in 2007)

He continues to defy Moscow but has escaped the fate of subsequent turncoat and defector Sergei Skripal, a victim of the Salisbury Novichok poison attack.

So why are you reading about Gordievsky today?

Because a new book revives claims that Michael Foot was in the pay of the Soviet Union when he was leader of the Labour Party in the late Eighties.

Such is the world of espionage that these claims are impossible to verify but in his book, The Spy And The Traitor, the respected intelligence historian Ben Macintyre reveals that MI6 found them credible and that Secret Intelligence Service chiefs were prepared to tell the Queen if Foot ever became prime minister.

Gordievsky graciously accepted the award from the Queen, wearing top hat and tails. He receives a £20,000-a-year pension from MI6

The source of the allegations was Gordievsky.

Foot, he said, had met his KGB handlers over lunch at the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant in London’s Soho, and received the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money for being ‘a confidential contact’.

The accusations were first published in the Sunday Times two decades ago. Foot fiercely challenged the story and won a famous libel victory against the newspaper. He continued to deny the accusations until his death at the age of 96 eight years ago.

Whatever the truth about Agent Boot — the KGB’s pseudonym for Foot, apparently, a play on his name — the controversy has turned the spotlight on the enigmatic figure of Gordievsky.

Gordievsky first came to the attention of the West in the Sixties when based in Copenhagen, running Soviet spies in Denmark and was thought to be vulnerable to blackmail after being spotted buying homosexual pornography in the city’s red light district

In 2007, he was made a Companion to the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) ‘for services to the security of the UK’. Fittingly, this is the same honour given to James Bond. Gordievsky graciously accepted the award from the Queen, wearing top hat and tails. He receives a £20,000-a-year pension from MI6.

Ever since his defection, Gordievsky has lived comfortably in the Surrey suburbs, for most of that time with his long-term British-born companion Maureen. Salmon canapes and red Bulgarian wine are said to regularly grace their dining table.

So how did he escape from the Moscow shadows to become the greatest asset our secret services have ever turned?

Gordievsky first came to the attention of the West in the Sixties when based in Copenhagen, running Soviet spies in Denmark and was thought to be vulnerable to blackmail after being spotted buying homosexual pornography in the city’s red light district.

In fact, as Macintyre explains in his book, he had been intrigued by gay practices and had taken the magazines home to show his then wife Yelena and place them on the mantelpiece as ‘an open exhibition of freedom unavailable in Soviet Russia’.

Gordievsky did make a pass at Western intelligence, however, after becoming disenchanted with the Soviet system and its brutal repression of the 1968 Prague Spring, when tanks were sent into Czechoslovakia to crush the growing reform movement.

His feelings were picked up by MI6 when a defector informed it that Gordievsky had shown ‘clear signs of political disillusionment’.

A surreptitious approach was duly made when he was playing a morning game of badminton with a female member of the Young Danish Communists.

It was, to quote Macintyre, the beginning of the ‘career’ of ‘Britain’s greatest ever spy’.

In 1982, more than a decade after being recruited on the badminton court, Oleg Gordievsky was posted to the Russian Embassy in London where he would be made the ‘resident’ — the head of the KGB in Britain. His swift advancement was helped by the fact that MI6 arranged for his immediate superiors to be kicked put of Britain.

It meant that Gordievsky provided a valuable insight into Soviet thinking at a crucial stage of the Cold War.

Three years after settling in London, though, Gordievsky was suddenly summoned back to Moscow where he was subjected to a lengthy interrogation that involved the administration of a truth drug; someone — in the CIA, it was suspected — had betrayed him.

Gordievsky may not have cracked, but he knew the game was up. It was time to activate Operation Pimlico, the daring escape plan already formulated by MI6 in the event of such an eventuality.

But how to get him out of Russia when he was under such scrutiny? The chain of events that were set in motion proves the old adage, that truth is indeed sometimes stranger — and in this case, at least, infinitely more fascinating — than fiction.

In his flat on 103 Leninsky Prospect in Moscow, Gordievsky retrieved a hardback copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and soaked the flyleaf so he could peel it off. Inside, he found a sheet containing his escape instructions, which he committed to memory.

So he found himself standing on a Moscow street corner, as per the instructions, at 7pm on July 16, 1985, clutching a Safeway carrier bag. Safeway bags bore a large letter ‘S’, an immediately recognisable logo that would stand out in the drab surroundings of the Soviet capital.

This was the signal — to British agents working in an office across the street — that his cover had been blown, and that he needed to be pulled out of the Motherland immediately.

Exactly 24 minutes later, a man walked passed him carrying a Harrods bag eating a chocolate bar; Gordievsky had been told in advance that it might be a Kit Kat or a Mars bar. In fact, it was a Mars bar. The man was an MI6 officer.

‘As he passed within four or five yards, he stared straight at me,’ Gordievsky recalled in his memoirs. ‘I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, “Yes, its me! I need urgent help”.’

Gordievsky had already said goodbye to his wife and two daughters, whom he would not see until the end of the Soviet regime.

He took a train north to Leningrad, Russia’s second city, from where he made his way to the town of Zelenogorsk, up the coast from the Baltic Sea.

Next, he caught a bus heading for the Russian-Finnish border (the nearest East-West frontier to Moscow) where the border guards were accustomed to seeing diplomatic vehicles pass through checkpoints.

Gordievsky hid in bushes until the car, with two MI6 operatives inside, arrived to pick him up.

One of the officers opened the bonnet of the Ford, which was Gordievsky’s signal to emerge from the undergrowth. After scrambling into the boot, he was wrapped in a space blanket to deflect the infrared cameras and heat detectors believed to be deployed at Soviet borders, and given a tranquiliser pill.

If the plan failed, Gordievsky knew that he would taken back to Moscow and shot.

But it was a success.

Some time after Gordievsky was driven across the Finnish border, the head of MI6 made an urgent appointment to see Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary, at No 10, and explained that Operation Pimlico was under way, and that the personal authorisation of the Prime Minister herself was urgently required.

‘We have to honour our promises to our agent,’ she would tell Powell, not realising that Gordievsky was already on his way back to Britain in the boot of a car.

For his part, Gordievsky has since said he has no regrets about betraying the KGB and says there is nothing he misses about Russia. ‘Everything here is divine’ compared to Russia, he declared in a subsequent interview.

Gordievsky has little contact with his daughters, Mariya, 38, and Anna, 37, or his former wife Yelena. They joined him in Britain in 1991 after extensive lobbying of former leader Mikhail Gorbachev by Margaret Thatcher, but after being apart for six years, the marriage ended.

How valuable an asset was Gordievsky? There was no new Cambridge spy ring, no network of KGB agents that had ‘wormed their way into the establishment in order to destroy it from within’. The most explosive ‘revelation’ was that Moscow was ‘prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference’ to swing an election in favour of Michael Foot — an ‘intriguing harbinger of modern times’, according to Macintyre.

More importantly, perhaps, he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a key moment in history. When he came to Britain Gordievsky was secretly briefing both sides, under the guidance of MI6. He told the Russians what to say to the British — and warned the British what the Soviet delegation would say to them, triggering the end of the Cold War.

Since settling here, he has worked as a security adviser and has often appeared on TV as an expert on Russian espionage.

He has been a consultant editor for the journal of National Security and co-hosted the Channel 4 show Wanted in the Nineties, in which contestants had to complete a list of challenges without being detected by a ring of spymasters.

Gordievsky remains a passionate Anglophile, subscribing to The Spectator and penning articles for the Literary Review. Paintings hanging on the walls of his home in Surrey reflect his love of avant-garde art. One of his great pleasures, he says, is feeding the foxes who visit his garden.

There has been only one sinister episode during this gilded life in the stockbroker belt.

In 2008, he spent 34 hours unconscious in hospital after falling ill at his home. He was initially paralysed and still has no feeling in his fingers. He claimed he was the victim of a Kremlin-inspired assassination plot.

‘I’ve known for some time that I am on the assassination list drawn up by elements in Moscow,’ he said at the time. ‘It was obvious to me that I had been poisoned.’

He said he was poisoned with thallium, a highly toxic metal used in insecticides which was favoured by the KGB in assassinations during the Cold War.

Of course, this poisoning claim sounds eerily like what happened earlier this year in Salisbury.

Indeed, it seems that stories about Kremlin assassins, Soviet defectors and British Left-wing politicians who are deemed Moscow’s useful idiots will continue to run and run. But surely none can surpass that of the superspy who came in from the cold.