Prof Christopher Andrew: ‘My secret collaboration with Oleg Gordievsky after his escape from Moscow in 1985’

About this event Oleg Gordievsky was Britain’s most important twentieth-century Russian agent. Following his death last year, I’m able to talk about our secret collaboration after his dramatic escape from Russia. Ben Macintyre writes in his latest well-deserved bestseller ‘Redwood’: ‘Gordievsky brought with him an encyclopedic knowledge of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service. Kuzichkin (Redwood) understood the inner workings of the (KGB) illegals section.’ In reality, the key material on illegals, especially in London, came from Gordievsky. I’ll be quoting from the KGB documents on which we worked and showing photos of illegal ‘signal sites’ and ‘dead letter boxes’ in London churches and pubs which can still be visited. I’ll also talk about my mildly hair-raising visit to Moscow in 1990