Posted on 01/03/2005 5:46:57 PM PST by LaserLock
A RUSSIAN double agent who worked for MI6 for ten years before having to defect for his own safety is at the centre of a new mystery over who betrayed him to the KGB.
Oleg Gordievsky, who has lived in Britain since his escape from Moscow in the boot of a car in 1985, is now claimed to have been betrayed by a British journalist working for a magazine in Washington.
Mr Gordievsky, in an interview with The Times, discounted the latest theory, although he admitted that he still did not know who tipped off the KGB that he was a double agent.
The allegation is made in a new book, Spy Handler, which chronicles the 40-year KGB career of Victor Cherkashin, who was deputy KGB chief in Washington in the mid-1980s. He recruited two of the most notorious American spies — Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, and Robert Hanssen, another CIA officer, who was given a life sentence in 2001.
Mr Cherkashin recruited Ames in 1985, the same year as Mr Gordievsky’s enforced defection, and it was previously assumed that it was the CIA man who had betrayed Mr Gordievsky.
However, in the new book, co-authored by Mr Cherkashin and Gregory Feifer, a scholar in Russian studies and former Radio Free Europe Moscow correspondent, the ex-KGB officer says: “I knew Gordievsky was a British spy when Ames fingered him, which he did after we asked him to provide more information about the suspected SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) agent.”
He then maintains: “A Washington-based British journalist who occasionally provided us with information had tipped me off that Gordievsky was spying for the British SIS.”
Although the book does not identify the journalist, it appears to have been someone who had been recruited by the KGB as a so-called “agent of influence” — a Cold War term describing a person who was not involved in spying but was in a position to help the Russian cause with propaganda and disinformation.
Mr Cherkashin referred to the journalist as a “he”, but the imminent publication of the book has generated speculation that the correspondent he had in mind was Claudia Wright, an Australian-born writer who was working for the New Statesman magazine in Washington in the mid-1980s.
In 1994 a former junior officer in the Washington KGB residence, Yuri Shvets, claimed in a book to have recruited a journalist codenamed Sputnitsa in the 1980s, whom Mr Cherkashin identified as Claudia Wright. She died in 1991. Told of the latest allegations, Mr Gordievsky said: “How would a journalist ever have known that I was working secretly for MI6? It sounds to me like an attempt by the surviving members of the KGB of the 1980s to spread disinformation.” However, he acknowledged that he had always suspected that someone, so far unidentified, had played a part in betraying him to the Russians, wittingly or unwittingly.
When Moscow began to suspect his double role, Mr Gordievsky — then acting KGB chief in London — was summoned back to Russia for interrogation. He was not kept in custody and after contacting his MI6 handlers escaped across the Finnish border in the boot of a car.
Mr Gordievsky said that he doubted that Ames had been the first person to betray him.
In an interview a few years ago, he said, Mr Cherkashin had claimed that the CIA man had told him about the British spy during his third debriefing session, on June 10, 1985. “I was by then already in Moscow under house arrest, so somebody else must have been involved, but who it was remains a mystery to this day,” he said.
His own theory is that he may have been betrayed unwittingly by someone mentioning his name inside the British Embassy in Moscow, which was picked up by the numerous bugging devices installed by the KGB.
Modern journalists tend to be scum sucking lowlifes who don't care about anything but the story. There are exeptions of course but by and large they are rats coming from the socialist rat factories.
Oleg's book on the KGB, co-authored by Christopher Andrew, is brilliant and worth the read.
It's too generic. The whole MSM "journalists" may as well fall into this broad category.
Shocking!!!!!
/sarcasm
ping
ping
Where was that drunken toad Christopher Hitchens?
Color me skeptical, but how the heck would a journalist working in Washington, D.C. know who was spying for the Brits? It just seems a little too convient for a former KGB operative who was supposed to be "in-the-know" about who was betraying them to claim he knew it all along, or was on the trail of the guy... Hmm...
Quite likely. But if it's true, then it makes my blood run cold. Stupid, twitty journalist intent on getting the scoop, never realizing or even caring that outing someone like that can get them killed.
Whacko would probably use it as leverage to write a book about it if someone got killed as a result.
?....London...since?
?....was NOT kept in 'custody'...?
?....is this a joke?
(deep....and,...DEEPER...in total BS...?)
Well, that narrows the list down to about 99 44/100% of Beltway journalists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.