My VERY surreal day with Britain’s bravest double agent – the ex-KGB colonel who saved us from nuclear catastrophe and whose mind-boggling escape from Russia is the stuff of legend: RICHARD PENDLEBURY

‘Jane, Jane! Close the French windows! There is a draught on my ankles!’ The irritated speaker did not much resemble James Bond. Nor was the put-upon Jane, who scuttled off without demur to close the garden doors, much like Miss Moneypenny.

But here I was, with MI6’s greatest double agent, in the safe house in the Surrey stockbroker belt, where he’d lived under the protection of a grateful British state ever since one of espionage’s most celebrated escapes.

Oleg Gordievsky, former colonel in the KGB, head of its London station and the man who possibly saved us from an accidental Third World War, was reported on Friday to have died at the age of 86.

His place in history as one of the most significant shadow players in the Cold War is reflected in the formal obituaries.

He was feted at the White House and in 2007 the Queen made him a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, an honour reserved for people who have made distinguished contributions in international affairs.

But on hearing the news of his death I couldn’t help but recall the very strange day I spent as Gordievsky’s guest more than a decade ago.

It came about through my research into a particular area of Cold War politics. Someone suggested I should try contacting Gordievsky. Finally, and no doubt after official vetting, I was given his telephone number. I called.

A gruff, heavily accented voice gave me my travel instructions.

Utter discretion was impressed upon me. And so, one summer morning, I boarded a train at Waterloo, bound for the Surrey town of Godalming. 

Waiting at the station for me, in a nondescript saloon car, was the aforementioned Jane. She was a woman of late middle-age and little chit-chat. 

Later, I was told that she had been one of Gordievsky’s original MI6 handlers when he defected and reached England. She seemed to have continued this role as his general factotum, part- or full-time, it wasn’t made clear.

She drove me to a suburban residential street, not far from the centre.

We stopped in front of a house behind a hedge which gave it privacy. Beyond the front gate, the garden path led to the front door of the kind of semi where one might expect to find a bank official who took the 7.21 to Waterloo every morning and returned each evening on the 5.45.

Instead, it was the lair of the Russian-born super spy.

In the flesh, Gordievsky presented an almost fragile figure. He had a stoop and so seemed far smaller than his original 5ft 8in – and walked with a limp.

His scraggily bearded facial features appeared a little distorted, a look he attributed to a number of strange illnesses he had suffered, which he blamed on attempts by the KGB to poison him.

Indeed, he had spent 34 hours in a coma in hospital in November, 2007, after taking some pills given to him by a UK-based Russian business associate who told him they were the sedative Xanax.

According to Gordievsky, they were, in fact, thallium, a highly toxic metal used in insecticides which was favoured by the KGB in Cold War assassinations.

Initial pleasantries over, Gordievsky suggested we go and have lunch at his favourite restaurant, even though it was not yet midday. This proved to be a branch of an Italian pasta and pizza chain – possibly Prezzo, I can’t quite recall – where Gordievsky was obviously a very regular diner.

‘Your usual grappa, to start with sir?’ asked one of the waiters as we sat down.

I looked at my watch. It had just passed 11am. Coffee time for the rest of Godalming. Grappa time for Oleg Gordievsky.

They also knew his favourite pasta dish. He liked dough balls too, I recall.

He ate and talked. Often, it was quite difficult to understand him because of his heavy accent.

And of course there was the effect of the 11am grappa with the Peroni chasers that followed. ‘Last month, William Waldegrave and some of my other government friends from that time gave me a dinner here, in the private room,’ he volunteered, proudly. ‘They have not forgotten me.’

One imagined the Old Etonian Waldegrave – a Foreign Office minister in the Thatcher government – and various former mandarins and senior spooks, in the back room poring over the laminated menu to decide which pizzas they would order.

A far remove from White’s, Beefsteak and Pratt’s, the three London gentlemen’s clubs of which Lord Waldegrave is a member.

‘We should go back to the house and talk some more,’ said Gordievsky, who was obviously mindful of his legacy and liked to talk about his exploits.

I liked to listen to them. The afternoon continued, with Jane hovering in the background with tea or something stronger.

In his 1995 memoir, Gordievsky wrote: ‘I had been entirely pro-Western since the [1968] invasion of Czechoslovakia.’

He said he was first approached by ‘Dick’, an officer in MI6, in 1974, while playing badminton in Denmark. Gordievsky had been posted to the Russian embassy there. 

This initial contact came to its glorious fruition in 1982 when Gordievsky, along with his wife Leila and two young daughters, was posted to London, with diplomatic cover as a counsellor. It was, he later wrote, ‘like being put into orbit and sent to the Moon’.

The Gordievskys lived in a ‘small, dark’ embassy flat in Kensington High Street and at first the agent was unimpressed by the ‘squalor’ of 1980s Britain.

But there were more important considerations. ‘Simply to be in London, with my head full of KGB and Kremlin secrets that I could pass on, was a mighty victory for British intelligence and me.’

In the memoir and, to me that day in Godalming, Gordievsky talked of various prominent Britons that Moscow had wanted him to approach and cultivate as possible intelligence assets.

They were the usual suspects – trade unionists (he visited the home of former Transport and General Workers’ Union leader Jack Jones on a number of occasions), Labour MPs, an adviser to the Labour leader Neil Kinnock and even, rather incongruously, the author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. 

‘After studying his record [Moscow Centre] had come to the conclusion that he was progressive [that is in Moscow’s eyes, friendly to the Soviets] and also influential in the British media.’

This operation, wrote Gordievsky, was ‘killed at birth by lack of resources’. The KGB simply did not have enough spies in London to cultivate prominent politicians and civil servants, let alone the presenter of the South Bank Show. In any case, he added: ‘I never received the slightest indication that Bragg would play our game.’

The other spies at the London embassy were no good, he told me. The most they would do as far as information gathering was concerned was to read the local newspapers or listen to the radio. ‘All they really liked to do was drink vodka and gossip about the wives of colleagues. Particularly the wife of the ambassador.’

This was a cause celebre among the diplomats and spooks. Ambassador Viktor Popov’s second wife was 28 years younger than him and subject to a good deal of ‘scandalous’ tittle-tattle.

She drank, apparently. Perhaps because her husband was too old for their marriage to be mutually satisfying.

‘Yes, the others were useless spies,’ he told me. ‘Lazy. I was the only one doing any kind of work there.’ Of course, the work he did best was not for Moscow but the British security services.

His greatest service as a double agent is said to be his tip-off that a 1983 Nato exercise codenamed Able Archer was being seen by Moscow as cover for a genuine attack on the Soviet bloc. Nuclear missile launchers had been put on high alert. Gordievsky’s warning on Kremlin paranoia saw the exercise curtailed and an accidental Third World War averted.

Which brings us to his escape.

By spring 1985, Gordievsky was acting head of the KGB station in London. But then the ‘ground opened under me’.

In May he was summoned back to Moscow for ‘briefings’ and found his flat in the Russian capital had been burgled – by his colleagues, he assumed – which could only mean he was (rightly) suspected of treason.

A week later he was taken to a KGB safe house, drugged and interrogated. He was told his British posting had been ‘terminated’. Now he was in a deadly limbo: suspected of being a double agent, with the KGB actively hunting for conclusive proof.

He had one chance. An escape plan – codenamed ‘Pimlico’ – had been formulated by his handlers at MI6. Gordievsky had to act with extreme care. He knew his Moscow flat had been bugged by the KGB and he also suspected hidden cameras. The instructions on how to warn MI6 that he was in danger were secreted in the flyleaf of a novel he kept on a bookshelf in his flat. These he very carefully removed and read in a box room.

The initial step, he recalled, was ‘to appear on a certain street corner at 7pm on a Tuesday, and stand by a lamp post on the edge of the pavement holding a plastic Safeway shopping bag’.

This he did. But the second step – when he was supposed to pass a written message detailing his situation to an MI6 agent – was bungled when he lost his nerve. He would have to start the warning process again, which he did.

A second novel on his bookshelf contained his ‘exfiltration plan’. Somehow, while under close surveillance, he would have to reach a rendezvous point in a forest on the border between the Soviet Union and Finland.

In the instructions, French place names were substituted for the Russian originals. Gordievsky began his nerve-shredding escape – which would lead either to freedom, death or life in jail – by ‘dry-cleaning’; in other words, throwing off his KGB close surveillance and reaching Leningrad railway station in Moscow, undetected. There, he bought a fourth-class ticket for a sleeper train two days later.

He spent his last night in Moscow with his flat door barricaded and the incriminating rail ticket on a tin tray along with a box of matches so he could burn it if the KGB tried to break in.

The following day he left his apartment block as if to go jogging in the nearby forest and made it to the station and his train carriage without being intercepted. At Leningrad – now St Petersburg – the next day he disappeared into the crowd and headed for another station where he caught his final train.

A bus took him close to the assigned rendezvous point. He spent some time hiding in a forest by the road until two UK embassy cars pulled up, carrying two men and two women.

Gordievsky climbed into the boot of one of the vehicles – a Ford driven by the then MI6 head of station Raymond Asquith – and they set off for the border. The daring plan had been signed off by Prime Minister Thatcher.

The aristocratic Asquith – or Viscount Asquith to give him his correct title then – had brought with him, as cover, his wife Clare and their baby daughter Frances.

When the vehicles were stopped at the final checkpoint, the claustrophobic, overheated and terrified Gordievsky could hear the Soviet guards and their dogs.

What he didn’t know was that Frances’s dirty nappy was being changed on the lid of the boot in which he was hiding, as Soviet sniffer dogs milled around.

A packet of crisps was also shared with the alsatians. They detected nothing or at least did not raise the alarm. Gordievsky had escaped.

He left behind Leila who never knew he was working for the British, and his daughters. The couple were reunited in the UK six years later but the marriage didn’t survive.

In Godalming, in something of a grappa-haze, it was time to take leave of Gordievsky.

‘Here, I give this to you as a gift.’ He handed me a colour photograph. ‘Taken in White House in 1987,’ he said proudly. And there he was, shaking hands with President Ronald Reagan. I suspected he had a number of copies which he saved for visitors.

His proudest moment and irrefutable proof of his worth to the West and the ‘leader of the Free World’ in particular.

I left feeling that he did not have long to live. He was a sick old man who’d had an incredible life but was dying by inches in the necessary shadows. As solace, he had the long-suffering Jane and occasional visits from those who recalled his distant glory days. But I was wrong, the teak-tough Gordievsky still had more than a decade left.

And there was another twist in this tale. In 2016, as the rebel-held Syrian city of Aleppo was being pounded by Russian jets, I attended a conference held in the capital Damascus hosted by the father-in-law of the brutal president Bashar Al Assad.

The chair of one of the discussion panels and perhaps the event’s most distinguished – and controversial – foreign guest was Raymond Asquith, now Lord Oxford and a Lib Dem peer.

Months earlier, Vladimir Putin had ordered his military to step in to the civil war to prop up the faltering Assad regime. Yet, here was the former MI6 head of Moscow station and Gordievsky’s rescuer, taking part in an event that was nothing more than propaganda for a murderous Putin client.

In recent years Lord Oxford has also had a business relationship with Dmitry Firtash, an exiled Ukrainian oligarch who has been linked to Putin and was sanctioned by the UK government last November for ‘extracting hundreds of millions of pounds from Ukraine through corruption’. How the shadows shift in time.

And now the greatest shadow-man of them all, Oleg Gordievsky, is gone.

I’ll raise a glass of grappa to the memory of him and that very peculiar day in Godalming.