President Putin’s chief of staff has admitted for the first time that he was exposed as a Cold War spy by one of Britain’s greatest Soviet double agents.
Sergei Ivanov, like his boss, was a career KGB officer. He later served in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, before moving into government in the late 1990s.
He has never talked in detail about his foreign postings but in an interview published by Tass, the state news agency, he said he had been betrayed by Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer who defected to the UK in 1985 after feeding MI6 with secrets for 11 years.
Asked to comment on a remark he once made that a betrayal had affected his career, Mr Ivanov, 62, said: “I can tell you now . . . I knew a man named Gordievsky. If he can be called a man, of course. I cannot say that his shameful betrayal and recruitment by the British intelligence service broke my life but I got certain problems at work. Roughly speaking, Gordievsky ratted on me. After that, I had some foreign assignments but in other locations.”
Mr Ivanov was recruited into the KGB in the mid 1970s. During his career it is thought that he served under diplomatic cover in Scandinavia and Africa, and that he may have spent a period in London in the early 1980s. That has never been confirmed, but a man called Sergei Ivanov was one of two diplomats expelled from the Soviet embassy in London in April 1983 for “activities incompatible with their status”, a euphemism for espionage.
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Mr Ivanov is a leader of the siloviki, a clan of hawkish security service veterans who surround Mr Putin and is a fan of British spy thrillers and the Beatles.
A newspaper interview with him last year was illustrated with a picture of a smiling Mr Ivanov carrying an umbrella, wearing flares and standing in front of a sign reading “Embassy Court”.
The caption read: “Sergei Ivanov does not enlarge upon his work abroad: the code of a spy does not allow it. Photograph taken in Britain, where Ivanov was sent to improve his English in the 1970s.”
In an interview with The Times in July, Mr Gordievsky, 77, described how he was smuggled out of the Soviet Union into Finland in a car boot, with the help of the MI6 Moscow station chief and his wife who casually changed her daughter’s nappy on top of the boot in order to distract the Soviet guards and their sniffer dogs.
After his escape, Mr Gordievsky was sentenced to death for treason in absentia in Moscow, and he is still despised by officials. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment via his agent in London.
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Recalling his exposure by Mr Gordievsky, Mr Ivanov said: “Since then I feel an especial disgust for betrayals.”