MI6 double agent was 'betrayed by a journalist'

[emad]

Times
By Gregory Feifer and Michael Evans



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.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1424438,00.html