‍Operation PImlico was a life-and-death mission to exfiltrate a British-Russian double agent from the KGB’s clutches - a high-stakes plan so outrageous it included a Mars bar moment, a newborn baby, and plot twists that could rival any spy thriller.

Oleg Gordievsky was a KGB Colonel secretly recruited by British intelligence during the Cold War but by 1985 Moscow was suspicious. Was there a mole in their ranks? They recalled Gordievsky from London to Russia where he was drugged and interrogated for five hours. Terrified, Gordievsky realized he had only two options: escape or execution.

“If I did not break out of the great concentration camp of the Soviet Union within the next few weeks, I would die,” Gordievsky writes in his memoir Next Stop Execution.

Gordievsky barricaded himself inside his Moscow apartment with furniture to slow down any late-night KGB visitors. He removed two books of Shakespeare’s sonnets from his shelf and soaked them in water, removing the cellophane-bound instructions sealed into the hard covers. Fearful his home was bugged with KGB microphones and video cameras, he read the MI6 escape plan by candlelight: Appear on a specified street corner on any Tuesday at 7 pm carrying a Safeway plastic bag. Wait long enough to be noticed. Make eye contact with a man carrying a Harrods bag who’ll be munching food. On the third Sunday after that, pass a written message by brush contact in St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square.
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Gordievsky’s first outing ended in agonizing failure so he returned the following Tuesday and locked eyes with a man carrying a Harrods bag and chewing a Mars bar: “As he passed within four or five yards, he stared straight at me,” Gordievsky said. ”I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, ‘Yes! It’s me! I need urgent help!”

What followed was a harrowing journey into fear and near-madness as Gordievsky - staking his life on eye contact and a chocolate bar - prepared to abandon his apartment, his bank account, his wife, and their two children. If all went as planned, he’d rendezvous with a British team and be whisked over the border in a diplomatic car without incident. All did not go according to plan, however. Far from it. 
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Shaking off the KGB‍

Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, the son of an NKVD secret police officer, began his journey as a KGB officer in the illegals department, the Russian unit that trains officers to work overseas using false names and backgrounds.

Fluent in Russian, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and English, Gordievsky rose quickly and was posted to East Berlin in August 1961, just before the Berlin Wall was erected. He witnessed first-hand the division of the city and the Soviet brutality which had a lasting psychological impact.

The 1968 Prague Spring, which saw Soviet forces crush the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, deepened his disenchantment. As Gordievsky climbed the ranks to become London chief of station, he made overtures to the Danish and British governments to indicate he was willing to cooperate.

Gordievsky operated under the codenames Sunbeam, Nocton, and Tickle as he exposed classified Russian secrets from 1974 to 1985. While working as KGB station chief at the Soviet Embassy in London, a telegram arrived ordering his return to Moscow. Gordievsky chose to follow orders, not knowing he’d been betrayed by CIA-KGB double agent Aldrich Ames. Gordievsky returned to an ambush.
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Soviet interrogation

‍“Priznaysya!” his interrogator repeated hypnotically. “Confess! You confessed very well a few minutes ago. Now please go through it again, and confirm what you said. Confess again!”

Drugged and exhausted, Gordievsky suspected he was performing well but after five-and-a-half hours of questioning he had trouble remembering the details. “At one stage I went to the bathroom, and I may have been sick,” he recalled. “I could not tell what the KGB had or had not found out; but it was clear that I was, in effect, under sentence of death, even if that sentence was suspended pending further investigations.”

Gordievsky didn't wait for the bullet to the back of his head. It was June 1985 and he followed his British escape instructions to the letter. On the night of his departure, Gordievsky lost his Soviet surveillance team with extensive 'dry cleaning'. He walked calmly to a nearby forest, then broke into a run. He reappeared on a crowded street, doubled back, watched the Moscow streets from the window of an apartment stairwell, then boarded a train. He had a fourth-class ticket with a top bunk leaving Moscow on Friday at 5:30 pm. “By then I was so nervous that everything appeared highly sinister,” he said. 

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Gordievsky: drugged and disoriented

Gordievsky drugged himself to sleep with a double dose of sedatives. He awoke in the lower bunk to discover he’d fallen out of bed during the night. He was disheveled, unshaven, and bleeding from his temple onto his clothing. The sophisticated KGB officer who needed to blend into the crowd would now stand out to any guards at the train station. Still, he pushed ahead.

Gordievsky needed to catch another train, a bus, then hitchhike to a forest where he would hide behind a large rock and wait for the British exfiltration team. Arriving more than three hours early at the rendezvous point, Gordievsky lay down in the forest only to discover it was a haven for mosquitoes.

Little did Gordievsky know, the wheels at Britain’s Foreign Office were moving slowly. Former Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, in his memoirs Conflict of Loyalty (1994), recalled that on Saturday July 20, two senior officials - one from the Foreign Office, the other from MI6 - visited his country residence where Howe gave the go-ahead for Operation Pimlico. The decision was endorsed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There was no turning back for Gordievsky or the British team. 

The spies weren’t out of the woods yet though. 
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The MI6-KGB race to the Finnish border

The plan was for Britain's spies to arrive in two diplomatic cars, speeding up in the last few minutes before arriving at the rendezvous point to pull ahead of any KGB surveillance team trailing behind. They’d stop near the rock - seeming to all the world as if they were men in need of a quick rest break - then smuggle Gordievsky into the trunk and drive across the border into Finland. 

Gordievsky - disoriented, bloodied, and now set upon by mosquitoes - was at his breaking point when the British team arrived 15 minutes late at 2:45 pm. Two men got out - including the man who’d enjoyed the Mars bar in Moscow - accompanied by two women who transpired to be their wives. Gordievsky was soon sweltering in the trunk and battling claustrophobia under an aluminum space-blanket used in case Soviet guards turned an infra-red heat detector on the car at the checkpoints.

“All the time, I was thinking, What happens if someone opens the boot?” Gordievsky recalled. “The British, I knew, would have to disown me. They would feign amazement and cry, ‘By God! A provocation!’ claiming they had no idea who I was.”

Gordievsky's nightmare played out in his head as the diplomatic cars were pulled over at the Russia-Finnish border. Russian officials with sniffer dogs demanded to search the cars. Was the game up? A quick-thinking diplomat's wife saved the day by using the border stop as an opportunity to change her baby's diaper. She lay the child on the trunk as Gordievsky lay in hiding, then dropped a dirty diaper to the ground to distract the sniffer dogs from Gordievsky’s scent. The guards, happy to keep their distance, waved the vehicles through the checkpoint. 

Gordievsky, uncertain about what was transpiring, heard the car radio switch from loud pop music to Sibelius’ Finlandia. The trunk was soon opened. “I saw blue sky, white clouds, and pine trees above me,” Gordievsky said. “Thanks to the courage and ingenuity of my British friends, I had outwitted the entire might of the KGB. I was out! I was safe! I was free!”

Oleg Gordievsky: free at last?‍

Gordievsky's escape marked a turning point in the Cold War as the intelligence he provided to MI6 could be acted upon immediately without jeopardizing his life or identity. He revealed KGB contacts in Britain, exposed Soviet plans in Scandinavia and elsewhere, and alerted Western leaders to Kremlin paranoia in the 1980s.

Gordievsky continued his work in the UK under tight security, receiving honors for his remarkable service, writing books on the KGB, and providing insights into the secret world of espionage including one of the most remarkable and audacious exfiltration operations ever attempted.