John Daniel

They missed surveillance on them during a meeting or whatever.

Ultimately, they gave themselves away.

When in reality, it was all because Aldrich Ames wanted money, so he'd handed over a list of names.

There's been some debate around that in terms of the timeline, but I asked the former chief of CIA counterintelligence.

There's some discussion still as to whether Aldrich Ames was able to give up Oleg Gordievsky to the KGB.

Do you have any particular insights on that?

Yeah.

That's what I remember.

Good enough for me.

Now remember, Gordievsky manages to get out thanks to an MI6 escape plan.

It's a shame because he's about to become the resident in London.

So this would have been like chief of station for the KGB in London.

Yeah, so that would have put him in a very powerful position.

But anyway, he gets away from the KGB after they brought him in for interrogation, presumably because they want to check that Ames' information is good.

It's only the previous month that he's approached the KGB in America, and even they can't go around bumping off their own people without checking out the story behind it.

Yeah, the nice man from the KGB, as my mother put it, clearly likes it here from what he writes in his book, Next Stop Execution.

He says 1986 was his first visit of four.

Obviously, he does a lot of talking in the UK and the US.

He has meetings with Thatcher and Reagan.

And he goes to CIA where he talks with their Soviet teams.