OLEG GORDIEVSKY, the former KGB officer who spied for Britain, fears he could be murdered by Russians in this country.

Gordievsky says he has become increasingly worried about his safety since the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, in London 15 months ago. Worsening relations between Britain and Russia have given him further concerns.

“Until five years ago I felt very safe living here,” said Gordievsky, who escaped to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1985. “But not now. They will kill me here. If they try to kill me, it will be in Britain.”

Gordievsky, speaking on Desert Island Discs today on Radio 4, adds: “I now feel they [the Russians] can find some way to damage me.”

Gordievsky, 69, who lives in Surrey, told The Sunday Times this weekend that a month after the death of Litvinenko he asked the police for more protection.

He suggested an electric wire around his garden and a police protection car at the end of his road. The fence idea was not followed up. A police car was brought in, but only for two weeks. “The police did change the door to the garage, but that was it,” he said. “Luckily I already had floodlights in the front garden.”

Gordievsky, who was honoured by the Queen for services to British security last year, made some of his most important contributions in 1982, when working as the KGB resident-designate in London. His work was credited with helping avert a nuclear confrontation over the 1983 Nato exercise Able Archer.

He tells Kirsty Young, the programme’s presenter, details of his escape from the Soviet Union to Finland after his cover had been blown. The extraction was masterminded by John Scarlett, then his “minder” and now chief of MI6.

In 1985, Gordievsky had been ordered back to Moscow by the KGB. His escape plan involved first going by train to Leningrad, now St Petersburg.

Once there, he caught a bus westwards and, at an agreed point, got out on the pretext that he was feeling ill. A car driven by MI6 officers picked him up and he was smuggled over the Finnish border in the boot, wearing a specially designed head cover to shield him from infra-red searching.

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