Oleg’s Desert Island necessities

Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior Russian intelligence officer ever to defect to Britain, said on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs on Sunday that since the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London, and with relations between Whitehall and the Kremlin worsening, he no longer feels safe living in Britain. Like Litvinenko, a former agent for the FSB, which replaced the KGB for whom Gordievsky worked for more than 20 years, he fears he could be murdered in Britain by Russians.

"Until five years ago I felt very safe living here," said Gordievsky, 69, who escaped to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1985, four years before the Berlin Wall came down, and lives in Surrey. "But not now. If they try to kill me, it will be here in Britain."

British intelligence had 'turned' Gordievsky into a double-agent in the 1960s when he was based in Denmark. It was not until 1982, when he was posted to head the KGB operation in London, that he became really useful to M16.

Among other things, he was credited with helping to avert a nuclear confrontation over the 1983 Nato war games codenamed Able Archer. The Russians, mistakenly believing Nato was about to attack, had nuclear-capable planes on standby at East German airbases. Alerted by Gordievsky, the West was able to defuse the worst Cold War situation since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

On Desert Island Discs, his taste in music proved eclectic - from the predictable Song of the Volga Boatmen, to an avant garde piece by the late Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, by way of Mozart and Beethoven.

He talked to presenter Kirsty Young about his high-risk defection to Britain after his cover had been blown in 1985 and he was ordered back to Moscow by the KGB. The escape plan, masterminded by John Scarlett, then his minder and now head of M16, involved Gordievsky evading his watchers and taking a train from Moscow to Leningrad, since renamed 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 agents and - for cover - their wives and small children, picked him up and he was taken to the Finnish border hidden in the boot, wearing a specially designed head cover to shield him from infra-red searching.

At the border, he could hear the search dogs approaching. But the MI6 agents' wives threw their dirty babies' nappies out of the window to disorientate the dogs' sense of smell. The trick worked and he crossed the border safely.

And what does a former KGB colonel, who has risked his life to spy for the enemy, choose as his one luxury on the desert island? "Toiletries, please - for my bath."