On a late summer evening in 1971, a KGB officer walked into a north London police station with a strange request. He wanted to be expelled from Britain to divorce his wife. Within weeks, his decision would trigger the biggest Soviet spy purge in history.
Oleg Lyalin
The officer was Oleg Lyalin, a 32-year-old captain in the Russian KGB's notorious Department V, the sabotage and assassinations unit. Officially, he was a "textiles specialist" with the Soviet trade mission in London. But he was tasked with planning how to cripple Britain in the event of war: assassinating politicians, destroying railways, contaminating coastal waters with radioactive waste, and sabotaging food supplies.
Yet it was his personal life that brought him to MI5's doorstep. His marriage to Tamara collapsed under the strain of heavy drinking, late nights in London's West End, and affairs, including one with a colleague, Irina Teplyakova.
Lyalin believed that if MI5 declared him persona non grata, he could return to Moscow, divorce his wife, and start over.
Too Good To Be True?
At the height of the Cold War, MI5 was still reeling from Moscow's recruitment of British insiders like Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. The CIA warned that the KGB might send "false defectors" to mislead the West.
MI5 chief Martin Furnival Jones understood the risk. If he alerted the Americans too soon, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton might dismiss Lyalin as a plant and derail the operation. Instead, MI5 quietly debriefed him for months. Surveillance even confirmed the turmoil in his marriage.
Piece by piece, Lyalin exposed the network of Soviet espionage. The identities of KGB and GRU officers operating in Britain, coastal landing sites for saboteurs, and the framework of a support network being assembled on British soil.
A Drunken Mistake
The arrangement nearly collapsed on August 30, 1971, when Oleg Lyalin was arrested for drinking and driving in central London. He spent a night in a cell, bailed out by a Soviet embassy official, and was ordered back to Moscow. Instead, on September 3, he defected with Irina Teplyakova and sought asylum.
Later that month, Britain launched Operation Foot, expelling 105 Soviet officials accused of espionage. It became the largest single purge of Kremlin spies carried out by a Western country.
The KGB scrambled, launching internal inquiries, intensifying surveillance on its own officers, and ultimately shuttering Department V's mission against Britain. In July 1972, the Soviet Union sentenced Lyalin to death in absentia. He received a new identity in Britain and lived quietly in northern England until his death in 1995.
