It was behind a tree along this path that runs by the side of Coram’s Fields in Bloomsbury that a hollowed out brick containing £8,000 was deposited by the KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky in the mid-1980s. The intention was for it to be picked up by an agent working for the Soviet Union, and the whole process to be monitored by MI6, who would follow the man and, in a timely fashion, take back the money. The Soviet agent gave them the slip, though, in a pursuit through the streets of north London, and he and the eight grand were never captured.
This and many other tales of the Cold War are recounted in Oleg Gordievsky’s book Next Stop Execution.
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