
The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet.


