The KGB man who spied on the bond markets

It’s not every day a former KGB spy invites you to interview him. But Alexander Lebedev is not your typical KGB spy. He’s made billions in stock-market trading, he throws lavish parties in London attended by the likes of Tom Wolfe and J.K. Rowling, and he might just be the most serious critic of Kremlin policy still standing. Naturally I accept, and go to meet him in the Hyatt hotel in central Moscow. He’s sitting at the back of the bar, dressed more like a rock-band manager than a billionaire spook.

Lebedev joined the KGB in the early 1980s and was sent to London in 1988, operating out of a flat in Kensington High Street. But he was no faceless apparatchik with a poisoned umbrella — his first interest, in fact, was studying international debt markets at the elite Moscow State University of International Relations. ‘Unfortunately, stud­ies of the debt markets by foreign economists were kept in a closed institute,’ he recalls. ‘So I was invited to join the KGB’s economic analysis unit, to be able to study these sources.’

Fledgling global debt markets were a mystery to the Soviet government, but the young Lebedev’s intuitive grasp impressed his superiors, and he was sent to London under the cover of being the embassy’s economic attaché, to report (he says) on capital flows. ‘In some ways it was one of the best jobs in the USSR — you got to travel, you had access to much more information than those at home, though of course you were always under the scrutiny of counter-intelligence. Sometimes I got in trouble for pointing out that Western economies were actually doing much better than Warsaw Pact economies.’

He disliked the Soviet system for its lies, but was still very much part of it. It’s an ambiguity that continues to this day — he’s not quite an insider, not quite an outsider, not quite a dissident, not quite a bureaucrat.