ASIO called him “one of the most dangerous KGB officers ever posted to Australia”.

He headed the Soviet spy operations in Canberra at the height of the Cold War and oversaw a mole inside ASIO.

It was the crowning intelligence achievement of the Soviet Union and Australia’s greatest ­intelligence failure.

As the mole was spilling Australia’s secrets to Moscow, it was Lev Koshlyakov who played the surveillance game of cat and mouse between Soviet spies like himself and ASIO agents on the streets of Canberra in the 1970s and 80s. He was handsome, dapper and tough. It was the golden age of espionage, a Cold War wilderness of mirrors.

But as he grew older, Koshlyakov softened and changed. The ­retired super spy would look out of his Moscow apartment as the snow fell gently on the city and wonder what it was all for. He mused nostalgically about his time in Australia, about the beach, the sun and the cricket.

And about the spy games he played against the Fraser and Hawke governments for the ­Soviet Union, an empire that crumbled with the Berlin Wall.

He would play his favourite Slim Dusty or Redgum ballads in Moscow and contemplate a world today that seems a darker place than it was when spies helped in their own way, to keep the Cold War peace.

For the last decade of his life, Koshlyakov shared his story with me, quietly via sporadic emails, from his Moscow apartment.

He talked frankly about life in Russia under Vladimir Putin, about the ASIO mole, about the folly of the Ukraine war and about the life of a spy.

His job had been to undermine Australia and yet it dawned on him, as the years passed, that he had come to love the place he called home for eight years and had always dubbed the “lucky country”.

The former KGB colonel was still loyal to his native Russia but he despaired over what had ­become of it. He mourned about what Putin had done to his homeland. He was brave to say what he said, even in private.

On December 6, Lev sent me his final email.

“During sleepless nights I recall my life episodes, contemplate about the essence of life and my stay in Australia as maybe one of the best moments and most interesting periods of my life,” he wrote.

“I hope you have seen (the) ABC (Four Corners) film on the mole. Professionally I am proud to be involved if not directly in this operation. Film is accurate and good in my opinion.

“Dear Cameron, thank you again for your empathy and all the best to you. Wish you many good stories for (The) Australian. Lev.”

Lev Sergeevich Koshlyakov died six weeks later, on January 15, aged 78 after a long battle with cancer.

An urn containing his ashes with his name engraved on it was interred in Moscow’s snow-draped Vostryakovskoye cemetery, farewelled by his loved ones and former KGB colleagues.

He takes with him the last great secrets of Australia’s Cold War spy battles with Moscow.

But before he died, Lev read all three volumes of ASIO’s official history, and shared many of his final thoughts with me and his Australian friend, defence strategist and Russian expert professor Paul Dibb.

His responses, revealed today, are the last pieces of living history from the KGB side about the Cold War spy games between the Kremlin and Canberra.

In late 2021 I sent Lev a story I had written about the Soviet penetration of ASIO in the Cold War. At that time I did not realise that he had managed the ASIO mole himself. He sent this stunning reply:

“Communism inspired Philby and his Cambridge friends in the 30s-60s, greedy and dissatisfied Americans (Aldrich) Ames and (Robert) Hanssen in the 80s, about 20 turncoats including (Oleg) Gordievsky in the KGB in 80s-90s. So do not be upset, you are in good company. But it is always painful for the service and the colleagues so it’s natural they do not want to talk about it.”

On another occasion, he said simply: “Tell them (ASIO) I never poisoned anyone and I was not going to murder Petrov who was still alive at my time. Still, I am ­almost flattered to be part of Aussie history.’

Lev’s legacy

The man who would become Australia’s KGB nemesis, was an accidental spy. His parents were actors and Lev, a talented ice speed skater, majored in English and literature in St Petersburg before choosing to join the KGB only ­because he liked detective novels. He imagined being posted to London to recruit British parliamentarians as double-agents, but was disappointed to be sent to Australia, which seemed far less glamorous.

“Australia was not a primary target but interesting as a close ally of the US, a member of the Anglo-Saxon Five Eyes intelligence co-operation, with considerable diplomatic corps in Canberra that could be a pond for intelligence fishing,” Lev recalled.

Ahead of his posting in 1977 the KGB gave him files to read about Australia and he recalled that the Petrov affair – the defection to Australia of Canberra-based Soviet KGB agents Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in 1954 – was barely mentioned in the files despite the massive and lasting impact it had on Australian politics.

“It was seen as an obsolete and unimportant case that died long ago,” he recalls. “It shocked me later (to learn) that Petrov’s case was still alive in Australian political history in the late 70s. We in Moscow underestimated the impact it made on domestic politics at the time.”

But when Lev arrived in Canberra in 1977, with his wife and young daughter, he learned that Australia had suddenly become ­vitally important in the KGB’s ­global operations.

The previous KGB station chief in Canberra, Gerontiy Lazovik, had been the recipient of some ­astonishing luck when, shortly ­before Lev arrived, Lazovik received an anonymous letter from a person claiming to be from ASIO offering classified information in exchange for money.

It seemed almost too good to be true, but on further examination by Moscow, it was genuine. The KGB suddenly had a mole inside ASIO. The KGB eventually learned that the mole was a veteran ASIO officer called Ian ­George Peacock who, as Four Corners revealed last year, was superviser of ASIO’s espionage unit in Sydney. It was a betrayal that lasted six years.

Through Peacock, the KGB learned all about ASIO’s operations against it in Australia, allowing the Soviets to stymie almost all counterintelligence efforts by the domestic spy agency. ASIO had no idea until many years later why its surveillance operations against the Soviets during this period were so regularly unsuccessful. More importantly, Peacock also had access to vital Five Eyes secrets, giving the Soviets a window beyond Australia into US and British secrets. It was a goldmine for Moscow.

Lev’s arrival in Canberra coincided with the first leaks from the mole. Lev chose as his KGB diplomatic cover the title of Soviet embassy press attache, which gave him an excuse to hang out with journalists at the National Press Club and with politicians to keep abreast of Canberra’s political gossip.

At just 32 years of age, he was a new and smoother type of KGB operator, a good conversationalist and a dapper dresser.

“(Lev) was different, a change from the old type (of Soviet spy) who had bad skin, ill-fitting suits and eyes too close together,” says one former ASIO officer.

“Unlike Lazovik, he was very much out and about – his list of press contacts (numbered more than) 115. He was an agent runner and used all the counter-surveillance tricks known.”

But even with his cover, Lev says people in Canberra always joked that he was KGB.

“I do not like to be called a spy even though almost every contact during my stay in Australia started with what seemed like a natural question ‘are you a spy?’ ” Lev told me in 2022. “Initially I felt embarrassed but as time passed I got used to it and reacted with a twisted smile and replied ‘Are you?’ ”

“I never participated in kidnappings; do not know how to open safes, shoot only at a range, never had a car chase. I like driving fast but I tried not to irritate (ASIO) surveillance teams and saved my evasion skills (for) times when they were necessary.”

But Lev may have been exaggerating his traits as a gentleman at that time. Journalist Laurie Oakes once reported that Lev beat up an ASIO officer whose role it was to tail him.

Even so, Lev claimed that ­“intelligence work mostly consists of routine paperwork, report writing and fact checking. The most important thing is that you have to be not just smart professionally and to be in the right place at the right time – to be lucky.”

Luck on his side

Lev was hugely lucky. He was posted to Canberra from 1977 until 1984, almost mirroring the years when the mole, Peacock, spilt ASIO secrets to Moscow between 1977 until his retirement in 1983. Lev was therefore overseeing the KGB’s spy operations in Australia when its penetration of Australia’s domestic spy agency was at its height. Dibb recalls his interactions with Lev at the time in Canberra.

“From a professional point of view, Lev Koshlyakov was the most hardworking and active intelligence officer in my 20 years experience of helping ASIO to understand the Soviet embassy,” he says.

“He was quick-witted and sarcastic, once telling me “welcome to the Soviet embassy, Paul. Now that your general election is over, Australia can revert to its usual ­irrelevance for this embassy.”

Lev was joking of course, ­because the KGB’s operations in Australia under his watch were the most fruitful they had ever been for Moscow as Peacock was ­actively spilling our secrets. ASIO only discovered the moles’ identity years later. Peacock, who died in 2006, was never charged. ASIO has admitted it was penetrated, but it has not publicly disclosed ­Peacock as the mole.

Not surprisingly, Lev was richly rewarded for his successful tour of duty. He went on to become KGB station chief for Norway before Oslo ejected him for spying in 1991. He was then given a series of plum corporate roles in post-Cold War Russia that were so senior that he would have needed Putin’s backing.

These included deputy chairman of the All-Russia State Television and Radio, deputy CEO of the state-owned airline Aeroflot, and deputy director of the domestic Russian airline, UTair Airlines before he retired in 2015.

A year earlier, in 2014, I ­obtained Lev’s email address in Moscow and reached out to him. He was initially cautious, refusing to answer my questions about being a KGB officer because he was “observing the rules of the game and I am a long time out”.

But over the years, slowly and unevenly, Lev began to share parts of his life with me, including his time with the KGB in Australia. I would ask him questions and sometimes he would answer them but other times he would ignore them and go offline for months at a time. “Are you still there Lev?’ was an email introduction I must have typed a dozen times over the years before I would eventually get the reply: “old spy still kicking though not as lively as before.”

I pleaded with him to write a memoir and he tossed the idea around for years, before sending me a single chapter in 2002 on his recruitment by the KGB and his arrival in Australia. “You and the snowy Moscow winter inspired me to do some writing,” he said. I peppered him with many more questions, but he never did write any more chapters.

In his correspondence with me, Lev told me some things that were sensitive but mostly he was still ­respectful of the secrets he had kept for the KGB.

As he told his friend Dibb in Moscow in 2016, “You may think I’m old fashioned, but I still do not reveal intelligence sources and methods.”

Yet in a series of emails, Lev did confirm the existence of the ASIO mole, while remaining cautious about giving too much away.

“The issue of penetration or a mole inside the service is extremely sensitive, at least for ASIO it is,” he told me in December 2021. “I know that the subject (the mole) is not alive but Lazovik and my former colleagues are.”

In 2016, after Lev read the third volume of ASIO’s official history in which ASIO admits to being penetrated, he wrote to Dibb saying, “I read volume three … the mole hunt in the ending chapter was interesting reading.

“The fact that ASIO admitted it and revealed the pain of investigation (was a) credit to its leadership.”

But Lev said he thought the political benefits of the KGB’s penetration of ASIO were exaggerated.

“Maybe (ASIO) over-estimates the importance of this source in political terms,” he wrote. “I think that ­mutual penetration of services is a kind of internal spy game bringing very little benefit politically and strategically. The greatest successes are ­obviously with the real sources like atomic spies (Soviet traitors Adolf) Tolkachev or (Oleg) Penkovsky to mention a few.”

In a separate email in October 2021, he wrote that “more details are now available in the west on our penetration into ASIO in the (late) 70s – that was not a bad operation.”

When Lev read that he was­ ­described in ASIO’s official history as “one of the most dangerous KGB officers ever posted to Australia”, he replied dryly, “I do not think I deserve such glory.”

Career’s end

Despite his retirement in 2015, he remained an active player in international affairs, having been a member since 1999 of leading Russia think tank, the Council on Foreign Affairs and Defence Policy.

He still tried to keep a close eye on Australian politics, although he quipped in December 2021, “I cannot read The Australian as the subscription is rather expensive but enjoyed watching some Australian serials on Netflix where all ASIO guys are terrible and the parliamentarians corrupt. Very similar to what we have here!”

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Lev grasped quickly how populist politics was changing the world.

“We all have to live with the fact that politics is now made not just in DC, Canberra or Moscow, but Wisconsin, Queensland and Ural,” he wrote. “I think madness is overtaking rational politics everywhere. But as old people we know that mankind has survived even worse periods. Let’s hope.”

He noted that Trump’s election had led to voices in Australia calling for a more independent Australian foreign and defence policy, saying that such an unlikely trend during the Cold War “would certainly have brought satisfaction to the Kremlin”.

“It (was) an issue with the Labor left and like-minded press during my years in Canberra and much more during the Whitlam Government but then it (to advocate it) was almost a stamp of treason or suspicion of a KGB (involvement).”

Foreign relations

He added that “there is no way Australia (would) not be a close ally of the US and everyone accepts it”.

He believed that Australia’s ­recent growing concern about the rise of China was overblown. “Can you describe reasons why China would threaten Australia when it has so many easier targets and problems in the neighbourhood,” he asked Dibb.

‘The Chinese threat (has) ­replaced the imagined or real ­Soviet one (in Australia) with the same alarmist rhetoric.”

He was also sceptical about Australia’s need to form the AUKUS pact with the US and Britain in 2021. He wrote to me after the announcement: “I understand you must feel safer now sitting with your beer protected by nuclear-powered submarines to keep dangerous Chinese away. Russians are not a danger anymore, (there are) too many problems at home.”

Lev messaged me after the death of Mikhail Gorbachev in ­August 2022, saying that he, like many Russians, had mixed feelings about the legacy of Gorbachev, whose reforms led to the end of the Soviet Union and the KGB. “He is highly recognised (in Russia) for initiating the changes and political reform, but charged with naivety in the economic sphere that brought a lot of suffering and softness to the West that provoked expansion of NATO and (made) the West feel victorious in the Cold War. I share these feelings.”

 He believed Russia had legitimate concerns about the eastwards expansion of NATO closer to Russia since the Cold War, telling Dibb in 2018 “imagine the ­Chinese trying to arm PNG and turn them to Maoism?”

But Lev was appalled when NATO’s expansion was used as an excuse by Putin to invade Ukraine.

Just weeks after Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Lev wrote to Dibb, laying out his criticism of the war in a way that he could never say publicly in Putin’s Russia.

“I believe Putin became a victim of his own dictatorial style that does not accept any opposition or doubts on his decisions, his ­maniacal belief in his historic mission of resurrection of Imperial Russia and probably some mental disorientation of the political ­environment,” he wrote.

Lev said Putin did not have a plan B if the invasion did not quickly succeed and that many Russians were opposed to it but were too scared to protest for fear of arrest.

“There is division among the public. More educated and the middle class are quietly opposing by signing petitions and voicing protests in social media. Highly paid propagandists and senior government officials are afraid to lose their warm posts …. I am very upset with all of this. We in (the) KGB were taught and believed that we make peace.”

Six months later, in September 2022 his view of the Ukraine war had only become bleaker:

“I am extremely upset with the Ukraine situation and judge it as a great failure of our foreign policy and Putin’s mistake,” he told me.

“I am against the Ukraine ­operation and I think it does great damage to my country.”  He said that conflict with the West was not what many Russians wanted because they see themselves as a part of “European political and cultural tradition”.

“Moscow restaurants and bars are full with trendy young people who want to enjoy life and associate themselves more with Europeans than Asians, so I see this situation as bizarre,” he said.

In one of his last messages to Dibb last year Lev wrote: “Most of us are very frustrated with our helplessness seeing how Russian is plunged into isolation and political degradation. I served being proud of my country … now I am ashamed of what is going on internally and externally ... we often remember the good days in sunny Australia.”

In 2022, as his cancer began to advance and he became more wistful about Australia, Lev wrote “I am still alive though I have some health problems. I still remember the famous (prime minister) John (sic) Fraser commenting … life is not meant to be easy. I (have) had some holidays in Turkey – nice but not as good as Bondi Beach.’”

“From 2016 onwards I was privileged to get a better understanding of Koshlyakov the man,” says Dibb. “As the cancer threatened his life he still enjoyed taking his dog for a walk every day and often reminisced to me how much he had enjoyed his Canberra posting, especially the Friday night hard drinking at the National Press Club!”

Lev said that reading about Australia during a Moscow winter brought “Australian warmth into my long dark evenings”.

He spoke of how “I buy good and bad Australian wines and ­expensive lamb chops in Moscow supermarkets making a small contribution to Australian farmer’s prosperity”.

“For decades the best Australian merinos wool was used for the Soviet general’s military uniforms. Now uniforms are mostly synthetic,” he wrote. “And when I want to remember ‘good old days’ I listen on my computer (to) Slim Dusty ballads and the popular 70s song ‘I was only 18 (sic) by the Red Gum group about the Vietnam War.’”

He noted how in recent years many thousands of Russians had migrated to Australia for a better life. “I hope they are not all considered spies and (have) added some flavour to multicultural Melbourne and Sydney life.”

Last month, on 19 January, the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy in Moscow made the heavy announcement that “friends and colleagues saw off Lev Koshlyakov on his last journey” to the Vostryakovskoye cemetery.

Among the eulogies was one by a friend Grigory Rapota who said: “Leo (Lev) fulfilled his duty to life, not only by doing the necessary things for a man – to build a house, plant a tree, and raise a son – but most importantly, he fulfilled his duty as a soldier. He had a difficult, difficult career in intelligence, but he remained faithful to his oath (and) overcame all adversaries.”

And yet, in his final years, Lev Koshylakov, the KGB spy who oversaw our greatest intelligence failure, came to understand a deeper truth: that Australia offered a better life than Putin’s Russia.