Henry Dodds

Henry Dodds was editor of Jane’s Soviet Intelligence Review at the end of the Cold War

The day I met Oleg Gordievsky in a Surrey safe house

From our UK edition

Twenty years ago, I made a programme for Radio 4 on Soviet military maps from the Cold War. I needed expert opinion on the highly detailed maps I had of London and Blackpool and Oleg Gordievsky, master spy of the late Cold War era, who died on Friday at the age of 86, seemed the perfect choice. Thinking about the interview the following day I wondered if we really had been in his home. Dog food and no dog? After a few phone calls, my producer Marya Burgess and I took a midday train from Waterloo Station to a location that, for the first time, I can name as Godalming. Our instructions were precise: to catch a particular train and go straight out of the station where we would find Oleg waiting for us.

Is Britain prepared for a different corona disaster?

From our UK edition

Amidst the drama of Dominic Cummings's appearance in front of MPs last week, perhaps the most important thing the PM's former adviser said was almost entirely ignored. As well as slating his former boss, Cummings criticised the UK’s disaster planning. The pandemic has shifted attention to how Britain would deal in the future with another respiratory virus, but arguably a bigger threat to this country – and, indeed, the world – has been forgotten. When it comes to dealing with solar flares, Cummings's said, ‘the current Government plan is completely hopeless. If that happens then we’re all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.