‘A Total Extrovert’ : Ousted Soviet Journalist Joked About Being a Spy

A Soviet journalist who is being expelled as an alleged spy often joked that he and his wife were KGB officers and he will be missed as the life of the party at the press bar at the House of Commons, a British reporter said today.

David Healy, political correspondent for Press Assn., the British domestic news agency, wrote that Mikhail Boghdanov and his wife, Nadia, gave lavish parties at their luxury apartment “where the vodka and champagne flowed like water.”

Boghdanov, 43, was among 25 Soviet diplomats, trade officials, embassy officials and journalists ordered expelled Thursday as the Foreign Office announced that the London station chief for the KGB secret service, Oleg Gordievski, had defected and had received political asylum in Britain.

Healy wrote that Boghdanov was “a total extrovert” who spoke English with an American accent, while his wife was a “brilliant linguist.”

“They joked that one of them was a colonel and the other a major in the KGB--and that Nadia was Mikhail’s boss,” Healy wrote.

Boghdanov, who was accredited as a correspondent for Socialist Industry, a Soviet publication, liked to meet British journalist friends at the press bar in the House of Commons, Healy wrote.

“Although he has now been exposed as a Soviet spy--no great surprise to his journalist friends in London--they will miss him as an amusing colleague,” Healy wrote.