Letter: Spooks with no licence to kill

Sir: Jo Brand (20 July), writing about my and allegedly Stella Rimington's participation in the game show Wanted, claims that "the spy services... doubtless killed people". She did not get it quite right.

The KGB, as the Soviet socialist state's secret police, in the past killed innumerable of their own people. Its foreign intelligence branch carried out assassinations abroad on some of its opponents. But then it got cold feet, and since the 1950s it did not dare kill a single person outside the borders of the USSR. The British intelligence and security services have never killed anybody.

OLEG GORDIEVSKY

London WC2