How the Concorde plans were secretly given to the Russians

Agent Ace’s identity has never been uncovered, but a new two-part Channel 4 documentary, Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, does just that. After cross-referencing what is known about Ace with records smuggled out of Russia by dissident KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, they reveal that he was Ivor James Gregory. Born in Hong Kong in 1909, we know he moved to Europe and trained in engineering, but little else is confirmed other than the secrets he passed on. 

These included not just details of Concorde’s instantly recognisable design, but also plans for the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 – the plane’s engine. “It’s really quite striking. Unfortunately we cannot get any granular detail about his motivations, or how he was recruited,” says academic and historian Calder Walton, author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. 

“There’s nothing to suggest he was an ideologically committed communist. I think it’s more likely that there was money. All we know is that he was an extraordinarily productive agent.” 

Smuggling some 90,000 files is easily dismissed in our age of hard drives and terabytes, Walton adds, “but this was old school. We don’t know his methods and it’s not difficult to imagine this was the work of a Minox camera, taking photographs of the documents.” Nor do we know how he passed the secrets on, but Soviet spies and ‘dead drop’ points were all over London at the time.

Whether Gregory was contractor ‘George’, who Britton remembers doing so many late nights in the factory, isn’t clear (it does seem unlikely he would have been Eastern European), but there’s every chance Ace wasn’t working alone. 

“We may not know Gregory’s motivations, but we know the Soviets’. Especially in the 1970s, during détente, in the West the US thought it would be an opportunity to let the Soviets become a ‘responsible player’ within international relations, while the Soviets saw it as a chance to steal as much technical and scientific intelligence from the West as possible,” Walton says. 

“Ultimately, this was absolutely not unique to Concorde; that is just one tiny part of a much wider effort across all different sectors. And it’s exactly the same thing we see with China now.” The Soviets wanted plans for infrastructure projects and government secrets; the Chinese in 2023, Walton says, are more interested in artificial intelligence and gene editing technology.

Jonathan Glancey, author of Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner, notes that while Concorde is viewed in many ways – as an icon of British-French design, the ultimate luxurious way to travel, a glimpse into an imagined future – it was also, plainly, just “an extremely political aircraft.”

“The Soviets had to hurry – under extreme pressure from their government, they only had a few years to get theirs in the air,” Glancey says. “But of course if they had all the information they needed to make the Concorde, they wouldn’t have made an aeroplane that was ultimately a failure.” 

The Tupolev Tu-144 – nicknamed ‘Concordski’ by Western journalists – really was a failure. Though it got airborne first, its performance was unreliable, its range short and its supersonic capabilities limited. There were seven years between Concorde’s first flight, in 1969, and its entering service in 1976; with almost 5,000 hours of testing, it is likely the most tested aircraft in history. 

The Tu-144, on the other hand, was hastily delivered and scarcely finished. It ended in tragedy: the Tu-144 had two crashes, including one at the 1973 Paris Air Show, when its pilot attempted to mimic Concorde’s impressive aerobatic display – which may have been beyond the aircraft’s capabilities. 

“The one thing they didn’t copy was the air intake control system, which was the heart of the aeroplane, and the thing that made it work,” says Britton, who went on to become Concorde’s chief engineer for the last few years of its time in service. After four decades working on the aircraft, he’s now long retired, too, but is as sharp an engineering mind as ever.