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Boris Karpichkov is the spy who was left out in the cold, reports the Sunday People.

And even in the warmth of a London hotel room a chill goes down my spine as this trained killer’s knuckles jab towards my throat.

A few millimetres more and I would have been dead.

Boris is demonstrating how a sharp blow to the Adam’s apple or under the ear are lethal.

He denies ever killing anyone – though he insists he was asked to do so twice.

He said: “It was against my principles. But I was told by my superiors if my refusal exposed my networks I’d have become the target.

"They meant I would have been executed.”

Boris – who has agreed to share the tricks of the spy trade with the Sunday People – was a major in the KGB and its post-Soviet ­successor, the FSB.

He defected to the UK 16 years ago and has lived in the shadows ever since.

The Russians want him dead and our own MI5 don’t want him at all.

Boris, 55, could be a KGB hood from Central Casting and his life is straight out of a spy novel by John Le Carré.

(Image: Matt Sprake Photography)

He was raised in the then-Soviet Baltic state of Latvia to be “a blockheaded communist”.

He said: “I was completely brainwashed – I thought communism was the bright future for the entire world.

“At first I fancied myself as James Bond. But then I realised what the KGB was really about – blackmail and persecution.”

When he was 23, mechanical engineer Boris was recruited by the KGB and switched to Russia’s FSB spy agency after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991.

He served in the Third Department, which specialised in counter-espionage.

Had he shown a flair for assassination he might have ended up in Department 13, the so-called Department of Wet Affairs, whose agents had a licence to kill.

But he did have a pen that fired bullets and had a s­ecret compartment for poison.

He still has the set of KGB skeleton-keys he used for picking locks.

And he claims he spied on Latvia for the Russians and on Russia for the Latvians, the CIA and the French.

By 1998 the FSB had rumbled him, so he fled to Britain using false travel documents for himself and his family.

The defection, he says, won him a death sentence from his ex-bosses.

Boris hoped MI5 would pay for a cosy new life in exchange for the two cases full of top secret documents he brought with him.

But the agency was awash with defectors and couldn’t afford to bankroll another.

Boris has had to fend for himself ever since with occasional security work.

But he remembers all the tricks of his trade – such as how to kill a man bare-handed.

(Image: Matt Sprake Photography)

Most spy work is now done by computer but there are still occasions when secret orders, maps and rendezvous arrangements have to be put down on paper and delivered – the classic dead-letter drop.

Boris advised: “Look for the most unused item in a room and stick your message behind it with chewing gum.”

That’s usually the fire extinguisher.

No one will touch it unless the building is burning down – and then your secrets will burn with it.

Boris used railings by London’s Westminster Bridge to show how to hide a memory-stick in public. Within seconds it was invisible.

When his Russian ­dissident friend Alexander Litvinenko died in London of polonium poisoning in 2006 Boris says MI5 told him to flee the country because his life was in danger.

He flew to New Zealand, where a mystery illness left him a “walking corpse”.

Despite massive weight-loss he survived – and is convinced the Russians infected him.

Boris claims New Zealand agents tailed him everywhere and he had to use counter-surveillance skills to thwart them.

He said: “Simple changes like a reversible hat and jacket make all the difference.

"Disappear into a bar or ­restaurant and come out with them reversed.”

Boris is full of tips for budding secret agents.

Always arrive for meetings at least an hour early in case the venue is being watched – a precaution he is convinced has saved his life twice.

(Image: Matt Sprake Photography)

Look for anyone hanging around and see if they make eye-contact.

Check for parked cars with their engines running, especially if they have a driver and two or more passengers.

And a final giveaway: Surveillance cars are always surprisingly clean.

Boris still notes down the number plates of suspicious cars in case he sees them again.

And he’s most fearful of any vehicle carrying Russians, especially if it has diplomatic plates beginning 251D.

New Zealand officials say they shadowed Boris because he has links to Russian organised crime.

Boris denies any such mafia connections.

But he was forced to quit the country with the same false ­passport he’d used to get in.

The Latvian admits he’s had six fake passports in his time and says the key to a good forgery is the two lines of letters and figures beneath the photograph.

(Image: Matt Sprake Photography)

Many international passports don’t have microchips so border control ­machines read those two lines.

And if you get the code right you can pass through any airport in the world.

Boris used a Lithuanian passport in a false name to go to New Zealand.

Fake identities used to be found by scouring graveyards for dead babies who would be about your age now – a method made ­famous by Frederick Forsyth in his thriller The Day Of The Jackal.

But today’s spies use social networks such as Facebook because many people lodge so much personal information on them.

And it’s where Boris came across a Lithuanian man called Vladimir – still unaware his ID has been filched.

Boris said: “I have no idea who he is but I was able to find out enough to know he didn’t have a passport.”

The spy got credit cards in his name, had business cards made and became an academic working for a London university.

And false emails showed he’d been invited to New Zealand for a conference.

Boris has an impressive array of documentation to prove everything he says.

And independent checks with Whitehall security sources confirm he is who he claims to be.

But in the wilderness of mirrors that is the murky world of espionage, nothing is ever quite what it seems.