The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  The “Khrushchev Thaw” was brief and restricted, but it was a period of genuine liberalization that saw the relaxation of censorship and the release of thousands of political prisoners. These were heady times to be young, Russian, and hopeful.

  At the age of seventeen, Oleg enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. There, exhilarated by the new atmosphere, he engaged in earnest discussions with his peers about how to bring about “socialism with a human face.” He went too far. Some of his mother’s nonconformity had seeped into him. One day, he wrote a speech, naive in its defense of freedom and democracy, concepts he barely understood. He recorded it in the language laboratory and played it to some fellow students. They were appalled. “You must destroy this at once, Oleg, and never mention these things again.” Suddenly fearful, he wondered if one of his classmates had informed the authorities of his “radical” opinions. The KGB had spies inside the institute.

  The limits of Khrushchev’s reformism were brutally demonstrated in 1956 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to put down a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule. Despite the all-embracing Soviet censorship and propaganda, news of the crushed rebellion filtered back to Russia. “All warmth disappeared,” Oleg recalled of the ensuing clampdown. “An icy wind set in.”

  The Institute of International Relations was the Soviet Union’s most elite university, described by Henry Kissinger as “the Russian Harvard.” Run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was the premier training ground for diplomats, scientists, economists, politicians—and spies. Gordievsky studied history, geography, economics, and international relations, all through the warping prism of Communist ideology. The institute provided instruction in fifty-six languages, more than any other university in the world. Language skills offered one clear pathway into the KGB and the foreign travel that he craved. Already fluent in German, he applied to study English, but the courses were overenrolled. “Learn Swedish,” suggested his older brother, who had already joined the KGB. “It is the doorway to the rest of Scandinavia.” Gordievsky took his advice.

  The institute library stocked some foreign newspapers and periodicals that, though heavily redacted, offered a glimpse of the wider world. These he began to read, discreetly, for showing overt interest in the West was itself grounds for suspicion. Sometimes at night he would secretly listen to the BBC World Service or the Voice of America, despite the radio-jamming system imposed by Soviet censors, and picked up “the first faint scent of truth.”

  Like all human beings, in later life Gordievsky tended to see his past through the lens of experience, to imagine that he had always secretly harbored the seeds of insubordination, to believe his fate was somehow hardwired into his character. It was not. As a student, he was a keen Communist, eager to serve the Soviet state in the KGB, like his father and brother. The Hungarian Uprising had caught his youthful imagination, but he was no revolutionary. “I was still within the system but my feelings of disillusionment were growing.” In this he was no different from many of his student contemporaries.

  At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits. Oleg could be gregarious, attractive to women, and flirtatious. His looks were bluntly handsome, with hair swept back from his forehead and open, rather soft features. In repose, his expression seemed stern, but when his eyes flashed with dark humor, his face lit up. In company he was often convivial and comradely, but there was something hard and hidden inside. He was not lonely, or a loner, but he was comfortable in his own company. He seldom revealed his feelings. Typically hungry for self-improvement, Oleg believed that cross-country running was “character building.” For hours he would run, through Moscow’s streets and parks, alone with his thoughts.

  One of the few students he grew close to was Stanislaw Kaplan, a fellow runner on the university track team. “Standa” Kaplan was Czechoslovakian and had already obtained a degree from Charles University in Prague by the time he arrived at the institute as one of several hundred gifted students from the Soviet bloc. Like others from countries only recently subjugated to Communism, Kaplan’s “individuality had not been stifled,” Gordievsky wrote years later. A year older, he was studying to be a military translator. The two young men found they shared compatible ambitions and similar ideas. “He was liberal-minded and held strongly sceptical views about communism,” wrote Gordievsky, who found Kaplan’s forthright opinions exciting, and slightly alarming. With his dark good looks, Standa was a magnet to women. The two students became firm friends, running together, chasing girls, and eating in a Czech restaurant off Gorky Park.

  An equally important influence was his idolized older brother, Vasili, who was now training to become an “illegal,” one of the Soviet Union’s vast global army of deep undercover agents.

  The KGB ran two distinct species of spy in foreign countries. The first worked under formal cover, as a member of the Soviet diplomatic or consular staff, a cultural or military attaché, accredited journalist or trade representative. Diplomatic protection meant that these “legal” spies could not be prosecuted for espionage if their activities were uncovered, but only declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. By contrast, an “illegal” spy (nelegal, in Russian) had no official status, usually traveled under a false name with fake papers, and simply blended invisibly into whatever country he or she was posted to. (In the West such spies are known as NOCs, standing for non-official cover.) The KGB planted illegals all over the world, who posed as ordinary citizens, submerged and subversive. Like legal spies, they gathered information, recruited agents, and conducted various forms of espionage. Sometimes, as “sleepers,” they might remain hidden for long periods before being activated. These were also potential fifth columnists, poised to go into battle should war erupt between East and West. Illegals operated beneath the official radar and therefore could not be financed in ways that might be traced or communicate through secure diplomatic channels. But unlike spies accredited to an embassy, they left few traces for counterintelligence investigators to follow. Every Soviet embassy contained a permanent KGB station, or rezidentura, with a number of KGB officers in various official guises, all under the command of a rezident (head of station in MI6 parlance, or station chief to the CIA). One task facing Western counterintelligence was working out which Soviet officials were genuine diplomats and which were really spies. Tracking down the illegals was far harder.

  The First Chief Directorate (FCD) was the KGB department responsible for foreign intelligence. Within this, Directorate S (standing for “special”) trained, deployed, and managed the illegals. Vasili Gordievsky was formally recruited into Directorate S in 1960.

  The KGB maintained an office inside the Institute of International Relations, staffed by two officers on the lookout for potential recruits. Vasili mentioned to his bosses in Directorate S that his younger brother, proficient in languages, might be interested in the same line of work.

  Early in 1961, Oleg Gordievsky was invited in for a chat, and then told to go to a building near the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, where he was politely interviewed, in German, by a middle-aged woman, who complimented him on his grasp of the language. From that instant, he was part of the system. Gordievsky did not seek to join the KGB; this was not a club you applied to. It chose you.

  Gordievsky’s time at the university was nearing an end when he was sent to East Berlin for a six-month work-experience posting, as a translator in the Russian embassy. Thrilled at the prospect of his first trip abroad, Gordievsky’s excitement spiked when he was called into Directorate S for a briefing on East Germany. The Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic was a Soviet satellite, but that did not make it immune from the attentions of the KGB. Vasili was already living there as an illegal. Oleg readily agreed to make contact with his brother and carry ou
t a few “small tasks” for his new, unofficial employer. Gordievsky arrived in East Berlin on August 12, 1961, and traveled to a student hostel inside the KGB enclave in the suburb of Karlshorst.

  Over the previous months, the stream of East Germans fleeing to the West through West Berlin had reached a torrent. By 1961, some 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20 percent of the entire population, had joined the mass exodus from Communist rule.

  Gordievsky awoke the next morning to find that East Berlin had been invaded by bulldozers. The East German government, prompted by Moscow, was taking radical steps to stanch the flow: the construction of the Berlin Wall was under way, a physical barrier to cut off West from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany. The “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” was, in reality, a prison perimeter, erected by East Germany to keep its own citizens penned in. More than 150 miles of concrete and wire, with bunkers, anti-vehicle trenches, and chain fencing, the Berlin Wall was the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain, and one of the nastiest structures man has ever built.

  Gordievsky watched in horrified awe as East German workers tore up the streets alongside the border to make them impassable to vehicles and troops unrolled miles of barbed wire. Some East Germans, realizing that their escape route was closing fast, made desperate bids for freedom by clambering over the barricades or attempting to swim the canals that formed part of the border. Guards lined up along the frontier with orders to shoot anyone attempting to cross from East to West. The new wall made a powerful impression on the twenty-two-year-old Gordievsky: “Only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise and stop them fleeing to the West.”

  But Gordievsky’s shock at the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall did not prevent him from faithfully carrying out the orders of the KGB. Fear of authority was instinctive, the habit of obedience ingrained. Directorate S had provided the name of a German woman, a former KGB informant; Gordievsky’s instructions were to sound her out and establish if she was prepared to continue providing information. He found her address through a local police station. The middle-aged woman who answered the door seemed unfazed by the sudden arrival of a young man holding a bunch of flowers. Over a cup of tea, she made it clear that she was prepared to continue cooperating with the KGB. Gordievsky eagerly wrote up his first KGB report. Only months later did he realize what had really happened: “It was I, rather than she, who was being tested.”

  That Christmas he linked up with Vasili, who was living under a false identity in Leipzig. Oleg did not reveal to Vasili his horror at the construction of the Berlin Wall. His older brother was already a professional KGB officer, who would not have approved of such ideological wavering. Just as their mother had concealed her true feelings from her husband, so the brothers kept their secrets from each other: Oleg had no idea what Vasili was really doing in East Germany, and Vasili had no clue what Oleg was really feeling. The brothers attended a performance of the Christmas Oratorio, which left Oleg “intensely moved.” Russia seemed “a spiritual desert” by comparison, where only approved composers could be heard, and “class hostile” church music, such as Bach’s, was deemed decadent and bourgeois, and banned.

  Gordievsky was profoundly affected by the few months he spent in East Germany: he had witnessed the great physical and symbolic division of Europe into rival ideologies; he had tasted cultural fruits denied to him in Moscow; and he had started spying. “It was exciting to have an early taste of what I might do if I joined the KGB.”

  In reality, he already had.

  Back in Moscow, Gordievsky was told to report for duty at the KGB on July 31, 1962. Why did he join an organization enforcing an ideology he had already started to question? KGB work was glamorous, offering the promise of foreign travel. Secrecy is seductive. He was also ambitious. The KGB might change. He might change. Russia might change. And the pay and privileges were good.

  Olga Gordievsky was dismayed to learn that her younger son would be following his father and brother into the intelligence service. For once, she openly voiced her anger at the regime and the apparatus of oppression that sustained it. Oleg pointed out that he would not be working for the internal KGB but in the foreign section, the First Chief Directorate, an elite organization staffed by intellectuals speaking foreign languages, doing sophisticated work that required skill and education. “It’s not really like the KGB,” he told her. “It’s really intelligence and diplomatic work.” Olga turned away and left the room. Anton Gordievsky said nothing. Oleg detected no pride in his father’s demeanor. Years later, when he came to understand the full scale of Stalinist repression, Gordievsky wondered whether his father, now approaching retirement, had been “ashamed of all those crimes and atrocities committed by the KGB, and simply afraid to discuss the work of the KGB with his own son.” Or perhaps Anton Gordievsky was struggling to maintain his double life, a pillar of the KGB too terrified to warn his son against what he was getting into.

  In his last summer as a civilian, Gordievsky joined Standa Kaplan at the institute’s holiday camp on the Black Sea coast. Kaplan had decided to stay on for an additional month before returning to join the StB, Czechoslovakia’s formidable intelligence service. The two friends would soon be colleagues, allies in espionage on behalf of the Soviet bloc. For a month, they camped under the pines, ran every day, swam, sunbathed, and discussed women, music, and politics. Kaplan was increasingly critical of the Communist system. Gordievsky was flattered to be the recipient of such dangerous confidences: “There was an understanding between us, a trust.”

  Soon after his return to Czechoslovakia, Kaplan wrote a letter to Gordievsky. In among the gossip about the girls he had met and the fine time they would have together if his friend came to visit (“We’ll empty all the pubs and wine cellars in Prague”), Kaplan made a highly significant request: “Oleg, might you have a copy of Pravda with Yevtushenko’s poem about Stalin?” The poem in question was “Heirs of Stalin” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a direct attack on Stalinism by one of Russia’s most outspoken and influential poets. The poem was a demand that the Soviet government ensure that Stalin would “never rise again” and a warning that some in the leadership still hankered for the brutal Stalinist past: “By the past, I mean the neglect of the people’s welfare, false charges, the jailing of the innocent…‘Why care?’ some say, but I can’t remain inactive. / While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth.” The poem had caused a sensation when it was published in the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and had also been reprinted in Czechoslovakia. “It had a powerful effect on some of our people, with a certain tinge of discontent,” Kaplan wrote to Gordievsky. He said he wanted to compare the Czech translation to the original Russian. But in reality Kaplan was sending a coded message of complicity to his friend, an acknowledgment that they shared the sentiments expressed by Yevtushenko and, like the poet, would not remain inactive in the face of Stalin’s legacy.

  The KGB’s “Red Banner” elite training academy, deep in the woods fifty miles north of Moscow, was code-named School 101, an ironic and entirely unconscious echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the basement torture chamber where the Party breaks a prisoner’s resistance by subjecting him to his worst nightmare.

  Here Gordievsky and 120 other trainee KGB officers would be inducted into the deepest secrets of Soviet spycraft: intelligence and counterintelligence, recruiting and running spies, legals and illegals, agents and double agents, weapons, unarmed combat and surveillance, the arcane arts and language of this strange trade. Some of the most important instruction was in surveillance detection and evasion, known as “dry-cleaning,” or proverka in KGB jargon: how to spot when you were being followed and dodge surveillance in a way that would appear accidental rather than intentional, since a target that is obviously “surveillance aware” is likely to be a trained intelligence operative. “The intelligence officer’s behavior should not cause suspicion,” the KGB instruc
tors declared. “If a surveillance service notices that a foreigner is blatantly checking for a tail, it will be stimulated to work more secretly, more tenaciously, and with more ingenuity.”

  Being able to make contact with an agent without being watched—or even while under surveillance—is central to every clandestine operation. In Western spy parlance, an officer or agent operating undetected is said to have gone “black.” In test after test, the KGB students would be sent off to link up with a specific person at a precise location, drop off or pick up information, try to identify whether and how they were being followed, throw off the tail without appearing to do so, and arrive at the designated place spotlessly dry-cleaned. Surveillance was the responsibility of the KGB’s Seventh Directorate. Professional watchers, highly trained in the art of tailing a suspect, would take part in the exercises, and at the end of each day the student trainee and the surveillance team compared notes. Proverka was exhausting, competitive, time-consuming, and nerve-shredding; Gordievsky found he was very good at it.

  Oleg learned how to set up a “signal site,” a secret sign left in a public place—a chalk mark on a lamppost for example—that meant nothing to a casual observer but would tell a spy to meet at a certain place and time; how to make a “brush contact,” physically passing a message or item to another person without being spotted; how to make a “dead-letter drop,” leaving a message or cash at a particular spot to be picked up by another without making direct contact. He was taught codes and ciphers, recognition signals, secret writing, preparation of microdots, photography, and disguise. There were classes on economics and politics, as well as ideological tuition to reinforce the young spies’ commitment to Marxism-Leninism. As one of Oleg’s fellow students observed, “These clichéd formulas and concepts had the character of ritual incantations, something akin to daily and hourly affirmations of loyalty.” Veteran officers, who had already served abroad, gave lectures on Western culture and etiquette to prepare recruits for understanding and combating bourgeois capitalism.