“I blossomed as a human being,” he wrote. “There was so much beauty, such lively music, such excellent schools, such openness and cheeriness among ordinary people, that I could only look back on the vast, sterile concentration camp of the Soviet Union as a form of hell.” He took up badminton and found that he loved the game, particularly relishing the game’s deceptive element. “The shuttlecock, slowing down in the final few seconds of flight, gives a player a chance to use his wits and change his shot at the last moment.” The last-minute change of shot was a skill he would perfect. He attended classical-music concerts, devoured library books, and traveled to every corner of Denmark, sometimes on spy business, but mostly for the sheer pleasure of being able to do so.
For the first time in his life, Gordievsky felt that he was not being watched. Except that he was.
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service, the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, or PET, was tiny but highly effective. Its stated duty was to “prevent, investigate, and combat operations and activities that pose a threat to the preservation of Denmark as a free, democratic, and safe country.” PET strongly suspected that Oleg Gordievsky posed just such a threat, and from the moment the young Russian diplomat with a taste for classical music arrived in Copenhagen, it had been keeping an eye on him.
The Danes routinely monitored Soviet embassy personnel, but lacked the resources for round-the-clock surveillance. Some of the telephones inside the embassy were bugged. KGB technicians, meanwhile, had successfully penetrated the PET radio networks, and a listening post within the embassy routinely picked up messages passing between the Danish surveillance teams. Yelena Gordievsky was now working for the KGB alongside her husband, listening to these messages and translating them into Russian. As a result, the KGB could often work out the positioning of PET surveillance cars, and establish when its officers were free of surveillance. Each suspected KGB officer had a code name: Gordievsky was referred to in PET radio messages as “Uncle Gormsson,” a reference to a tenth-century king of Denmark, Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson.
The Danish security service had little doubt that Gordievsky (alias Gornov, alias Guardiyetsev, alias Uncle Gormsson) was a KGB spy working under diplomatic cover.
One evening Oleg and Yelena were invited to dinner by their policeman friend and his wife. While they were out, PET entered their flat and planted listening devices. Gordievsky had been somewhat suspicious of the invitation from the Danish couple and so, in accordance with his School 101 training, he had taken the precaution of squeezing a blob of glue between the hall door and its frame. When they returned from dinner, the invisible glue seal had been broken. From then on, Gordievsky was careful about whatever he said at home.
The mutual snooping was erratic and piecemeal, on both sides. KGB officers, trained in the art of dry-cleaning, frequently managed to slip off the Danish radar. But, just as often, Gordievsky and his colleagues believed they had successfully gone “black” when they had not.
Either PET was monitoring Copenhagen’s red-light district or the Danes were shadowing Gordievsky, because he was spotted entering the sex shop and buying homosexual porn magazines. A married Russian intelligence officer with a taste for gay porn is vulnerable, a man with secrets who might be blackmailed. The Danish security service made a careful note, and passed on this interesting nugget of information to selected allies. For the first time in Western intelligence files, a question mark appeared alongside Gordievsky’s name.
Oleg Gordievsky was evolving into a most effective KGB officer. Lyubimov wrote: “He indisputably stood out among his colleagues as a result of his excellent education, thirst for knowledge, love of reading, and, like Lenin, visits to public libraries.”
The only cloud on his horizon was his marriage, which seemed to be wilting as fast as his cultural inner life was blooming. A relationship begun with little warmth grew steadily chillier. Gordievsky wanted children; Yelena, emphatically, did not. A year into the posting, his wife revealed that before leaving Moscow she had aborted a pregnancy without consulting him. He felt deceived, and furious. A fierce bundle of energy, he found his young wife strangely passive and unresponsive to the new sights and sounds around them. He began to feel that his marriage was “one more of convention than love” and his “feeling of emptiness” grew steadily stronger. Gordievsky described his attitude toward women as “respectful.” In reality, like many Soviet men, he had old-fashioned ideas about matrimony, and expected his wife to cook and clean without complaint. A skilled KGB translator, Yelena insisted there were “better things for a woman to do than housework.” Oleg might be open to many of the new influences in Western society, but he drew the line at women’s liberation; what he called Yelena’s “anti-domestic tendencies” became a source of increasing frustration. He took a culinary course, hoping to shame Yelena into doing more cooking herself; she either did not notice or did not care. Her one-line retorts, which he had once found witty, now merely irritated him. When he felt he was in the right, Gordievsky could be obdurate and inflexible. To work off his frustration, he ran every day in Copenhagen’s parks, alone, for hour after hour, returning home too exhausted to quarrel.
While cracks were appearing in the marriage, seismic upheavals were taking place within the Soviet bloc.
In January 1968, Alexander Dubček, the reformist first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party, set about liberalizing his country and loosening the Soviet yoke by relaxing controls on travel, free speech, and censorship. Dubček’s “Socialism with a Human Face” promised to limit the power of the secret police, improve relations with the West, and eventually hold free elections.
Gordievsky observed these events with rising excitement. If Czechoslovakia could loosen Moscow’s grip, then other Soviet satellites might follow suit. Within the Copenhagen KGB rezidentura opinion was sharply divided over the significance of the Czech reforms. Some argued that Moscow would intervene militarily, as it had done in Hungary in 1956. But others, including Gordievsky and Lyubimov, felt certain the Czech revolution would flourish. “Oleg and I were sure the Soviet tanks would not go into Prague,” wrote Lyubimov. “We bet a whole crate of Tuborg.” Even Yelena, usually so politically disengaged, seemed galvanized by what was happening. “We saw Czechoslovakia as our one hope for a liberal future,” wrote Gordievsky. “Not only for that country but for our country as well.”
Back at Moscow Center, the KGB viewed the Czech experiment in reform as an existential threat to Communism itself, with the potential to tip the balance of the Cold War against Moscow. Soviet troops began massing on the Czech frontier. The KGB did not wait for the Kremlin’s signal and set about combating the Czech “counterrevolution” with a small army of spies. One of these was Vasili Gordievsky.
As one brother watched with mounting enthusiasm as the Prague Spring bloomed, the other was sent to nip it in the bud.
Early in 1968, more than thirty KGB illegals slipped into Czechoslovakia, with orders from the KGB’s chief, Yuri Andropov, to sabotage the Czech reform movement, infiltrate “reactionary” intellectual circles, and abduct prominent supporters of the Prague Spring. Most of these agents traveled disguised as Western tourists, since it was assumed that the Czech “agitators” would be more likely to reveal their plans to apparently sympathetic foreigners. Among the targets were intellectuals, academics, journalists, students, and writers, including Milan Kundera and Václav Havel. It was the largest intelligence operation the KGB had ever mounted against a Warsaw Pact ally.
Vasili Gordievsky traveled on a false West German passport under the name Gromov. The older Gordievsky brother had already demonstrated his mettle as a KGB kidnapper. Yevgeni Ushakov had been operating as an illegal for several years in Sweden, mapping the country and deploying a network of subagents in anticipation of a possible Soviet invasion. But in 1968 the Center concluded that this spy, code-named FAUST, had developed a persecution complex and had to be removed. In April 1968, Vasili Gordievsky drugged Ushakov and then suc
cessfully exfiltrated him via Finland to Moscow, where he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, then later released and fired from the KGB. Vasili was awarded a KGB medal for “impeccable service.”
The next month, he and a KGB colleague set out to kidnap two of the leading émigré figures in the Czech reformist movement: Václav Černý and Jan Procházka. A distinguished literary historian, Professor Černý had been sacked from Charles University by the Communist regime for speaking out in defense of academic freedom. Procházka, a writer and film producer, had publicly denounced official censorship and demanded “freedom of expression.” Both were living in West Germany. The KGB was convinced (wrongly) that the pair headed an “illegal anti-state” group dedicated to “subverting the foundations of socialism in Czechoslovakia,” and must therefore be eliminated. The plan was simple: Vasili Gordievsky would befriend Černý and Procházka, convince them that they were in imminent danger of assassination by Soviet hitmen, and offer a “temporary hiding place.” If they refused to come voluntarily, they would be subdued using “special substances,” then handed over to operatives from the Special Actions department of the KGB and driven across the border into East Germany in the trunk of a car with diplomatic license plates—by diplomatic convention, such vehicles were usually not subject to search. The plan did not work. Despite Gordievsky’s urgings, Černý refused to believe “that he was in any greater danger than usual”; Procházka was accompanied by a bodyguard, and spoke only Czech, which Gordievsky did not understand. After two weeks of trying, and failing, to persuade the Czech dissidents to come with him, Gordievsky aborted the kidnapping.
Vasili Gordievsky, alias Gromov, then crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and joined the small, highly trained gang of Soviet illegals and saboteurs posing as tourists. Their task was to mount a series of “provocation operations,” intended to give the false impression that Czechoslovakia was about to erupt in violent counterrevolution. They distributed false evidence suggesting that Czech “rightists,” backed by Western intelligence, were planning a violent coup. They fabricated inflammatory posters calling for the overthrow of Communism, and planted arms caches, wrapped in packages conveniently marked “Made in the USA,” which were then “discovered” and denounced as proof of an imminent insurrection. The Soviet authorities even claimed to have discovered a “secret American plan” to take over the Communist government and install an imperialist stooge.
The older Gordievsky brother was at the forefront of KGB efforts to defame and destroy the Prague Spring; like his father, he never questioned the rectitude of what he was doing.
Oleg had no idea his brother was in Czechoslovakia, let alone of the skullduggery he was perpetrating. The brothers never discussed the subject, then or later. Vasili guarded his secrets, and Oleg, increasingly, guarded his. As spring turned to summer, and the march toward a new Czechoslovakia seemed to gather pace, Gordievsky insisted that Moscow would never intervene militarily. “They can’t invade,” he declared. “They won’t dare.”
On the night of August 20, 1968, 2,000 tanks and more than 200,000 troops, principally Soviet but with contingents from other Warsaw Pact countries, rolled across the Czechoslovakian frontiers. There was no hope of opposing the Soviet juggernaut, and Dubček called upon his people not to resist. By morning, Czechoslovakia was an occupied country. The Soviet Union had emphatically demonstrated the “Brezhnev doctrine”: any Warsaw Pact country attempting to renounce or reform orthodox Communism would be brought back into the fold, by force. The Prague Spring was over, and a new Soviet winter began.
Oleg Gordievsky was appalled and disgusted. As angry Danish protestors gathered outside the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen to denounce the invasion, he felt a deep shame. Witnessing the building of the Berlin Wall had been shocking enough, but the invasion of Czechoslovakia offered even more blatant proof of the true nature of the regime he served. Alienation from the Communist system turned, very swiftly, to loathing: “This brutal attack on innocent people made me hate it with a burning, passionate hatred.”
From the telephone in the corner of the embassy lobby, Gordievsky called Yelena at home, and in a torrent of expletives damned the Soviet Union for crushing the Prague Spring. “They’ve done it. It’s unbelievable.” He was close to tears. “My soul was aching,” he later recalled, but his mind was clear.
Gordievsky was sending a message. He knew that the embassy phone was bugged by the Danish security service. PET was also eavesdropping on his home telephone. Danish intelligence would surely pick up this semisubversive conversation with his wife and take note that “Uncle Gormsson” was not the unquestioning cog in the KGB machine he appeared to be. The telephone call was not exactly an approach to the other side. Rather, it was a hint, an emotional brush contact, an attempt to make the Danes, and their allies in Western intelligence, aware of his feelings. It was, he later wrote, a “first, deliberate signal to the West.”
The West missed the signal. Gordievsky reached out, and nobody noticed. In the torrent of material intercepted and processed by the Danish security service, this small but significant gesture passed undetected.
As the grim news from Czechoslovakia sank in, Gordievsky’s thoughts turned to Stanislaw Kaplan, his outspoken friend at university. What must Standa be feeling as the Soviet tanks rolled into his country?
Kaplan was outraged. After leaving Russia, he had worked at the Ministry of the Interior in Prague before joining the Czech state intelligence service, the StB. His dissident sympathies carefully concealed, Kaplan watched the events of 1968 with bleak dismay, but said nothing. The crushing of the Prague Spring prompted a wave of mass emigration, and some 300,000 people would flee Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion. Kaplan began collecting secrets and prepared to join them.
Gordievsky’s tour of duty in Denmark was approaching its end when a telegram arrived from Moscow: “Cease operational activity. Stay to make analysis but no more operations.” Moscow Center had concluded that the Danes were showing an unhealthy level of interest in Comrade Gordievsky, having probably worked out he was a KGB officer. Radio intercepts showed that, since his arrival, he had been tailed, on average, every other day, more than any other member of the Soviet embassy staff. Moscow did not want a diplomatic incident, so for his final months in Copenhagen Gordievsky was put to work researching a KGB manual about Denmark.
Gordievsky’s career, and conscience, was at a crossroads. His anger over events in Czechoslovakia simmered, but had yet to cohere into anything approaching a decision. Leaving the KGB was unthinkable (and probably impossible), but he wondered whether he might be able to switch from running illegals and join Lyubimov in the political-intelligence department, work that seemed more interesting and less squalid.
Gordievsky trod water, professionally and personally: he carried out his consular duties, bickered with Yelena, nursed his secret antipathy for Communism, and gorged himself on Western culture. At a party in the home of a West German diplomat, he fell into conversation with a young Danish man, who was exceptionally friendly and evidently quite drunk. The Dane seemed to know a lot about classical music. He suggested they go on to a bar. Gordievsky politely declined, explaining that he needed to get home.
The young man was an agent of the Danish intelligence service. The conversation had been the opening gambit in an attempted homosexual entrapment. Prompted by Oleg’s apparent taste for gay pornography, the Danes had set a honeytrap, one of the oldest, grubbiest, and most effective techniques in espionage. PET was never quite sure why it failed. Had the highly trained KGB officer spotted the attempted seduction? Or perhaps the honey in the trap was simply not to his taste. The true explanation was simpler. Gordievsky was not gay. He had not realized he was being chatted up.
Outside fiction, spying seldom goes exactly according to plan. In the wake of the Prague Spring, Gordievsky sent a veiled message to Western intelligence, which was not spotted. The Danish intelligence service attempted to ensnare him, based on a false
premise, and missed by a mile. Each side had made an approach, and neither had connected. And now Gordievsky was going home.
The Soviet Union he returned to, in January 1970, was even more repressive, paranoid, and dingy than the one he had left three years earlier. The Communist orthodoxy of the Brezhnev era seemed to leech away all color and imagination. Gordievsky was repelled by his own homeland: “How shabby everything seemed.” The queues, the grime, the suffocating bureaucracy, fear, and corruption stood in grim contrast to the bright and bountiful world he had left in Denmark. The propaganda was ubiquitous, officials alternately servile and rude, and everyone spied on everyone else; the city stank of boiled cabbage and blocked drains. Nothing worked properly. Nobody smiled. The most casual contact with foreigners provoked immediate suspicion. But it was the music that gnawed at his soul, the patriotic mush blaring out of loudspeakers on every street corner, written to Communist formulas, bland, booming, and inescapable, the sound of Stalin. Gordievsky felt under daily assault from what he called this “totalitarian cacophony.”
He was sent back to Directorate S, while Yelena got a job in the Twelfth Department of the KGB, the section responsible for bugging and eavesdropping on foreign diplomats. She was assigned to the unit listening in on Scandinavian embassies and diplomatic personnel, and promoted to lieutenant. The marriage was now little more than a “working relationship,” though they never spoke about their work, or discussed much of anything else in the grim flat they shared in east Moscow.
The Spy and the Traitor Page 4