The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  “I carefully examined all the other people in the restaurant, to see if I could recognize any other member of the Soviet embassy staff, whose pictures were all filed in our office. Everyone seemed to be an innocent Dane, or an equally innocent tourist. I sat back, wondering if Oleg would come.”

  Gordievsky entered the dining room exactly on time.

  Bromhead detected “no hint of special nervousness, though his style was intrinsically taut, poised for action. He saw me at once. Had he already been told which table I had reserved? I wondered, as my mind raced into conventional spy fever. Oleg smiled his usual friendly smile and walked over.”

  Bromhead felt a “friendly atmosphere from the start” as they tucked into the Østerport’s excellent Scandinavian buffet. The conversation ranged across religion, philosophy, and music. Oleg made a mental note that his companion had done his homework, and “took trouble to talk about subjects of interest to me.” When Bromhead remarked how odd it was that the KGB deployed so many officers abroad, Gordievsky’s response was “noncommittal.” The Russian mostly spoke Danish; Bromhead replied in a messy mixture of Danish, German, and Russian, a linguistic smorgasbord that made Gordievsky laugh, though “there didn’t seem to be any malice” in his amusement. “He seemed to be totally relaxed, and was obviously aware that we were both intelligence officers.”

  When coffee and schnapps had been served, Bromhead asked the crucial question. “Will you have to file a report about our meeting?”

  The reply was revealing: “Probably, yes, but I’ll make it a very neutral one.”

  Here, finally, was the hint of collusion—not a flash of leg exactly, but the glimpse of an ankle.

  Even so, Bromhead left the lunch “more puzzled than ever.” Gordievsky had hinted that he was, in part, concealing the truth from the KGB. But he was also behaving exactly like a man who believed he was the hunter, not the prey. Bromhead sent a memo to MI6 headquarters: “I emphasized my fear that it had been much too easy, and the strong impression I had that he was being so nice to me because he wanted to recruit me.”

  Gordievsky also reported back to his bosses; a long, insipid document, concluding that the meeting had “been of interest,” but framed to emphasize “the apparent importance of my own initiative.” The Gray Cardinal was delighted.

  And then something quite extraordinary happened: nothing at all.

  The Gordievsky case went dead. For eight months there was no contact whatever. Quite why this happened remains a mystery.

  In Geoffrey Guscott’s words: “Looking back, you think: ‘How dreadful, the case just went into the long grass for months.’ We were waiting for the Danes to report, waiting for Bromhead to come back. But nothing happened. Bromhead took his eye off it—he was pursuing two or three others and it was such a long shot, you think it is never going to happen.” Perhaps Bromhead’s suspicions had applied the brakes harder than he intended. “If you push too hard, too quickly, it can go wrong,” said Guscott. “When it goes right, it is often because you don’t push.” In this case, MI6 failed to push at all: “It was a cock-up.”

  But it was a “cock-up” that, in the long run, worked. Gordievsky was concerned when weeks passed without an effort by Bromhead to renew contact, then dismayed, then quite angry, and finally oddly reassured. The pause gave him time for reflection. If this had been a dangle, MI6 would have moved much faster. He would wait. Give the KGB time to forget the contact with Bromhead. In spying, as in love, a little distance, a little uncertainty, an apparent cooling on one side or the other can stimulate desire. In the eight frustrating months that followed lunch at the Østerport Hotel, Gordievsky’s enthusiasm grew.

  On October 1, 1974, the tall Englishman reappeared at the badminton court in the dawn light and suggested they meet again. Bromhead’s reason for suddenly reestablishing contact was that he was being redeployed to Northern Ireland as an undercover officer, to conduct operations against the IRA. He would be leaving in a few months. “There was not much time left. I had decided, therefore, to waste no more of it,” Bromhead later wrote, with a briskness that suggests he was fully aware he had been wasting time. They agreed to meet at the SAS hotel, run by Scandinavian Airlines, a brand-new building never frequented by Soviet officers.

  Bromhead was waiting at a corner table in the bar area when Oleg arrived. Asterix and Obelix, the two PET agents, had arrived some time earlier, and were sitting at the opposite end of the bar, trying to look inconspicuous behind a potted palm tree.

  “With his usual clockwork punctuality, Oleg walked through the door on the stroke of one o’clock. The light was dim in the corner I had chosen, and for a moment Oleg looked around. To prevent him taking too much notice of the surveillants, I rose quickly to my feet. He came straight over, with his familiar smile.”

  The atmosphere was immediately different. “I felt it was time I took the initiative,” Gordievsky later recalled. “I was alive with anticipation. He had sensed this, and felt the same.” Bromhead moved first. MI6 had authorized him to indicate that this was more than a flirtation: “After our drinks had been brought, I went straight to the point.

  “ ‘You’re KGB. We know you have worked in Line N of the First Chief Directorate, the most secret of all your departments, which is running illegals all over the world.’ ”

  Gordievsky did not hide his surprise.

  “Would you be prepared to talk to us about what you know?”

  Gordievsky gave no reply.

  Bromhead pressed on. “Tell me, who is the PR Line deputy in your section, the person in charge of political-intelligence gathering and agent running?”

  There was a pause, and then the Russian broke into a broad grin.

  “I am.”

  Now it was Bromhead’s turn to be impressed.

  “I had toyed with the idea of talking about world peace and so on, but my intuition about Oleg told me not to try any such blarney. But everything was still too easy. My suspicious mind was unable to accept this man at face value. My instinct was telling me that he was a remarkably nice person and I could trust him. My training and experience of KGB officers, on the other hand, was screaming caution.”

  Another marker had been put down, and both knew it. “All at once we were almost colleagues,” wrote Gordievsky. “At last we began to speak in plain language.”

  Bromhead now administered the “acid test.”

  “Would you be prepared to meet me, in private, in a safe place?”

  The Russian nodded.

  Then he said something that flicked an invisible light from amber to green. “No one is aware that I am meeting you.”

  After their first encounter, Oleg had informed his superiors and written up a report. This meeting was unsanctioned. If the KGB discovered he had contacted Bromhead and kept it secret, he was doomed. By informing MI6 that he had told no one, he was making his switch of allegiance perfectly clear, and putting his life in their hands. He had crossed over.

  “This was a big step,” Guscott later recalled. “It was the equivalent, in adultery, of saying: ‘My wife doesn’t know I’m here.’ ” Gordievsky felt a flood of relief, and a fluttering surge of adrenaline. They agreed to meet again, in three weeks, in a bar on the edge of the city. Gordievsky departed first. Bromhead a few minutes later. Finally, the two Danish undercover intelligence officers emerged from behind a potted plant.

  The courtship was over: Major Gordievsky of the KGB was now working with MI6. SUNBEAM was up and running.

  In that one cathartic moment, in the corner of a Copenhagen hotel, all the strands of a long-brewing rebellion had come together: his anger at his father’s unacknowledged crimes, his absorption of his mother’s quiet resistance and his grandmother’s hidden religious beliefs; his detestation of the system he had grown up in and his love of the Western freedoms he had discovered; his simmering outrage over the Soviet repressions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Wall; his sense of his own dramatic destiny, cultural superiority, and opt
imistic faith in a better Russia. From now on Oleg Gordievsky would live two distinct and parallel lives, both secret, and at war with each other. And the moment of commitment came with the special force that was central to his character: an adamantine, unshakable conviction that what he was doing was unequivocally right, a whole-souled moral duty that would change his life irrevocably, a righteous betrayal.

  When Bromhead’s report landed in London, the senior officers of MI6 were gathered for a conference at the service’s secret training base in Fort Monckton, a Napoleonic-era fortress near Portsmouth on England’s south coast. At 10 p.m., a small group gathered to consider Bromhead’s report and decide on a course of action. “The question of whether this was a provocation was raised time and again,” said Geoffrey Guscott. Would a senior KGB officer really be willing to risk his life by meeting secretly with a known MI6 operative? On the other hand, would the KGB dare to dangle one of its own officers? After a tense debate, it was agreed to press ahead. SUNBEAM might seem too good to be true, but it was also too good to pass up.

  Three weeks later, Bromhead and Gordievsky met in the dark, almost empty bar: both had carefully dry-cleaned themselves en route; both were “black.” Their conversation was businesslike, but halting. The lack of a common language was a serious impediment. The English and Russian spies had established an understanding; they just couldn’t fully understand what was being said. Bromhead explained that since he would soon be leaving Copenhagen, responsibility for handling future meetings would be transferred to a colleague, a senior intelligence officer who spoke fluent German and could therefore converse with Gordievsky more easily. Bromhead would select a convenient safe house in which to meet, make the introductions, and then bow out of the case.

  The secretary of the Copenhagen MI6 station lived in a flat in the residential suburb of Charlottenlund. The place was easy to reach by subway, and the secretary would make herself scarce at the appropriate time. Bromhead suggested he meet Gordievsky in the doorway of a butcher’s shop near the flat, at 7 p.m., in three weeks’ time. “The doorway provided a convenient shadow from the bright streetlights. Also, it was difficult to post any watcher near that doorway, without their being clearly visible in the surroundings. By that time of day the place would be deserted, and all the Danes would be cozy and tucked up with their TVs.”

  Gordievsky arrived at seven on the dot. Bromhead appeared moments later. After a silent grasping of hands, the Englishman said: “Come, I’ll show you the way.” The safe flat, or “OCP” in spy jargon, standing for Operational Clandestine Premises, was barely two hundred yards away, but Bromhead took a circuitous route, in case anyone was following. “The night was cold, with drifting snowflakes,” recalled Bromhead. Both men were bundled up inside overcoats. Gordievsky was silent, plunged in thought: “I was not afraid of being kidnapped, but I knew that things were now serious: this was the real start of operations. For the first time I was entering enemy territory.”

  Bromhead unlocked the door of the flat, ushered Gordievsky in, and poured them both stiff whiskies and soda.

  “How long have you got?” asked Bromhead.

  “About half an hour.”

  “I’m quite surprised you turned up. Are you not running a grave risk seeing me like this?”

  Gordievsky paused, and “in a very measured way” replied: “It might be dangerous, but at this moment I do not think it will prove to be so.”

  Bromhead carefully explained, in his odd jumble of languages, that he would be flying back to London the next morning and then on to Belfast. But he would return in three weeks, meet Gordievsky in the butcher’s doorway, bring him here to the flat, and introduce his new case officer. A small group of PET officers knew what was happening, but the case would be run exclusively by MI6. For Gordievsky’s safety, Bromhead assured him, only a tiny handful of people inside British intelligence would ever know he existed, and most of these would never learn his real name. In intelligence language, someone made party to a secret operation is “indoctrinated”; the case would involve the smallest number of indoctrinees possible, and would be run under the tightest security since there might be Soviet spies within PET or MI6, ready to report back to Moscow. Even the CIA, the intelligence service of Britain’s closest ally, would be kept “out of the loop.” “With these factors in our favor, we could put our relationship on sound foundations, and begin serious cooperation.”

  As he bid Gordievsky farewell, Bromhead reflected how little he really knew about the smiling, apparently nerveless Russian KGB officer who seemed ready to risk his life by colluding with MI6. The question of money had never arisen. Nor had Oleg’s own safety, or that of his family, or whether he wished to defect. They had talked generally about culture and music, but not about politics, ideology, or life under Soviet rule. Gordievsky’s motivation had not been discussed. “I never asked him why he was doing it. There just wasn’t time.”

  Those questions were still niggling Bromhead when he arrived the next morning in MI6’s London headquarters. The controller of the Sovbloc division was reassuring. “He was very experienced in KGB matters and suitably cautious, but said this was a unique situation which had to be exploited to the full. It was the first time any KGB officer had responded positively to a British approach ‘from cold.’ ” The Soviets were far too paranoid, he said, to dangle someone with access to real secrets. “They had never offered up a serving KGB staff officer…They just didn’t trust their own not to go off in a relationship with a [Western] case officer.”

  The MI6 bosses were optimistic. SUNBEAM could prove to be a breakthrough case. Gordievsky seemed genuine. Bromhead was not so sure. The Russian spy had yet to produce a single shred of useful intelligence, let alone an explanation for what he was doing.

  Transferring an agent from one case officer to another is a complex and sometimes fraught process, particularly when the spy is newly recruited. In January 1975, three weeks after leaving Copenhagen, Bromhead was “infiltrated as quietly and anonymously as possible back into Denmark”: he flew to Gothenburg in Sweden, where he was met by the PET officer Winter Clausen. Squeezed into the passenger seat of a Volkswagen alongside Obelix’s “vast and grinning bulk,” he crossed the border into Denmark and checked into a “suitably impersonal and suburban” hotel in Copenhagen’s Lyngby shopping district.

  Philip Hawkins, the new handler, flew in from London on a false passport. “You will like him,” Bromhead had told Gordievsky. He was not entirely sure this was true. “I certainly didn’t like him. I thought he was a prize shit.” This was neither accurate nor fair. Hawkins was a barrister by training: severe, precise, and not a bit like Bromhead.

  After meeting Gordievsky at the butcher’s shop, Bromhead escorted him to the safe flat, where Hawkins was waiting. Gordievsky took in his new case officer. “He was tall and physically powerful, and I immediately felt ill at ease with him.” Hawkins spoke formal, rather stiff German, and seemed to be eyeing his new agent “in a hostile, almost threatening manner.”

  Bromhead shook hands gravely with Gordievsky, thanked him for what he was doing, and wished him good luck. As he drove away, Bromhead felt a mixture of feelings: regret, for he liked and admired the Russian spy, anxiety at the lingering possibility of a KGB plot, and deep relief that, for him, the case was over.

  “I was profoundly glad my role had ended,” Bromhead wrote. “I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that I might have constructed a bottomless ‘heffalump trap’ into which my service was clearly determined to plunge headlong.”

  Chapter 4

  GREEN INK AND MICROFILM

  Why does anyone spy? Why give up the security of family, friends, and a regular job for the perilous twilight world of secrets? Why, in particular, would someone join one intelligence service and then switch loyalty to an opposing one?

  The nearest parallel to Gordievsky’s secret defection from the KGB may be the case of Kim Philby, the Cambridge-educated Englishman who made the same journey but in the opposite
direction, as an MI6 officer secretly working for the KGB. Like Philby, Gordievsky had undergone a profound ideological conversion, although one man was drawn to Communism and the other repelled by it. But Philby’s conversion occurred before he had managed to get himself recruited by MI6 in 1940 with the explicit intention of working for the KGB against the capitalist West; Gordievsky had joined the KGB as a loyal Soviet citizen, never imagining that he might one day betray it.

  Spies come in many shapes. Some are motivated by ideology, politics, or patriotism. A surprising number act out of avarice, for the financial rewards can be alluring. Others find themselves drawn into espionage by sex, blackmail, arrogance, revenge, disappointment, or the peculiar oneupmanship and comradeship that secrecy confers. Some are principled and brave. Some are grasping and cowardly.

  Pavel Sudoplatov, one of Stalin’s spymasters, had this advice for his officers seeking to recruit spies in Western countries: “Search for people who are hurt by fate or nature—the ugly, those suffering from an inferiority complex, craving power and influence but defeated by unfavorable circumstances….In cooperation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential and powerful organization will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.” For many years, the KGB used the acronym MICE to identify the four mainsprings of spying: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego.

  But there is also romance, the opportunity to live a second, hidden life. Some spies are fantasists. Malcolm Muggeridge, former MI6 officer and journalist, wrote: “Intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists.” Espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely, and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.