The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben MacIntyre

  The decision to spy on one’s own country, in the interests of another, usually emerges from the collision of an outer world, often rationally conceived, and an inner world, of which the spy may be unaware. Philby defined himself as a pure ideological agent, a devoted secret soldier in the Communist cause; what he did not admit was that he was also motivated by narcissism, inadequacy, his father’s influence, and a compulsion to deceive those around him. Eddie Chapman, the wartime crook and double agent known as Agent ZIGZAG, considered himself a patriotic hero (which he was), but he was also greedy, opportunistic, and fickle, hence his code name. Oleg Penkovsky, the Russian spy who furnished the West with crucial intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis, hoped to prevent nuclear war, but he also wanted prostitutes and chocolates brought to his London hotel, and demanded to meet the Queen.

  The outer world that propelled Oleg Gordievsky into the arms of MI6 was political and ideological: he had been profoundly influenced, and alienated, by the building of the Berlin Wall and the crushing of the Prague Spring; he had read enough Western literature, knew enough of his nation’s real history, and seen enough of democratic freedoms to know that the socialist nirvana reflected in Communist propaganda was a monstrous lie. He had been brought up in a world of unquestioning obedience to a dogma. Once he had rejected that ideology, he became committed to attacking it with all the fervor of the convert, as deeply and irreversibly opposed to Communism as his father, brother, and contemporaries were committed to it. A creature of the system, he understood the ruthless cruelty of the KGB firsthand. Alongside political repression lay cultural philistinism: with the passionate fury of an aficionado, he hated ersatz Soviet music and the censorship of the Western classical canon. He demanded a different, better soundtrack to his life.

  But the inner world that drove Oleg is more obscure. He relished the romance and the adventure. He was undoubtedly rebelling against his father, the obedient, guilt-ridden KGB yes-man. A secretly religious grandmother, a quietly nonconformist mother, and a brother dead in the service of the KGB at the age of thirty-nine may all have exerted a subconscious influence, driving him toward mutiny. He had little respect for most of his colleagues, KGB time servers, ignorant, lazy, and on the fiddle, who seemed to win promotion by political maneuvering and toadying. He was cleverer than most of those around him, and knew it. Gordievsky’s marriage had grown cold at that time; he found it hard to make close friends. He was looking for revenge, for fulfillment, but also for love.

  All spies need to feel they are loved. One of the most powerful forces in espionage and intelligence work (and one of its central myths) is the emotional bond between spy and spymaster, agent and handler. Spies want to feel wanted, part of a secret community, rewarded, trusted, and cherished. Eddie Chapman established close relationships with both his British and German handlers. Philby was recruited by Arnold Deutsch, a famously charismatic KGB talent scout, whom he described as “a marvellous man…[who] looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment.” Exploiting and manipulating that hunger for affection and affirmation is one of the most important skills of an agent-runner. There has never been a successful spy who did not feel that the connection with his handler was something more profound than a marriage of convenience, politics, or profit: a true, enduring communion, amid the lies and deception.

  Gordievsky sensed several emotions radiating off Philip Hawkins, his new English case officer, but love was not among them.

  The eccentric and ebullient Richard Bromhead had appealed to Gordievsky by seeming “terribly English.” He was just the sort of bravura Englishman Lyubimov had described with such enthusiasm. Hawkins was Scottish, and colder by several degrees. Upright, clipped, as stiff and brittle as an oatcake. “He felt it was his duty not to be smiley and nice, but to look at the case with a lawyerly eye,” said one colleague.

  Hawkins had been responsible for interrogating German prisoners during the war. For several years he worked on Czech and Soviet cases, including a number of defectors. Most important, he had direct experience of handling a spy inside the KGB. Back in 1967, an Englishwoman living in Vienna contacted the British embassy to report that she had taken in an interesting new lodger, a young Russian diplomat who seemed receptive to Western ideas and quite critical of Communism. She was teaching him to ski. She was probably also sleeping with him. MI6 gave him the code name PENETRABLE, began to make inquiries, and discovered that the West German intelligence service, the BND, “was also in on the chase,” and had already made an approach to PENETRABLE, a KGB trainee, which had yielded a positive response. It was agreed to run PENETRABLE as a joint Anglo–West German agent. The case officer on the British side was Philip Hawkins.

  “Philip knew the KGB backwards,” said one colleague. “He was paid to be skeptical. He was the obvious person to run Gordievsky, he spoke German, and he was available.” He was also nervous, and covered his anxiety with a display of aggression. His task, as he saw it, was to find out if Oleg was lying, how much he was prepared to divulge, and what he wanted in return.

  Hawkins sat Gordievsky down and launched into a courtroom-style cross-examination.

  “Who is your rezident? How many KGB officers are there in the station?”

  Gordievsky had expected to be welcomed, praised, and congratulated on the momentous choice he was making. Instead, he was being hectored, interrogated as if he were a captive enemy rather than a cooperative new recruit.

  “The inquisition continued for some time, and I did not like it,” he said.

  Through Gordievsky’s mind ran the thought: “This can’t be the true spirit of the British intelligence service.”

  The grilling paused for a moment. Gordievsky raised his hand and issued a declaration: he would work for British intelligence, but only under three conditions.

  “First, I don’t want to damage any of my colleagues in the KGB station. Second, I don’t want to be secretly photographed or recorded. Third, no money. I want to work for the West out of ideological conviction, not for gain.”

  Now it was Hawkins’s turn to be affronted. Inside his mental courtroom, witnesses under cross-examination did not set rules. The second condition was moot. If MI6 decided to record him, he would never know, since the recording would, by definition, be secret. His preemptive refusal to accept financial compensation was more worrying. It is an axiom of spycraft that informants should be encouraged to accept gifts or money—although not so much that they would not want more or would be tempted to extravagant expenditure that might attract suspicion. Cash makes a spy feel valuable, establishes the principle of payment for services rendered, and can be used, if necessary, as a lever. And why did he wish to shield his Soviet colleagues? Was he still loyal to the KGB? In reality, Gordievsky was partly protecting himself: if Denmark started ejecting KGB officers, the Center might begin looking for an internal traitor and eventually alight on him.

  Hawkins remonstrated: “Now we know what your position in the station is, we’ll think not twice but three times before we or our allies take a decision to expel anyone.” But Gordievsky was adamant: he was not going to identify his fellow KGB officers, their agents and illegals, and they should be left alone. “These people are not important. They are nominally agents but they are not doing any harm. I don’t want them to get into trouble.”

  Hawkins reluctantly agreed to relay his conditions to MI6 and laid out the modus operandi. He would fly to Copenhagen once a month and stay for a long weekend, during which they could meet twice, for at least two hours. The meetings would take place in another safe flat (provided by the Danes, though Gordievsky was not told this) in the northern suburb of Ballerup, a quiet area at the end of an underground line, on the other side of the city from the Soviet embassy. Gordievsky could travel by rail, or by car and park some distance away. There was little chance of being spotted there by his embassy colleagues, and if Soviet surveillance was deployed in the vicinity, he would probably know ab
out it. Danish surveillance was more of a problem. Gordievsky was a suspected KGB officer and had been monitored by PET in the past. Loud alarm bells would ring should he be spotted going to a secret rendezvous in the suburbs. No more than half a dozen people in PET were aware that MI6 was running a Soviet agent, and only a couple of these knew his name. One of them was Jørn Bruun, the head of PET counterintelligence and Bromhead’s old ally. Bruun would ensure that his men were not tailing Gordievsky on the days he met his British handler. Finally, Hawkins handed over an emergency telephone number, secret ink, and a London address to which he could send any urgent messages between meetings.

  Both men left the flat feeling disgruntled. The first contact between spy and case officer had not been a happy one.

  Yet in some ways the appointment of the brusque and unsmiling Hawkins turned out well. He was a professional, and so was Gordievsky. The Russian was in the hands of someone who took his job, and Gordievsky’s safety, extremely seriously. To use Bromhead’s favorite phrase, Hawkins was not mucking about.

  So began a series of monthly meetings, in a one-bedroom flat on the third floor of a nondescript apartment block in Ballerup. The place was simply furnished with Danish furniture. The kitchen was fully equipped. The rent was paid jointly by the intelligence services of Britain and Denmark. A few days before the first meeting at the new OCP, two PET technicians disguised as electricity company workers inserted microphones in the overhead lights and electric sockets, and ran connecting wires behind the baseboards into the bedroom, where, behind a panel above the bed, they installed a tape recorder. The second of Gordievsky’s conditions had been violated.

  The meetings were initially tense, gradually became more relaxed, and in time, were exceptionally fruitful. What had started in an atmosphere of prickly suspicion would slowly evolve into a highly efficient relationship, based not on affection, but on grudging mutual respect. In lieu of love, Gordievsky accepted Hawkins’s professional approval.

  The best way to test whether someone is lying is to ask a question to which you already know the answer. Hawkins was well versed in the structure of the KGB. Gordievsky described, with impressive accuracy, every directorate, department, and subdepartment of the sprawling, complex bureaucracy inside Moscow Center. Some of this Hawkins already knew; a great deal he did not: names, functions, techniques, training methods, even rivalries and internal disputes, promotions and demotions. The level of detail proved that Gordievsky was straight: no “dangle” would have dared reveal so much. He never once asked Hawkins for information about MI6 or made any of the moves a double agent attempting to infiltrate an enemy service might make.

  The spymasters at MI6 headquarters were soon convinced of Gordievsky’s bona fides. “SUNBEAM was the real thing,” concluded Guscott. “He was playing it fair and square.”

  That conviction was redoubled when Gordievsky began to describe, in minute detail, the activities of Directorate S, the illegals section, where he had worked for a decade before moving to the political wing: how Moscow planted its spies, disguised as ordinary civilians, all over the world, including “the immense and highly sophisticated operation to create false identities”: forging documents, manipulating registration records, burying moles, and the complex methodology for contacting, controlling, and financing the army of Soviet illegals.

  Before every meeting, Hawkins unclipped the panel in the bedroom, inserted a fresh cassette, and switched on the tape recorder. He took notes, but then carefully transcribed each recorded conversation, translating from German to English. Each hour of recording took three or four times as long to process. The resulting report was then handed to a junior MI6 officer in the British embassy, who sent it back to London with the cassette tape in the diplomatic bag—an accepted part of international law used to pass information securely to and from embassies without interference from the host country—which was immune from search. At MI6 headquarters, the reports were eagerly awaited. British intelligence had never run a spy so deep within the KGB. As a trained intelligence officer, Gordievsky understood exactly what MI6 was looking for. At School 101 he had been taught techniques for memorizing large quantities of information. His powers of recall were prodigious.

  Relations between agent and case officer slowly improved. For hours they would sit on either side of a large coffee table. Gordievsky drank strong tea, and occasionally asked for a beer. Hawkins drank nothing. There was little in the way of small talk. Gordievsky found it hard to like this uptight Scot with the air of an “austere Presbyterian priest,” but he respected him. “He was not an easy man with whom to joke, but he was dedicated and hardworking, always making notes, preparing himself well, and asking good questions.” The British case officer frequently arrived with a shopping list of questions, which the Russian would memorize and attempt to find answers to before the next meeting. One day Hawkins asked Gordievsky to look over one of his reports, a comprehensive write-up, in German, of the illegals system Oleg had described. The Russian was impressed; clearly Hawkins was a master of German shorthand, for not a single detail had been omitted. Only later did it strike him: MI6 must be bugging the apartment. Oleg decided not to make a fuss over the broken promise, reflecting that he would probably have done the same.

  “I was much easier in my mind,” wrote Gordievsky. “My new role gave a point to my existence.” That role, he believed, was nothing less than undermining the Soviet system, in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil that would eventually bring democracy to Russia and allow Russians to live freely, read what they wanted, and listen to Bach. In his day job for the KGB, he continued to make Danish contacts, draw up articles for pro-Soviet journalists, and generally service the patchy intelligence-gathering system of the Copenhagen rezidentura. The more energetic he appeared, the greater his chances of promotion and the better his access to important information. It was an odd situation: trying to demonstrate his proficiency to the KGB, without actually damaging Danish interests; setting up spy operations with one hand, and then unpicking them with the other, by informing Hawkins of every move; keeping his eyes and ears open for useful information and gossip, without seeming too inquisitive.

  Yelena remained wholly ignorant of what her husband was up to. “A spy has to deceive even his nearest and dearest,” Gordievsky later wrote. But Yelena was no longer either near or dear to him. Indeed, he felt sure that, as a loyal KGB officer, she would shop him if she discovered the truth. Gordievsky knew what the KGB did to traitors. Regardless of Danish or international law, he would be seized by the operatives of the Special Actions department, drugged, bundled onto a stretcher bound in bandages to conceal his identity, and flown to Moscow, where he would be interrogated, tortured, and then killed. The Russian euphemism for the summary death sentence was vyshaya mera, “highest measure”: the traitor was taken into a room, made to kneel, and then shot in the back of the head. Sometimes the KGB was more imaginative. It was said that Penkovsky had been cremated alive and his death filmed, as a warning to potential turncoats.

  Despite the pressure of a double life and the peril this entailed, Gordievsky was content, waging his solitary campaign against Soviet oppression. And then he fell in love.

  Leila Aliyeva was a typist for the World Health Organization in Copenhagen. The daughter of a Russian mother and a father from Azerbaijan, she was tall and striking, with a shock of dark hair and deep brown eyes behind long eyelashes. In contrast to Yelena, she was shy and unworldly, but when she relaxed, her laugh was loud and infectious. She loved to sing. Like Oleg, Leila came from KGB stock: her father, Ali, had risen to the rank of major general in the Azeri KGB, before retiring to Moscow. Brought up a Muslim, she had had a sheltered childhood. Her few boyfriends to date had been carefully vetted by her parents. She started work as a typist in a design firm, then worked as a journalist on the Communist Youth League newspaper, and then applied, through the Ministry of Health, for a secretarial job at the World Health Organization. Like every Soviet citizen seeking to work
for a foreign organization abroad, Leila was thoroughly vetted for ideological dependability before being permitted to travel to Copenhagen. She was twenty-eight, eleven years younger than Oleg. Soon after her arrival in Denmark, Leila was invited to a reception given by the ambassador’s wife, who asked her what she did in Moscow.

  “I was a journalist,” Leila replied. “And I would like to write something about Denmark.”

  “Then you must meet the press attaché at the embassy, Mr. Gordievsky.”

  And so Oleg Gordievsky and Leila Aliyeva began working together on an article for the Communist Youth magazine about the slum district of Copenhagen. It was never published. But very swiftly their collaboration deepened.

  “She was sociable, interesting, original, witty, and eager to be liked. I fell in love at first sight; our love flared up quickly.” Free from her parents’ controlling supervision, Leila threw herself into the affair with abandon.

  “At his first appearance he seemed so gray,” Leila recalled. “If you saw him in the street you would not notice him. But when I started to talk to him, my jaw dropped. He knew so much. He was so interesting, with this brilliant sense of humor. Slowly, slowly, I fell in love with him.”

  For Gordievsky, Leila’s gentle personality and simple sweetness seemed a tonic after Yelena’s shrewish disdain. He had become used to calculation in his human relationships, constantly assessing his own actions and words and those of others. Leila, by contrast, was natural, outgoing, and uninhibited: Oleg felt adored, for the first time in his life. Gordievsky introduced his young lover to a new world of literature, containing ideas and realities banned in Russia. At his urging she read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle, depicting the dark brutality of Stalinism. “He gave me books from his library. I took it to my heart, this waterfall of truth. He educated me.” Leila knew from the outset, without ever being told, that Gordievsky was a KGB officer. The thought that his interest in such books might conceal a deeper dissidence never crossed her mind.